er age would account for. She kept foolishly
whispering to the servants, however--sometimes that the princess was
not right in her mind, sometimes that she was too good to live, and
other nonsense of the same sort.

All this time Curdie had to be sorry, without a chance of confessing,
that he had behaved so unkindly to the princess. This perhaps made him
the more diligent in his endeavours to serve her. His mother and he
often talked on the subject, and she comforted him, and told him she
was sure he would some day have the opportunity he so much desired.

Here I should like to remark, for the sake of princes and princesses in
general, that it is a low and contemptible thing to refuse to confess a
fault, or even an error. If a true princess has done wrong, she is
always uneasy until she has had an opportunity of throwing the
wrongness away from her by saying: 'I did it; and I wish I had not; and
I am sorry for having done it.' So you see there is some ground for
supposing that Curdie was not a miner only, but a prince as well. Many
such instances have been known in the world's history.

At length, however, he began to see signs of a change in the
proceedings of the goblin excavators: they were going no deeper, but
had commenced running on a level; and he watched them, therefore, more
closely than ever. All at once, one night, coming to a slope of very
hard rock, they began to ascend along the inclined plane of its
surface. Having reached its top, they went again on a level for a
night or two, after which they began to ascend once more, and kept on
at a pretty steep angle. At length Curdie judged it time to transfer
his observation to another quarter, and the next night he did not go to
the mine at all; but, leaving his pickaxe and clue at home, and taking
only his usual lumps of bread and pease pudding, went down the mountain
to the king's house. He climbed over the wall, and remained in the
garden the whole night, creeping on hands and knees from one spot to
the other, and lying at full length with his ear to the ground,
listening. But he heard nothing except the tread of the men-at-arms as
they marched about, whose observation, as the night was cloudy and
there was no moon, he had little difficulty in avoiding. For several
following nights he continued to haunt the garden and listen, but with
no success.

At length, early one evening, whether it was that he had got careless
of his own safety, or that the