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CHAPTER 12
A Short Chapter About Curdie
Curdie spent many nights in the mine. His father and he had taken
Mrs. Peterson into the secret, for they knew mother could hold her
tongue, which was more than could be said of all the miners' wives.
But Curdie did not tell her that every night he spent in the mine,
part of it went in earning a new red petticoat for her.
Mrs. Peterson was such a nice good mother! All mothers are nice
and good more or less, but Mrs. Peterson was nice and good all more
and no less. She made and kept a little heaven in that poor
cottage on the high hillside for her husband and son to go home to
out of the low and rather dreary earth in which they worked. I
doubt if the princess was very much happier even in the arms of her
huge great-grandmother than Peter and Curdie were in the arms of
Mrs. Peterson. True, her hands were hard and chapped and large,
but it was with work for them; and therefore, in the sight of the
angels, her hands were so much the more beautiful. And if Curdie
worked hard to get her a petticoat, she worked hard every day to
get him comforts which he would have missed much more than she
would a new petticoat even in winter. Not that she and Curdie ever
thought of how much they worked for each other: that would have
spoiled everything.
When left alone in the mine Curdie always worked on for an hour or
two at first, following the lode which, according to Glump, would
lead at last into the deserted habitation. After that, he would
set out on a reconnoitring expedition. In order to manage this, or
rather the return from it, better than the first time, he had
bought a huge ball of fine string, having learned the trick from
Hop-o'-my-Thumb, whose history his mother had often told him. Not
that Hop-o'-my-Thumb had ever used a ball of string - I should be
sorry to be supposed so far out in my classics - but the principle
was the same as that of the pebbles. The end of this string he
fastened to his pickaxe, which figured no bad anchor, and then,
with the ball in his hand, unrolling it as he went, set out in the
dark through the natural gangs of the goblins' territory. The
first night or two he came upon nothing worth remembering; saw only
a little of the home-life of the cobs in the various caves they
called houses; failed in coming upon anything to cast light upon
the foregoing design which kept the inundation for the present in
the background. But at length, I think on the third or fourth
night, he found, partly guided by the noise of their implements, a
company of evidently the best sappers and miners amongst them, hard
at work. What were they about? It could not well be the
inundation, seeing that had in the meantime been postponed to
something else. Then what was it? He lurked and watched, every
now and then in the greatest risk of being detected, but without
success. He had again and again to retreat in haste, a proceeding
rendered the more difficult that he had to gather up his string as
he returned upon its course. It was not that he was afraid of the
goblins, but that he was afraid of their finding out that they were
watched, which might have prevented the discovery at which he
aimed. Sometimes his haste had to be such that, when he reached
home towards morning, his string, for lack of time to wind it up as
he 'dodged the cobs', would be in what seemed most hopeless
entanglement; but after a good sleep, though a short one, he always
found his mother had got it right again. There it was, wound in a
most respectable ball, ready for use the moment he should want it!
'I can't think how you do it, mother,' he would say.
'I follow the thread,' she would answer - 'just as you do in the
mine.' She never had more to say about it; but the less clever she
was with her words, the more clever she was with her hands; and the
less his mother said, the more Curdie believed she had to say. But
still he had made no discovery as to what the goblin miners were
about.
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