One day, when the child had reached the place where the miner generally sent her back, she begged to go with him all the way to the bal; and as he was rather weak where his womenfolk were concerned, he willingly consented.

When they reached Ding Dong, with its hundreds of busy workers, the little maid grew very frightened, and fled back across the moor, in the direction of home, as fast as her legs could take her.

The miner, as he watched her running away, rather reproached himself for bringing her so far; and he wondered, as he put the tin into the furnace to be smelted, whether she got home all right.

'So you did take our Ninnie-Dinnie to the bal?' was his wife's greeting when he got home that evening. 'I've been terribly wisht [26] without her all day.'

'You don't mean to say the little dear haven't come back?' cried Tom. 'That is terrible news, sure 'nough! She didn't stop a minute at the bal, and tore off home like a skainer.' [27]

'I've never clapt eyes on her since she went out with 'ee this morning!' cried Joan, greatly distressed. 'I do hope nothing has happened to her. Perhaps she has been an' gone an' tumbled down into one of the Old Men's workings [28] out there on the moor.'

Tom went as white as a sheet at the bare thought of the possibility, and he started off at once to look for the child, leaving his poor wife more troubled than she had ever been since Ninnie-Dinnie came.

He was gone a little over an hour, when, to Joan's thankfulness, he returned with the child.

He found her, he said, not far from the beaten track, sitting at the foot of a carn waiting for him to come for her.

She told him she had lost her way, and that as she was sitting on the griglans, [29] an ugly little man with long ears like a Skavarnak [30]

came up to her, and because she was afraid of him and would not go into his little house under the carn, he was very angry. She did not know what would have happened to her if a little old woman in a sunbonnet had not come along just then, and took her to the place where Tom found her. She told her to sit where she was till Daddie Trebisken came to fetch her, which he would be sure to do after sunset. In the mean-time she was to say her own name backwards seven times if the Long-Eared came near her again. She also told her that Ninnie-Dinnie, if she cared to believe it, was her real name spelt backwards with an 'n' left out; and she said she must never go out on the lonely moors without taking the Pail, made out of old Cornish tin, with her.

It was ever so long before Joan got over her fright about Ninnie-Dinnie, and for weeks she would not hear of her going out on the moors. But, as time deadens all things, she got over her nervousness, and when April came, and the broom and the gorse were in flower, making the great brown moor yellow-gold, and scenting all the air with peach-like fragrance, she was willing that the little maid should go with her husband once more. And Tom willingly took her.

As they were going out of the door, something fell on the Pail standing on the dresser, and the child, remembering the injunction of the little old woman about the Pail, turned back to get it.

'What shall I bring 'ee home, Mammie Trebisken?' she asked, looking at her foster-mother; and Joan, hearing the lark singing faintly in the distance, replied laughingly:

'You shall bring me home a pailful of lark's music, my dear.'

'You do knaw the little maid can't bring 'ee that,' cried Tom impatiently. 'I should think she was all the music you wanted now.'

'So she is, bless her!' said his wife. 'I was only joking.'

'Nevertheless, I will bring you home this Pail full of lark's music,'

said Ninnie-Dinnie, with great seriousness; and putting her tiny hand into Tom's big one, they started off, and Joan watched them out of sight.

When the miner and the child got about half-way to the mine, scores of larks were up in the blue air singing, and their little dark bodies waving to and fro in the rapture of their song, till it seemed to the miner as if their melody was trickling down all over him, and Ninnie-Dinnie declared it was.

As they stood listening, one of the larks began to descend, singing as it came.

'Now is the time if you want to catch the lark's music for Mammie Trebisken,' laughed Tom, watching the bird's descent. 'There it is, just over thy soft little head. Up with thy Pail, my dear!'

And Ninnie-Dinnie, with her face as grave as the great boulders lying amongst the golden-blossomed furze and the feathery fronds of the Osmunda, lifted the Pail above her head, and as she did so the strange letters under its rim stood out and glowed like white fire.

'Little lark, little lark, give me thy music!' she chanted in a voice as clear and sweet as linnets' fluting. 'Little lark, little lark, give me thy song!' and the small bird twirled down towards her singing wilder and sweeter as it came, until it hovered over the uplifted Pail.

