The White Pigeon
When in the winter they had had their supper and sat about the

fire, or when in the summer they lay on the border of the
rock-margined stream that ran through their little meadow close by

the door of their cottage, issuing from the far-up whiteness often
folded in clouds, Curdie's mother would not seldom lead the

conversation to one peculiarpersonage said and believed to have
been much concerned in the late issue of events.

That personage was the great-great-grandmother of the princess, of
whom the princess had often talked, but whom neither Curdie nor his

mother had ever seen. Curdie could indeed remember, although
already it looked more like a dream than he could account for if it

had really taken place, how the princess had once led him up many
stairs to what she called a beautiful room in the top of the tower,

where she went through all the - what should he call it? - the
behaviour of presenting him to her grandmother, talking now to her

and now to him, while all the time he saw nothing but a bare
garret, a heap of musty straw, a sunbeam, and a withered apple.

Lady, he would have declared before the king himself, young or old,
there was none, except the princess herself, who was certainly

vexed that he could not see what she at least believed she saw.
As for his mother, she had once seen, long before Curdie was born,

a certain mysterious light of the same description as one Irene
spoke of, calling it her grandmother's moon; and Curdie himself had

seen this same light, shining from above the castle, just as the
king and princess were taking their leave. Since that time neither

had seen or heard anything that could be supposed connected with
her. Strangely enough, however, nobody had seen her go away. if

she was such an old lady, she could hardly be supposed to have set
out alone and on foot when all the house was asleep. Still, away

she must have gone, for, of course, if she was so powerful, she
would always be about the princess to take care of her.

But as Curdie grew older, he doubted more and more whether Irene
had not been talking of some dream she had taken for reality: he

had heard it said that children could not always distinguish
betwixt dreams and actual events. At the same time there was his

mother's testimony: what was he to do with that? His mother,
through whom he had learned everything, could hardly be imagined by

her own dutiful son to have mistaken a dream for a fact of the
waking world.

So he rather shrank from thinking about it, and the less he thought
about it, the less he was inclined to believe it when he did think

about it, and therefore, of course, the less inclined to talk about
it to his father and mother; for although his father was one of

those men who for one word they say think twenty thoughts, Curdie
was well assured that he would rather doubt his own eyes than his

wife's testimony.
There were no others to whom he could have talked about it. The

miners were a mingled company - some good, some not so good, some
rather bad - none of them so bad or so good as they might have

been; Curdie liked most of them, and was a favourite with all; but
they knew very little about the upper world, and what might or

might not take place there. They knew silver from copper ore; they
understood the underground ways of things, and they could look very

wise with their lanterns in their hands searching after this or
that sign of ore, or for some mark to guide their way in the

hollows of the earth; but as to great-great-grandmothers, they
would have mocked Curdie all the rest of his life for the absurdity

of not being absolutely certain that the solemnbelief of his
father and mother was nothing but ridiculousnonsense. Why, to

them the very word 'great-great-grandmother' would have been a
week's laughter! I am not sure that they were able quite to

believe there were such persons as great-great-grandmothers; they
had never seen one. They were not companions to give the best of

help toward progress, and as Curdie grew, he grew at this time
faster in body than in mind - with the usual consequence, that he

was getting rather stupid - one of the chief signs of which was
that he believed less and less in things he had never seen. At the

same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that
this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind. Still,

he was becoming more and more a miner, and less and less a man of
the upper world where the wind blew. On his way to and from the

mine he took less and less notice of bees and butterflies, moths
and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds. He was

gradually changing into a commonplace man.
There is this difference between the growth of some human beings

and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in
the other a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes

at length to know at once whether a thing is true the moment it
comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more

afraid of being taken in, so afraid of it that he takes himself in
altogether, and comes at length to believe in nothing but his

dinner: to be sure of a thing with him is to have it between his
teeth.

Curdie was not in a very good way, then, at that time. His father
and mother had, it is true, no fault to find with him and yet - and

yet - neither of them was ready to sing when the thought of him
came up. There must be something wrong when a mother catches

herself sighing over the time when her boy was in petticoats, or a
father looks sad when he thinks how he used to carry him on his

shoulder. The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old
child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to

be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's
pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever

fresh born.
Curdie had made himself a bow and some arrows, and was teaching

himself to shoot with them. One evening in the early summer, as he
was walking home from the mine with them in his hand, a light

flashed across his eyes. He looked, and there was a snow-white
pigeon settling on a rock in front of him, in the red light of the

level sun. There it fell at once to work with one of its wings, in
which a feather or two had got some sprays twisted, causing a

certain roughness unpleasant to the fastidious creature of the air.
It was indeed a lovely being, and Curdie thought how happy it must

be flitting through the air with a flash - a live bolt of light.
For a moment he became so one with the bird that he seemed to feel

both its bill and its feathers, as the one adjusted the other to
fly again, and his heart swelled with the pleasure of its

involuntary sympathy. Another moment and it would have been aloft
in the waves of rosy light - it was just bending its little legs to

spring: that moment it fell on the path broken-winged and bleeding
from Curdie's cruel arrow.

With a gush of pride at his skill, and pleasure at his success, he
ran to pick up his prey. I must say for him he picked it up gently

- perhaps it was the beginning of his repentance. But when he had
the white thing in his hands its whiteness stained with another red

than that of the sunset flood in which it had been revelling - ah
God! who knows the joy of a bird, the ecstasy of a creature that

has neither storehouse nor barn! - when he held it, I say, in his
victorious hands, the winged thing looked up in his face - and with

such eyes! - asking what was the matter, and where the red sun had
gone, and the clouds, and the wind of its flight. Then they

closed, but to open again presently, with the same questions in
them.

And as they closed and opened, their look was fixed on his. It did