The Hobbit

sight and out of mind, in a very dark corner for a long while.
    After some time he felt for his pipe. It was not broken, and that was something. Then he felt for his pouch, and there was
     some tobacco in it, and that was something more. Then he felt for matches and he could not find any at all, and that shattered
     his hopes completely. Just as well for him, as he agreed when he came to his senses. Goodness knows what the striking of matches
     and the smell of tobacco would have brought on him out of dark holes in that horrible place. Still at the moment he felt very
     crushed. But in slapping all his pockets and feeling all round himself for matches his hand came on the hilt of his little
     sword—the little dagger that he got from the trolls, and that he had quite forgotten; nor fortunately had the goblins noticed
     it, as he wore it inside his breeches.
    Now he drew it out. It shone pale and dim before his eyes. “So it is an elvish blade, too,” he thought; “and goblins are not
     very near, and yet not far enough.”
    But somehow he was comforted. It was rather splendid to be wearing a blade made in Gondolin for the goblin-wars of which so
     many songs had sung; and also he had noticed that such weapons made a great impression on goblins that came upon them suddenly.
    “Go back?” he thought. “No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!” So up he got, and
     trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.
    Now certainly Bilbo was in what is called a tight place. But you must remember it was not quite so tight for him as it would
     have been for me or for you. Hobbits are not quite like ordinary people; and after all if their holes are nice cheery places
     and properly aired, quite different from the tunnels of the goblins, still they are more used to tunnelling than we are, and
     they do not easily lose their sense of direction underground—not when their heads have recovered from being bumped. Also they
     can move very quietly, and hide easily, and recover wonderfully from falls and bruises, and they have a fund of wisdom and
     wise sayings that men have mostly never heard or have forgotten long ago.
    I should not have liked to have been in Mr. Baggins’ place, all the same. The tunnel seemed to have no end. All he knew was
     that it was still going down pretty steadily and keeping in the same direction in spite of a twist and a turn or two. There
     were passages leading off to the side every now and then, as he knew by the glimmer of his sword, or could feel with his hand
     on the wall. Of these he took no notice, except to hurry past for fear of goblins or half-imagined dark things coming out
     of them. On and on he went, and down and down; and still he heard no sound of anything except the occasional whirr of a bat
     by his ears, which startled him at first, till it became too frequent to bother about. I do not know how long he kept on like
     this, hating to go on, not daring to stop, on, on, until he was tireder than tired. It seemed like all the way to tomorrow and over it to the days beyond.
    Suddenly without any warning he trotted splash into water! Ugh! it was icy cold. That pulled him up sharp and short. He did
     not know whether it was just a pool in the path, or the edge of an underground stream that crossed the passage, or the brink
     of a deep dark subterranean lake. The sword was hardly shining at all. He stopped, and he could hear, when he listened hard,
     drops drip-drip-dripping from an unseen roof into the water below; but there seemed no other sort of sound.
    “So it is a pool or a lake, and not an underground river,” he thought. Still he did not dare to wade out into the darkness.
     He could not swim; and he thought, too, of nasty slimy things, with big bulging blind eyes, wriggling in the water. There
     are strange things living in the pools and lakes in the hearts of mountains: fish whose fathers swam in, goodness only knows
     how many years ago, and never swam out again, while their eyes grew bigger and bigger and bigger from trying to see in the
     blackness; also there are other things more slimy than fish. Even in the tunnels and caves the goblins have made for themselves
     there are other things living unbeknown to them that have sneaked in from outside to lie up in the dark. Some of these caves,
     too, go back in their beginnings to ages before the