So all day long he butted Careful in the ribs, teasing and goading him on: “Hurry up, get on! We must seek, we must find! Let’s look for bees, let’s gather honey, and then we will keep a tally with rows and rows of scores!”
So said the goblin, because in those days they reckoned up a man’s possessions with tallies.
Now a tally is only a long wooden stick with a notch cut in it for every sum that is owing to a man!
But Bluster’s goblin butted him in the breast, and that goblin wanted to be the strongest of all and lord of all the earth. So he worried and worried Bluster, and urged him to roam through the woods looking for young ash plants and slender maple saplings to make a warrior’s outfit and weapons. “Hurry up, get on!” teased the goblin. “You must seek, you must find! Spears, bows and arrows to suit a hero’s mind, so that man and beast may tremble before us.”
And both Bluster and Careful listened to their goblins, and went off after their own concerns as the goblins led them.
But Quest stayed with his grandfather that day and yet other three days, and all the time he puzzled and puzzled over whatever it was that All-Rosy might have told him; because Quest wanted to tell his grandfather the truth; but, alas! he could not remember it at all!
So that day went by, and the next, and so three days; and on the third day Quest said to his grandfather:
“Good-bye, grandfather. I am going to the hills, and shall not come back until I remember the truth, if it should take me ten years.”
Now Witting’s hair was grey, and there was little he cared for in this world except his grandson Quest, and him he loved and cherished as a withered leaf cherishes a drop of dew. So the old man started sadly and said:
“What good will the truth be to me, my boy, when I may be dead and gone long before you remember it?”