about; eating and sleeping. But, after all, what can be expected of creatures without souls? One sees, now and seen, stupid human beings, whose eyes have no thoughts in them, and whose souls seem to be sound asleep. Such lumps of dulness might almost as well be gnomes, and slip into the earth and have done with it.
These underground folk had a great horror of our world. They knew all about it; for one of them had peeped out and taken a bird's-eye view. He went up very bravely, but hurried back with such strange accounts, that his friends considered him a little insane.
"Listen!" said the gnome, whose name was Clod. "The earth has a soft carpet, of a new kind of emerald; overhead is a blue roof, made of turquoise; but I am told that there is a crack in it, and sometimes water comes pouring down in torrents. But the worst
