ays of things, and they could look very wise with their
lanterns in their hands searching after this or that sign of ore, or
for some mark to guide their way in the hollows of the earth; but as to
great-great-grandmothers, they would have mocked Curdie all the rest of
his life for the absurdity of not being absolutely certain that the
solemn belief of his father and mother was nothing but ridiculous
nonsense. Why, to them the very word 'great-great-grandmother' would
have been a week's laughter! I am not sure that they were able quite
to believe there were such persons as great-great-grandmothers; they
had never seen one. They were not companions to give the best of help
toward progress, and as Curdie grew, he grew at this time faster in
body than in mind--with the usual consequence, that he was getting
rather stupid--one of the chief signs of which was that he believed
less and less in things he had never seen. At the same time I do not
think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of
superior faculty and strength of mind. Still, he was becoming more and
more a miner, and less and less a man of the upper world where the wind
blew. On his way to and from the mine he took less and less notice of
bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks
and the clouds. He was gradually changing into a commonplace man.

There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and
that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other
a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes at length to
know at once whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him;
one of the former class grows more and more afraid of being taken in,
so afraid of it that he takes himself in altogether, and comes at
length to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing with
him is to have it between his teeth.

Curdie was not in a very good way, then, at that time. His father and
mother had, it is true, no fault to find with him and yet--and
yet--neither of them was ready to sing when the thought of him came up.
There must be something wrong when a mother catches herself sighing
over the time when her boy was in petticoats, or a father looks sad
when he thinks how he used to carry him on his shoulder. The boy
should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of
him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his
mother's darling