"E. Nesbit - The Dragon Tamers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nesbit Edith)

the mayor. And John the blacksmith struggled on as best he could, with a few odd jobs from travellers
and strangers who did not know what a superior forge the mayor's was. The two rooms were warm and
weather-tight, but not very large; so the blacksmith got into the way of keeping his old iron, and his odds
and ends, and his fagots, and his twopenn'orth of coal, in the great dungeon down under the castle. It
was a very fine dungeon indeed, with a handsome vaulted roof and big iron rings, whose staples were
built into the wall, very strong and convenient for tying captives up to, and at one end was a broken flight
of wide steps leading down no one knew where.. Even the lords of the castle in the good old times had
never known where those steps led to, but every now and then they would kick a prisoner down the
steps in their light-hearted, hopeful way, and, sure enough, the prisoners never came back. The
blacksmith had never dared to go beyond the seventh step, and no more have I--so I know no more than
he did what was at the bottom of those stairs.

John the blacksmith had a wife and a little baby. When his wife was not doing the housework she used to
nurse the baby and cry, remembering the happy days when she lived with her father, who kept seventeen
cows and lived quite in the country, and when John used to come courting her in the summer evenings, as
smart as smart, with a posy in his button-hole. And now John's hair was getting grey, and there was
hardly ever enough to eat.

As for the baby, it cried a good deal at odd times; but at night, when its mother had settled down to
sleep, it would always begin to cry, quite as a matter of course, so that she hardly got any rest at all. This
made her very tired. The baby could make up for its bad nights during the day, if it liked, but the poor
mother couldn't. So whenever she had nothing to do she used to sit and cry, because she was tired out
with work and worry.

One evening the blacksmith was busy with his forge. He was making a goat-shoe for the goat of a very
rich lady, who wished to see how the goat liked being shod, and also whether the shoe would come to
fivepence or sevenpence before she ordered the whole set. This was the only order John had had that
week. And as he worked his wife sat and nursed the baby, who, for a wonder, was not crying.

Presently, over the noise of the bellows, and over the clank of the iron, there came another sound. The
blacksmith and his wife looked at each other.

"I heard nothing," said he.

"Neither did I," said she.

But the noise grew louder--and the two were so anxious not to hear it that he hammered away at the
goat-shoe harder than he had ever hammered in his life, and she began to sing to the baby--a thing she
had not had the heart to do for weeks.

But through the blowing and hammering and singing the noise came louder and louder, and the more they
tried not to hear it, the more they had to. It was like the noise of some great creature purring, purring,
purring--and the reason they did not want to believe they really heard it was that it came from the great
dungeon down below, where the old iron was, and the firewood and the twopenn'orth of coal, and the
broken steps that went down into the dark and ended no one knew where.

"It can't be anything in the dungeon," said the blacksmith, wiping his face. "Why, I shall have to go down
there after more coals in a minute."

"There isn't anything there, of course. How could there be?" said his wife. And they tried so hard to