The little Piskey then got into his ear and poked his red-capped head into the hollow of it, and again shouted:
‘I am the little Piskey who told you he had lost his laugh, and——’
‘Ah! the dinky little fellow who tried to help me to find my soul,’ interrupted the great Giant, in a voice almost as loud as the waves breaking on the Padstow Doombar.
‘Yes,’ answered the Piskey, ‘and a dinky Little Bargeman brought me from Dozmare Pool to Trebetherick that you might answer my question.’
‘I know who you mean—Merlin, the little old Master of Magic,’ cried the Giant in evident astonishment, pausing in his work of making a rope of sand to stare at the little Piskey. ‘Fancy his bringing a tiny brown fellow like you from Dozmare Pool to Trebetherick Bay in his Magic Barge! Pigs will fly and sing after this!’
‘He saw me helping you to dip the pool dry, and said that one kind deed deserved another,’ said the Piskey as meek as a harvest-mouse. ‘So he brought me all the way down to St. Minver to know if you had seen my laugh. Have you seen it, Mister Giant?’
‘No, I have not seen it,’ answered the Giant. ‘Nothing so cheerful as a Piskey’s laugh would come near such a mountain of misery as I am; and if by an evil chance it did come, it would flee far from my dark shadow.’
‘Do you know anyone else who has seen my laugh?’ asked the little Piskey piteously.
‘Not one; unless your cousins, the Night-riders, have,’ answered the Giant, looking at the sand-ropes he had just finished, lying at his feet. ‘I must now begin to bind my trusses of sand.’
He stooped to lift them as he spoke, and as he tried to take them up they fell to pieces in his hand. As they crumbled away his face was awful to see, and he began to howl and roar, and his cries of rage rang out over the sand-hills and over Trebetherick Bay, and were heard above the noise of waves breaking on the Padstow Doombar.