<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
<div class='chaptertitle'>A SHORT CHAPTER ABOUT CURDIE</div>
<div class='cap'>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.</div>
<p>Mrs. Peterson was such a nice good mother! All mothers
are more or less, but Mrs. Peterson was nice and good all <i>more</i>
and no <i>less</i>. She made a little heaven in that poor cottage on
the hillside—for her husband and son to go home to out of
the 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.</p>
<p>When left alone in the mine, Curdie always worked on for
an hour or two first, following the lode which, according to<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</SPAN></span>
Glump, would lead at last into the deserted habitation. After
that, he would set out on a reconnoitering 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 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 <i>cobs</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</SPAN></span>
his haste had to be such that, when he reached home
toward morning, his string for lack of time to wind it up as he
"dodged the cobs," would be in what seemed the 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!</p>
<p>"I can't think how you do it, mother," he would say.</p>
<p>"I follow the thread," she would answer—"just as you do
in the mine."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But still he had made no discovery as to what the goblin
miners were about.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</SPAN></span></p>
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