Vincent van Gogh Road with Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh Road with CypressesVincent van Gogh Peach Tree in BlossomVincent van Gogh Orchard in BlossomVincent van Gogh Olive grove I
They usually bring more'n one kid at a time...."
"What do they do?" Lyra managed to ask, gathering her doped wits as Pantalaimon stirred into wakefulness with her.
"We dunno," said the girl who was doing most of the talking. She was a tall, red-haired girl with quick twitchy movements and a strong London accent. "They sort of measure us and do these tests and that-"
"They measure thirty, I reckon."
"More'n that," said the plump girl. "More like forty."
"Except they keep taking us away," said the redhead. "They usually start off with bringing a whole bunch here, and then there's a lot of us, and one by one they all disappear."
"They're Gobblers," said the plump girl. "You know Gobblers. We was all scared of 'em till Dust," said another girl, friendly and plump and dark-haired."You don't know," said the first girl."They do," said the third, a subdued-looking child cuddling her rabbit daemon. "I heard 'em talking.""Then they take us away one by one and that's all we know. No one comes back," said the redhead."There's this boy, right," said the plump girl, "he reckons-""Don't tell her that!" said the redhead. "Not yet.""Is there boys here as well?" said Lyra."Yeah. There's lots of us. There's about we was caught...."