pale sad look, something like the look that I have heard papa say the
poor people in some parts of England have--the people in those parts
where they work so awfully hard in dark smoky towns and never see the
sun, or the green fields, or anything fresh and pretty. Of course the
forest people were not as badly off as _that_--for their work any way
was in the open air, and the forest was clean--not like dirty factories,
even though it was so dark. It was the want of sunshine that was their
worst trouble, and that gave them that white, dull, half-frightened
look. The forest was too thick and dense for the sun to get really into
it, even in winter, and then, of course, the rays are so thin and pale
that they aren't much good if they do come. And the mountains at the
side came so close down to the edge of the forest that there was no
getting any sunshine there either, for it was the north side there, the
side that the sunshine couldn't get to. So for these reasons the place
had come to be called 'the sunless country.'"

"What was there at the other side of the forest?" said Percy; "couldn't
they have got into the sunshine at that side?"

"No," said Mabel. "I think there was a river or something. Or else it
was that the forest was so very, very big that it would have been quite
a journey to get out at any other side. I think that was it. Any way
they couldn't. And they just had to live on without sunshine as well as
they could. Their fathers had done so before them, and there was no help
for it, they thought. They were too poor and too hard-worked to move
away to another country, or to do anything but just go through each day
as it came in a dull sad way, seldom speaking even to each other.

"But do you know, it had _not_ always been so in the sunless forest,
though the better times were so long ago that hardly any of the poor
people knew it had ever been different. There had, once upon a time,
been a way into the sunshine on the other side of the mountain, and this
way lay right through the great hill itself. But the mountain belonged
to a great and very powerful giant"--at this Ted edged still closer to
Mabel--"who lived in it quite alone. Sometimes he used to come out at
a hole in the top, which was his door, and stay up there for a while
looking about him, staring at the black forest down at his feet, and
smiling grimly to himself at the thought of how dark and dull it must be
for the people who lived in it. For he was