'The dear little lark has given me its music and its song to make Mammie Trebisken's heart glad,' said the child, as the lark dropped on the thyme-scented turf at her feet.

'Pretending, are 'ee, an?' laughed Tom.

'No!' cried Ninnie-Dinnie. 'Listen!'

And the miner, putting his ear close to the Pail, heard, to his unspeakable amazement, a lark singing quite distinctly, yet rather faintly, as it were singing far away.

'Jimmerychry! [31] Can it be believed?' he exclaimed. ''Tis magic, an' I don't half like it. An' I don't think the dear little bird do nuther,' looking down at the lark, who was trailing its wings on the ground in that distressful way birds have when their wee nestlings are in danger. 'Give it back its own, that's a dear little maid.'

'I can't,' said Ninnie-Dinnie. 'Mammie Trebisken can only do that; and I don't think she will want to, for the song in the Pail will make all her heart sing.'

She covered the Pail with her pinafore as she spoke, and the little lark disappeared into a brake of flaming gorse.

There was no time to bandy words, Tom told himself, as he was late for his work, and he left the child to go back to their cottage without any more protesting. But he did not feel very comfortable as he strode on his way to the mine.

It was late in the morning when Ninnie-Dinnie got home, and Joan was beginning to be troubled at her long absence when she came in.

'Have 'ee brought the lark's music along with 'ee?' she asked, as the child set the Pail on the red-painted dresser.

'Yes,' said Ninnie-Dinnie; 'and at sundown you will hear it.'

Joan, thinking it was all make-believe, laughed, and said she would keep her ears open to listen.

When the shadows of the great grey carns stretched over the heather and the sun sunk over the moor, the Pail began to move slightly on the dresser, and a sound came out like gra.s.s moved gently by the wind, which at once drew Joan's attention to it. Then, to her amazement, it shook all over, and there poured forth from it such a gush of melody that almost took her breath away. It was like lark's music, she said, with a strain of sweeter, wilder music added to it, and which, somehow, reminded her of the flute-like voice of the little old woman in the bal-bonnet, who sang that rude rhyme when she brought them their dear little Ninnie-Dinnie. She sat in her elbow-chair entranced, and the queer child sat at her feet, apparently entranced too!

The melody, which at first came from the depths of the Pail, or the turfy ground, it was hard to say which, rose higher and higher, until it sounded like a bird singing its heart out in the soft azure of an evening sky.

Joan never knew how long she listened to that fetterless song; she only knew she awoke to the fact that the sky's little songster, the Pail, or whatever it was, had stopped singing, that daylight was leaving the moor, and that a small dark shadow was slowly stealing across her window.

'Why, it is a little bird, surely,' she said, speaking to the tiny maid at her feet. 'The light of our fire have attracted it from its sleeping-place--poor little thing!'

'P'r'aps it is the little lark come for its music and its song,'

suggested Ninnie-Dinnie, fixing her gaze on the bird, which was now fluttering against the panes and uttering a tiny note of distress.

'I never thought of that,' said Joan. 'I hope it haven't. I couldn't give it back its song and its music for the world!'

As she was speaking, the Pail on the dresser was again agitated, and out of it rushed another entrancing melody, until all the cottage was full of music, and Joan said it was raining down upon her head from the oaken beams. But through the melody could be distinctly heard a little voice, which was the lark's voice:

'Give me back my music! Give me back my song!'

'My Aunt Betsy!' cried Joan. 'Whoever heard of a bird talking before?'

'Are you going to give the little lark what it wants?' asked Ninnie-Dinnie, watching the bird, which was still fluttering against the bottle-green pane.

'No!' said Joan decidedly. 'I don't think I ought. It do make my heart young an' happy again.'

'I was hoping you would like to give back the lark its music and its song,' said Ninnie-Dinnie.

'Whatever for, cheeld-vean?' [32] Joan asked.

'Because,' answered the child, 'I have been wondering what the lark's little mate will do if he hasn't his song to sing to her now she is sitting on her pretty eggs out on the gra.s.s.'