p is swoon-sleep;
Third Sleep is death, or N[=o][=o]manossi. So, too, the
Mulgars say, the first is "Little-go," the second is
"Great-go," and the third is "Come-no-more"; as if their
bodies were a lodging, and sleep a kind of out-of-doors.

Then, with her small, clumsy fingers, she tied up the sleeping
milk-white Wonderstone in the hem of his woolly sheep's coat, and lay
back in her bed, too feeble to speak again. Thumb, Thimble, and Nod sat
all three, each with his little heap of house-stuff before him, which it
seemed hateful now to have, staring through the doorway. In the purple
gloom the fireflies were mazily flickering. Night was still, like a
simmering pot, with heat. And out of the swamp they heard the Ooboe
calling to its mate, singing marvellous sweet and clear in the darkness
above its woven nest; while over their heads the tiny Nikka-nakkas, or
mouse-owls, sat purring in the thatch. And Nod said: "Listen, Mutta,
listen; how the Ooboe's telling secrets!" And she smiled with tight-shut
lids, wagging her wizened head.

And in the deepest dead of night, when Thimble sat sleeping, his long
arms thrown out over the Portingal's rough table, and Thumb crouching at
the door, Nod heard in the silence a very faint sigh. He crept to his
mother's bed. She softly raised her hand to him, and her eyes closed.

So her three sons dug her a deep grave beside Glint's, under the
Ukka-tree, as she had bidden them. And many of the Forest-mulgars,
specially those of her own kind and kindred, came down solemnly out of
the forest towards evening of that day, and keened or droned for
Mutta-matutta, squatting together at some little distance from the
Portingal's hut. Beyond their counting (though that is not a hard
matter) was the number of the years she and her father and her father's
father, back even to Zebbah, had lived in the hut. But they did not come
near, because they feared the Portingal's yellow bones hung up in the
corner.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER II

At first the three brothers lived so forlorn and solitary together they
could scarcely eat. Everything they saw or handled told them only over
and over again that their mother was dead. But there was work to be
done, and brave hearts must take courage, else sorrow and trouble would
be nothing but evil. This, too, was no time for sitting idle and
doleful. For a little before the gathering of the rains there bega