Surely, a man was never more ingeniously secure, he thought, as he went at a brisk pace into the depths of the mountain, and it would all be jeopardized by the influx into the Cove of a horde of tourists and summer sojourners that the projected hotel might bring. No exclusive aristocrat was ever more jealous of his seclusion from the roving of his kind than Lorenzo Taft. And then this danger of his own household, his own hearthstone; this silent, disapproving, prying, perfect little primness! He crossed water once. He never crossed it without remembering the instinct of the deer pursued to put a running stream between its flight and the hunter. The rivulet, very narrow here, flowed in a rocky bed at a swift rate. This was a tributary of the larger torrent that had flooded the mine, and, together with the small output and the inadequate prospect, had caused the work to be abandoned. Two of the miners had been drowned in the catastrophe, and this circumstance had doubtless contributed to the solitude of the locality. It was a place of strange sounds, with the forever-echoing rocks, and few curiosity seekers had ever ventured farther than the great outer portal of the Lost Time mine. Into this tunnel, with which Taft had joined a tunnel of his own secret workmanship, the water had not risen, albeit the lower excavations were all submerged; and as he went dryshod, he heard the deft patter of his tread on the well-beaten "dirt" path multiplied behind him by the echoes into the semblance of many a following footfall. This illusion might have jarred less accustomed nerves, but Taft had heard this impalpable pursuit so long with impunity that he was hardly likely to heed it now. Something, however, that he sometimes heard, and that was more often silent, he had learned to watch for, to fearfully mark the sound when it came, and to note its absence with a shuddering sense of vacancy and a chill suspense. It was like the sound of a pick continually striking into the earth, not with a hurried or fitful stroke, but timed with a composed regularity characteristic of the steady workman. Sometimes it seemed far away, sometimes immediately overhead, and again just underfoot. Those who heard it accounted for it readily enough. Who had set the ghastly superstition afoot none might say, but the belief widely obtained that the two lost miners thus wrought continually in the depths of the mountain, digging the graves that had been denied them on the face of the earth. To Taft, the familiar of the dark, the weird, and the uncanny, it seemed a likely enough solution of the mystery, and he nothing doubted it. He could not account for another phenomenon, not so frequent, but often enough forced upon his contemplation to bring him to an anxious pause. Sometimes he heard, or thought he heard, voices, loud, resounding, distinct,--hailing, hallooing voices; and again so uncertain, so commingled, were these vibrations, so repetitious and faint, that he