"That is your notion!" cried Conrad: "there never was a fool that could not talk and chatter like one. Your having lost your eye in your vocation is an honour to you, and you may be proud of it, and glory in it. But their sticking me down in the middle of their dung, where I was forced to lie like a tumble-down sheaf, or a truss of hay,--it has knockt half a dozen nails into my coffin. 'Conrad! Conrad! ninnyhammer! sack of straw!' so it seemed that everything was shouting in my ears. I have now seen the miserable, dirty ploughed land, in which the scurvy clowns have to breed up their bread. It's so flat down there, you can see nothing, far as eye can reach; and one hears no sledgehammers, no rush of waters, not even a boy pounding. It looks just like the end of the world; and I could never have fancied that the corn country and the plains, where more than half the world have to live, were so utterly mean and despicable." Thus they went on talking and squabbling, till some one for the sake of starting another subject began telling about the robberies, which their master, the old man of the mountain, was so incomprehensibly allowing to go on, doing next to nothing to find out the offender, although his losses, rich as he might be, must have amounted to very large sums. The stranger miner again spoke of his contrivances for making sure of catching the thief; and Conrad, who recollected the former conversation, shook his fist at him in silence. Eleazar seemed to enter into these strange schemes, and exulted with vulgar glee at the thought of thus at length getting hold of the rascal. As Edward eyed him in the dusky glare of the hut, and saw his face with its brown and yellow features unsteadily lit by the flickering flames, he thought that this disgusting and to him hateful monster had never lookt so hideous before: a secret shudder crept over him when he thought of Rose, and that this was the confident and bosom friend of a man whom he could not but honour, although his weaknesses and caprices formed so strong a contrast with his virtues. The smiths listened to the conversation with great earnestness: they believed the stranger; yet every one of them brought forward some superstitious device of his own, in which the speaker himself always put still greater reliance. Edward, in spite of the disgust this gossiping excited in him, was almost unconsciously held fast within the circle. Ghost stories were told; the wild huntsman was talkt of, and several said they had seen him; others had met with mountain sprites and goblins; then they got to forebodings and omens; and the conversation kept on growing livelier, the storytellers more eager, and the hearers more attentive. "Goblins," said Michael, "there are assuredly: for I myself ten years ago was well acquainted with one; and he was a very passable fellow to have to do with. The urchin foretold too in those days that I should lose my right eye about this very time."