"If peoples interrumpt, I wish they'd finish their interrumpting, and not stop in the middle."
"I didn't like to say it," said Duke. "I only wanted to know if they could see right into the middle of the sky where the angels are."
"No," said Hoodie, decidedly, "they couldn't. They was goblins; they wasn't angels at all, so they didn't want to see angels. It isn't that kind of story, Duke—I'll tell you one like that another day—Sunday perhaps. Now I want to go on about the goblins. What they liked best was to peep into the windows and look at people, and play them tricks sometimes. They was awful fond of playing tricks; goblins always is. But sometimes they gets tricks played them, and that's what my story's about. There was a window up in a house that they wanted to look in at, but they couldn't ever get quite high enough up, 'cos the window was at the top of the house, you see. It was the window of a witch, but the goblins didn't know that. She was a witch that lived all alone, and there wasn't anything she cared for except playing tricks, she was always playing tricks. She knowed the goblins wanted to peep in at her window, she knowed everything, 'cos that's what it means to be a witch, that and playing tricks. And she set herself to play a trick on the goblins—a reg'lar good trick, 'cos she didn't see what they was always wanting to peep in at her window for."
Hoodie paused for a moment to take breath.
"I wonder what the trick was," whispered Duke and Hec under their breath, evidently very much impressed.
"Yes, you may wonder," said Hoodie, majestically. "You'd never guess. Not in a milliond guesses. Well then, one night when the goblins was twisting and turning theirselves about on the very edge of the star, trying to peep in at the window, all of a suddent the witch's house turned right round, so that the window came to the side instead of up at the top, and one of the goblins gave a great jump and screamed out to the other—
"'I say, brother, we can see into the witch's house now.'"
"But you said the goblins didn't know it was a witch that lived there," said Maudie.