A princess in a house on a mountain finds a great-great-grandmother spinning at the top of a stair no one else can see, while below the mountain the goblins plan to take the kingdom by marriage. MacDonald set the whole plot on a thread the girl must follow when she cannot see where it leads, and refused to explain the grandmother to his readers or to his critics. The miner's son Curdie drives the goblins off with rhymes they cannot bear, and the trick is that their feet are soft. Forty-nine plates by painters from Jan van Goyen to John Atkinson Grimshaw follow the story's own weather, from moonlit water to winter roads and ruined castles.