“We’ve taken the wrong turning somewhere, and I don’t know where we are. We are lost, lost!”
The terror she was in had quite bewildered her. It was true enough they had lost the way. They had been running down into a little valley in which there was no house to be seen.
Now Irene did not know what good reason there was for her nurse’s terror, for the servants had all strict orders never to mention the goblins to her, but it was very discomposing to see her nurse in such a fright. Before, however, she had time to grow thoroughly alarmed like her, she heard the sound of whistling, and that revived her. Presently she saw a boy coming up the road from the valley to meet them. He was the whistler; but before they met his whistling changed to singing. And this is something like what he sang:
“Ring! dod! bang! Go the hammers’ clang! Hit and turn and bore! Whizz and puff and roar! Thus we rive the rocks, Force the goblin locks.— See the shining ore! One, two, three— Bright as gold can be! Four, five, six— Shovels, mattocks, picks! Seven, eight, nine— Light your lamp at mine. Ten, eleven, twelve— Loosely hold the helve. We’re the merry miner-boys, Make the goblins hold their noise.”
“I wish you would hold your noise,” said the nurse rudely, for the very word “goblin” at such a time and in such a place made her tremble. It would bring the goblins upon them to a certainty, she thought, to defy them in that way. But whether the boy heard her or not, he did not stop his singing.
“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen— This is worth the siftin’; Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen— There’s the match, and lay’t in. Nineteen, twenty— Goblins in a plenty.”