perhaps the loveliest of all hours in the year. The summer was young and soft, and this was the warmest evening they had yet had--dusky, dark even below, while above the stars were bright and large and sharp in the blackest blue sky. The night came close around them, clasping them in one universal arm of love, and although it neither spoke nor smiled, seemed all eye and ear, seemed to see and hear and know everything they said and did. It is a way the night has sometimes, and there is a reason for it. The only sound was that of the brook, for there was no wind, and no trees for it to make its music upon if there had been, for the cottage was high up on the mountain, on a great shoulder of stone where trees would not grow. There, to the accompaniment of the water, as it hurried down to the valley and the sea, talking busily of a thousand true things which it could not understand, Curdie told his tale, outside and in, to his father and mother. What a world had slipped in between the mouth of the mine and his mother's cottage! Neither of them said a word until he had ended. "Now what am I to make of it, mother? It's so strange!" he said, and stopped. "It's easy enough to see what Curdie has got to make of it--isn't it, Peter?" said the good woman, turning her face towards all she could see of her husband's. "It seems so to me," answered Peter, with a smile, which only the night saw, but his wife felt in the tone of his words. They were the happiest couple in that country, because they always understood each other, and that was because they always meant the same thing, and that was because they always loved what was fair and true and right better--not than anything else, but than everything else put together. "Then will you tell Curdie?" said she. "You can talk best, Joan," said he. "You tell him, and I will listen--and learn how to say what I think," he added, laughing. "_I_," said Curdie, "don't know what to think." "It does not matter so much," said his mother. "If only you know what to make of a thing, you'll know soon enough what to think of it. Now I needn't tell you, surely, Curdie, what you've got to do with this?" "I suppose you mean, mother," answered Curdie, "that I must do as the old lady told me?" "That is what I mean: what else could it be? Am I not right, Peter?" "Quite right, Joan," answered Peter, "so far as my judgment goes. It is a very strange story, but you see the question is not about believing it, for Curdie knows what came to him."