yards short of the place where his own lay, and that as far as that went he was the winner on the cast. All the same, he did not seem very regretful that things had happened as they had, and that now there was no occasion for him to make good his claim either by force of arms or at law.

Well, Giant Crafty didn't take long in reaching Giant Grim's, though it might have taken you and me a good deal longer; and he found the old fellow in not the best of tempers. For he had only just finished picking the bones of a boy who had newly come home from school for the holidays, and who had been so badly fed and so terribly 'crammed' at the earliest 'Dotheboys-Hall' of all, that he was neither meaty nor fit to eat, much less toothsome. However, when he heard what his giant-cousin had come about, he left off grumbling, finished the few big mussels he had left, to top up with, and under Crafty's guidance, bundled off at once for the treasuretrove he had just heard of; and as you may suppose, it was not long before the precious eye was in the long disused socket in old Grim's forehead. Nor

too, that it was

yet was it long before he found out, just as 'wick' out of his head as in; and then, when he began to consider the way in which his various cousins of near or distant degree were getting polished off the face of the earth by Beanstalk Jacks and Giant-killer Jacks, and the other enemies their disagreeable habits of stealing princesses, dining on

boys and girls, prigging white heifers, throwing rocks about without caring if they fell atop of a village, and so forth, stirred up against them, he bethought himself of pulling up a tree or two, until he could find one to suit for whittling into shape as a staff with a good knobby head, making a sort of socket in it for the eye, so that when he went to sleep himself, still he might have a waking sentinel always at hand. You know already how he was, after all, though a good long time later, no doubt, circumvented by Sir Jack the Giant-crusher; but you don't know, at least I did not tell you, that as long as Sir Jack lived, the eye as well as the Staff remained willingly with him, and helped him in everything because he was a Christen-lad, and because, growing to be a Christen-man, he had paved the way for the eventual deliverance of the imprisoned Princess of the Fairies.

Some day, no doubt, I shall have something more to tell you of Sir Jack's exploits, in all of which he was so strangely helped by the wonderful experience, knowledge, and virtue of the Staff, all of which proceeded simply from the 'Fairy Princess' who animated the eye which dwelt in the great knobhead of the same.

I

WORM OF THE WHORLE HILL AND THE
ELDRITCH ERNE OF ARNCLIFF.

WONDER if you remember how, at the be

ginning of my story about Quelling the Wolves, I told you that if you went up that hilly moorland road that leads from Castleton to Kirkby Moorside, and reached a certain point on it, and then looked in the right directions, you could see two places called Wolfdale in the old days, and a row of shooting butts called Wolfpit Slack butts. If you do, you will not be the least puzzled if I tell you that, if instead of looking the Westerdale Wolfdale way or the Wolfpit Slack way, you had turned right round and looked back over the road you had come, you would have seen a very remarkable object; and the name of that remarkable object is Freeburgh Hill.

Of course you remember the Round Hill I mentioned in my last story; the hill, that is, under which those ugly dwarfs or trolls lived till they were mastered by the holy men in the fight about the place where the church was to be built. But I don't think I told you why the hill I speak of was called the Round Hill. Well, the reason is that it is as round at the bottom and all up the sides as if it had been measured and worked out with compasses and all sorts of mathematical instruments,' as they are called. Its base is round, and if it is measured halfway up its sides it is round, and it is round at the top. I can't explain the cause of its shape to you. All I can say is that it was most likely shaped that way when the ice was grinding out these dales that we call Danby Dale and Fryup Dale, and so forth; or, at least, not long afterwards. I have seen mines

dug into it to get the jet that lies hid in it near the bottom, and I have got a piece myself as long as my arm from the elbow to the finger-tips. I wonder if those ugly but clever Dwarfs stored it there.

But it is the shape of the hill I want you to notice, not only because it is so regular and shapelylooking, but because there are two others like it in this country, only much bigger; and the story I am going to tell you has something to do with both of them. And Freeburgh Hill is one of the two.

Now, in my time, I have heard two or three very cock-and-bull stories about Freeburgh Hill. For

instance, I have heard that it was thrown up as a houe or burial-mound, and that, moreover, although there is rock that may be quarried close to the very top of it. And then I have heard that another wiseacre makes it out to be an artificial hill with a moat round it. And others have called it an ‘ancient druidical temple, thrown up' to be so used. But although these and such as these are cock-andbull stories, still there's another story that I shouldn't like to call a cock-and-bull story, that was told me almost as soon as ever I set eyes on Freeburgh Hill, or indeed had much more than learned that that was its name; and this is a story of a sort that is met with in other parts and places besides this dalescountry of ours, so that surely there must be something in it, although, from what I have gathered in one way or another, and am now going to tell you, I can't help thinking that our great Round Hill of Cleveland is the true place, and the others hardly so likely to be so really.

Well, the story that I have heard is that there is somebody beneath that big hill-not buried thereI don't mean that; but as alive as you and I are, only asleep with a strange mysterious sort of sleep, out of which he and those that are with him-for he is not alone-will wake up some day, when the need for such awaking shall be, and do wonderful things in help of the right.

I am sure you have all heard of good King

I