t part of the
garden which I have already described, they saw a score of creatures,
to not one of which they could give a name, and not one of which was
like another, hideous and ludicrous at once, gambolling on the lawn in
the moonlight. The supernatural or rather subnatural ugliness of their
faces, the length of legs and necks in some, the apparent absence of
both or either in others, made the spectators, although in one consent
as to what they saw, yet doubtful, as I have said, of the evidence of
their own eyes--and ears as well; for the noises they made, although
not loud, were as uncouth and varied as their forms, and could be
described neither as grunts nor squeaks nor roars nor howls nor barks
nor yells nor screams nor croaks nor hisses nor mews nor shrieks, but
only as something like all of them mingled in one horrible dissonance.
Keeping in the shade, the watchers had a few moments to recover
themselves before the hideous assembly suspected their presence; but
all at once, as if by common consent, they scampered off in the
direction of a great rock, and vanished before the men had come to
themselves sufficiently to think of following them.

My readers will suspect what these were; but I will now give them full
information concerning them. They were, of course, household animals
belonging to the goblins, whose ancestors had taken their ancestors
many centuries before from the upper regions of light into the lower
regions of darkness. The original stocks of these horrible creatures
were very much the same as the animals now seen about farms and homes
in the country, with the exception of a few of them, which had been
wild creatures, such as foxes, and indeed wolves and small bears, which
the goblins, from their proclivity towards the animal creation, had
caught when cubs and tamed. But in the course of time all had
undergone even greater changes than had passed upon their owners. They
had altered--that is, their descendants had altered--into such
creatures as I have not attempted to describe except in the vaguest
manner--the various parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparently
arbitrary and self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments.
Indeed, so little did any distinct type predominate in some of the
bewildering results, that you could only have guessed at any known
animal as the original, and even then, what likeness remained would be
more one of general expression than of definable conformation.