'that rats move about in
great companies sometimes. There may be an army of them invading us.
I've heard the noises yesterday and today too.'

'It'll be grand fun, then, for my Tom and Mrs Housekeeper's Bob,' said
the cook. 'They'll be friends for once in their lives, and fight on
the same side. I'll engage Tom and Bob together will put to flight any
number of rats.'

'It seems to me,' said the nurse, 'that the noises are much too loud
for that. I have heard them all day, and my princess has asked me
several times what they could be. Sometimes they sound like distant
thunder, and sometimes like the noises you hear in the mountain from
those horrid miners underneath.'

'I shouldn't wonder,' said the cook, 'if it was the miners after all.
They may have come on some hole in the mountain through which the
noises reach to us. They are always boring and blasting and breaking,
you know.'

As he spoke, there came a great rolling rumble beneath them, and the
house quivered. They all started up in affright, and rushing to the
hall found the gentlemen-at-arms in consternation also. They had sent
to wake their captain, who said from their description that it must
have been an earthquake, an occurrence which, although very rare in
that country, had taken place almost within the century; and then went
to bed again, strange to say, and fell fast asleep without once
thinking of Curdie, or associating the noises they had heard with what
he had told them. He had not believed Curdie. If he had, he would at
once have thought of what he had said, and would have taken
precautions. As they heard nothing more, they concluded that Sir
Walter was right, and that the danger was over for perhaps another
hundred years. The fact, as discovered afterwards, was that the
goblins had, in working up a second sloping face of stone, arrived at a
huge block which lay under the cellars of the house, within the line of
the foundations.

It was so round that when they succeeded, after hard work, in
dislodging it without blasting, it rolled thundering down the slope
with a bounding, jarring roll, which shook the foundations of the
house. The goblins were themselves dismayed at the noise, for they
knew, by careful spying and measuring, that they must now be very near,
if not under the king's house, and they feared giving an alarm. They,
therefore, remained quiet for a while, and when they began to work
again, they no doubt thought themselves