‘And didn’t you ask Giant Tregeagle that important question after the little Lantern Man had brought you so far?’ asked the little Bargeman.
‘I did, but he was so troubled about something he had lost—his soul it was—that he forgot to say whether he had seen my laugh.’
‘That is a pity, for the Giant is now on St. Minver sand-hills making trusses of sand and sand-ropes to bind them with, and when the sand-ropes break in his hand—which they are sure to do when he tries to lift them—he will fly away to Loe Bar[7] to work at another impossible task.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked the little Piskey.
The Tiny Bargeman looked at the green-coated, red-capped little Piskey with a strange expression in his dark eyes for a second or two, and then he said:
‘I have lived so long in the world that I know most things. People who knew me in a far-away time called me Merlin the Magician, and said I had all the secrets of the world in the back of my head.’
‘Then you will be able to tell me where my laugh has gone to?’ struck in the little Piskey eagerly.
‘I was speaking more of the past than of the present,’ said the Tiny Bargeman. ‘Since the time of which I spoke, I have lived here by this lake, now called Dozmare Pool. I lived sealed up in a stone, into which the Lady of the Lake shut me till a hundred years or so ago.’
‘How very unkind of the Lady to put you into a stone!’ said the little Piskey indignantly. ‘Whatever did she do it for?’
‘Thereby hangs a tale which is not good for a small Piskey like you to hear,’ returned the Tiny Bargeman, with another strange look in his dark, mysterious little eyes. ‘When Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, shut me up in the stone—like a toad in a hole she said—she thought she had done for me, and that I should soon die. But Merlin, the man who worked magic, was not so easily got rid of.’