as you need to know, what
you have to do. But I warn you that perhaps it will not look the least
like what you may have been fancying I should require of you. I have
one idea of you and your work, and you have another. I do not blame
you for that--you cannot help it yet; but you must be ready to let my
idea, which sets you working, set your idea right. Be true and honest
and fearless, and all shall go well with you and your work, and all
with whom your work lies, and so with your parents--and me too,
Curdie,' she added after a little pause.

The young miner bowed his head low, patted the strange head that lay at
the princess's feet, and turned away. As soon as he passed the
spinning wheel, which looked, in the midst of the glorious room, just
like any wheel you might find in a country cottage--old and worn and
dingy and dusty--the splendour of the place vanished, and he saw but
the big bare room he seemed at first to have entered, with the
moon--the princess's moon no doubt--shining in at one of the windows
upon the spinning wheel.

CHAPTER 9

Hands

Curdie went home, pondering much, and told everything to his father and
mother. As the old princess had said, it was now their turn to find
what they heard hard to believe. If they had not been able to trust
Curdie himself, they would have refused to believe more than the half
of what he reported, then they would have refused that half too, and at
last would most likely for a time have disbelieved in the very
existence of the princess, what evidence their own senses had given
them notwithstanding.

For he had nothing conclusive to show in proof of what he told them.
When he held out his hands to them, his mother said they looked as if
he had been washing them with soft soap, only they did smell of
something nicer than that, and she must allow it was more like roses
than anything else she knew. His father could not see any difference
upon his hands, but then it was night, he said, and their poor little
lamp was not enough for his old eyes. As to the feel of them, each of
his own hands, he said, was hard and horny enough for two, and it must
be the fault of the dullness of his own thick skin that he felt no
change on Curdie's palms.

'Here, Curdie,' said his mother, 'try my hand, and see what beast's paw
lies inside it.'

'No, Mother,' answered Curdie, half beseeching, half indignant, 'I will
not insult my new gift by making pretence to try it. That wo