everything.

When left alone in the mine Curdie always worked on for an hour or two
at first, following the lode which, according to Glump, would lead at
last into the deserted habitation. After that, he would set out on a
reconnoitring expedition. In order to manage this, or rather the
return from it, better than the first time, he had bought a huge ball
of fine string, having learned the trick from Hop-o'-my-Thumb, whose
history his mother had often told him. Not that Hop-o'-my-Thumb had
ever used a ball of string--I should be sorry to be supposed so far out
in my classics--but the principle was the same as that of the pebbles.
The end of this string he fastened to his pickaxe, which figured no bad
anchor, and then, with the ball in his hand, unrolling it as he went,
set out in the dark through the natural gangs of the goblins'
territory. The first night or two he came upon nothing worth
remembering; saw only a little of the home-life of the cobs in the
various caves they called houses; failed in coming upon anything to
cast light upon the foregoing design which kept the inundation for the
present in the background. But at length, I think on the third or
fourth night, he found, partly guided by the noise of their implements,
a company of evidently the best sappers and miners amongst them, hard
at work. What were they about? It could not well be the inundation,
seeing that had in the meantime been postponed to something else. Then
what was it? He lurked and watched, every now and then in the greatest
risk of being detected, but without success. He had again and again to
retreat in haste, a proceeding rendered the more difficult that he had
to gather up his string as he returned upon its course. It was not
that he was afraid of the goblins, but that he was afraid of their
finding out that they were watched, which might have prevented the
discovery at which he aimed. Sometimes his haste had to be such that,
when he reached home towards morning, his string, for lack of time to
wind it up as he 'dodged the cobs', would be in what seemed most
hopeless entanglement; but after a good sleep, though a short one, he
always found his mother had got it right again. There it was, wound in
a most respectable ball, ready for use the moment he should want it!

'I can't think how you do it, mother,' he would say.

'I follow the thread,' she would answer--'just as you do in the mine.'
She never had more to say about it; b