The Borrowers

Mrs. Driver begins treating everyone in the house harshly, convinced that either the boy or one of the staff is responsible for the disappearance of certain items from the drawing room. She rifles through the boy’s belongings but only finds some sugar cubes, a dead mole, and a potato knife. As she becomes more and more suspicious, she decides to get up in the middle of the night, hoping to catch someone creeping into the trinket cabinet. Around midnight, as she is making her way through the house, she sees a small flicker of light out of the corner of her eye and hears the faint sound of the door between the kitchen and the main hall being opened. She makes her way into the dark kitchen, where she finds one of the boards out of place and a small box from the drawing room sitting on the floor.

Mrs. Driver pries up the board that the boy has left loose and screams when she sees what she describes as hundreds of tiny people scurrying out of view. Crampfurl hears the screams and comes running but does not believe her when she says she saw either tiny people or “mice dressed up” beneath the floor.