of the building aid the illusion, were it not for a section of the foreground immediately below the cliffs of the terrace, where there stood, bare and open and unsheltered, a primitive log cabin, a stretch of cornfields, a horse-lot, a pig-pen, and all the accessories of most modern and unimpressive American poverty and ignorance. Being near, and bearing human significance, the prosaic little home seemed the most salient point, in its incongruity, in the whole magnificent landscape. The methods of the mountaineer furthered, too, the effect of antagonism. Along the side of one of the ranges near at hand, a great gaunt blackened area bore token of a "fire-scald." Kenniston's eyes rested frowningly on this deep burnt scar upon the face of nature. It came from the pernicious habit of "setting out fire in the woods" in the autumn, to burn away the undergrowth and dead leaves, in order to give freer pasturage to wandering cattle. Here, as is not unfrequently the case, the fire, instead of merely consuming leaves, twigs, and shoots, had gathered strength and fury, burning the giant trees to great blackened, deadened skeletons, bleakly standing, and had devastated some hundred acres. He could see in the sparse shadows the cattle feeding on the lush herbage, and he ground his teeth to reflect upon the alarm any future conflagration would spread among the autumnal lingerers of summer sojourners and the catastrophe that might ensue to the chateau on the rocks. "We _must_ buy him out," he muttered. "He _must_ be made to go." Kenniston's heart was as heavy with presage as if his flimsy chateau stood on the cliffs behind him; for it was not to be mediæval in point of strength of materials. The project of buying out Luther Tems seemed hardly so feasible as when first presented to the minds of the company. The proposition to this effect had already been made to the astounded mountaineer, and rejected with a plump No. A second and better considered effort, coupled with a disproportionately large pecuniary consideration, had fared no better. There Luther Tems was, and there he meant to stay, as his father and his grandfather had before him to a great age, till Death bethought himself at last of these loiterers in so obscure a corner of the world, and, although belated, gathered them in. The company was now at its wits' end. The place was an eyesore, a trail of the serpent in this seeming Paradise. It was, too, a source of danger and discomfort, and to seek to remove it was one of Kenniston's errands here, as well as to confer with the contractor, in his dictatorial character as one of the company rather than the architect. His visit was so timed that he was on the ground a day or so in advance of his coadjutor, and in furtherance of his project had asked for quarters in Luther Tems's house.