‘Yes, I have lost my soul,’ moaned the great fellow, and his moan shivered over the surface of Dozmare Pool, and made all the sallows that grew beside it shiver and shake as if a blasting wind had passed over them; and the reeds and rushes growing in the water sighed so sadly that the little Piskey felt ever so wisht, and sighed too.
‘How did you come to lose your soul, Mister Giant?’ asked the little Piskey after a while.
‘That’s a question,’ answered the Giant, beginning again his hopeless task of emptying the pool.
‘Have you never looked for your soul?’ queried the tiny fellow who, having lost his laugh, felt very sorry for the unhappy Giant who had lost so precious a thing as his soul.
‘It was no good to look for my soul when I gave it away in exchange for wealth,’ cried the Giant; ‘I can never get it back again unless I empty this big pool of every drop of water that is in it.’
‘And can’t you do that, and you a giant?’ asked the little Piskey in surprise.
‘I am afraid I can’t with a limpet-shell that has a hole in it; and I am not allowed to use any other.’
‘Will you let me help you to empty the pool?’ asked the tiny Piskey. ‘I am only a little bit of a chap compared with you, I know—a God’s little cow by the side of a plough-horse, the Man in the Lantern said,’ as the Giant laughed sardonically; ‘and my dinky hand is nothing for size, but it hasn’t a hole in it.’
‘You can help me if you like,’ said the Giant with another sardonic laugh. ‘It will be perhaps another case of a mouse freeing the lion!’
‘Who knows?’ cried the Piskey, who took the Giant’s remark quite seriously; and climbing out of the huge ear, he slid down over the boulder to the pool, and making a dipper of his tiny hand, began to dip out water as fast as he could, and never stopped dipping once till a movement behind him made him pause, and, looking up, he saw the great big Giant on his feet towering above him like a tor, with an awful look of rage on his face.