A cold, rainy week--the delayed equinox--caught and held me on the island, huddled over the fire, and it was then that I conceived the famous idea of the furnace. I had planned many a pleasant autumn there, for it was now the best of America to me, and if such weeks as this were possible (and probable) there would be little comfort for me away from the chimney corner--which has never been my favourite post, by the way. Caliban and Agnes, the cook, a kindly Normandy woman, did their best for me and for the ravenous gang of workmen that laboured (in the slight intervals between their meals!) at the monstrous, many-mouthed iron tube in the cellar; while I chafed and scolded at the delays, unwilling to leave the men, weary of my dear Island now its chief jewel was gone, irritated by the tramping feet and tuneless whistling where I had heard so much the patter of _petite Marie's_ slippers and the rich melody of her mother's voice. It was then that I fell upon Lockwood Prynne's library and learned more of his mind, I believe, than anyone else could ever know. I wish I had known the man himself. The little I have been able to find out about him in the South (the war practically wiped out the family) only confirmed my first idea of him. I actually succeeded in tracking an old album of daguerreotypes to a shiftless darkey cabin and identifying a picture of him as a boy from a half-blind negro mammy, with one of his father in full uniform and a singularly beautiful head that I am sure from the likeness of the brow and the set of the eyes must have been his mother, though here the old slave could not or would not help me. I rescued, too, for Margarita, a rich carved mahogany chair from a cow stall ("ole Marse Lockwood's pay chair") and a graceful, brass-handled serving-table, "what his grandpa done leave fo' li'l Marse Lockwood fer ter rec'leck' him by." I picked up a silver cup, at a roadside auction (and bid high for it against a Fifth Avenue dealer) engraved with his mother's coat-of-arms, and shamelessly inveigled Margarita into taking it, later, and giving me in return the silver bowl that stood for so long under the Henner etching. It stands there still, but not in the old place. Not Caliban, but Hodgson fills that bowl to-day and every day that I am in America with the most beautiful flowers Uncle Winthrop's money can buy; though Lockwood Prynne no longer lies in the army cot that faces it, one of his best friends does--a friend who loves him no less, that he never saw his face. Well, we got that furnace in and fifty tons of coal, too, towed over in an old scow and binned down in the cellar, and when I saw the bills for this last, I received the impression (which I have never been able wholly to abandon) that I must have been underpaid for those coal-lands!