"Seventy, eighty, ninety,
All your hands so flinty!
Eighty, ninety, hundred,
Altogether dundred!"
The goblins fell back a little when he began, and made horrible
grimaces
all through the rhyme, as if eating something so disagreeable that it
set their teeth on edge and gave them the creeps; but whether it was
that the rhyming words were most of them no words at all, for a new
rhyme being considered more efficacious, Curdie had made it on the
spur
of the moment, or whether it was that the presence of the king and
queen
gave them courage, I cannot tell; but the moment the rhyme was over,
they crowded on him again, and out shot a hundred long arms, with a
multitude of thick nailless fingers at the end of them, to lay hold upon
him. Then Curdie heaved up his axe. But being as gentle as courageous
and not wishing to kill any of them, he turned the end which was
square
and blunt like a hammer, and with that came down a great blow on the
head of the goblin nearest him. Hard as the heads of all goblins are, he
Madhuri Noah
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