and then, with the ball in his hand, unrolling as he went, set out in
the dark through the natural gangs of the goblins' territory. The first
night or two he came upon nothing worth remembering; saw only a
little
of the home-life of the _cobs_ in the various caves they called houses;
failed in coming upon anything to cast light upon the foregoing design
which kept the inundation for the present in the background. But at
length, I think on the third or fourth night, he found, partly guided by
the noise of their implements, a company of evidently the best sappers
and miners amongst them, hard at work. What were they about? It
could
not well be the inundation, seeing that had in the meantime been
postponed to something else. Then what was it? He lurked and
watched,
every now and then in the greatest risk of being detected, but without
success. He had again and again to retreat in haste, a proceeding
rendered the more difficult that he had to gather up his string as he
returned upon its course. It was not that he was afraid of the goblins,
but that he was afraid of their finding out that they were watched,
which might have prevented the discovery at which he aimed.
Sometimes
his haste had to be such that, when he reached home toward morning,
his
string for lack of time to wind it up as he "dodged the cobs," would be
Madhuri Noah
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