This leisure hour is the nipple of the soul. And fortunate they who are not artificially suckled, who know this hour no matter how brief, who get their nipple at the right time. If they do not, no pabulum ever after, will their indurated tissues assimilate. Do you wonder why the world is full of crusty souls? and why to them this infant hour, this suckling while, is so repugnant? But we must not intrude more of such remarks about mankind. Whether rightly suckled or not, we manage to live; but whether we do so marmot-like or Maronite-like, is not the question here to be considered. To pray for your bread or to burrow in the earth for it, is it not the same with most people? Given a missionary with a Bible in his hip-pocket or a peasant with a load of brushwood on his back and the same gastric coefficient, and you will have in either case a resulting expansion for six feet of coffin ground and a fraction of Allah's mercy. Our poor missionary, is it worth while to cross the seas for this? Marmot-like or Maronite-like--but soft you know! Here is our peasant with his overshadowing load of brushwood. And there is another, and another. They are carrying fuel to the lime-pit ahead of us yonder. What brow-sweat, what time, what fire, what suffering and patient toil, the lime-washing, or mere liming, of our houses and sepulchres, requires. That cone structure there, that artificial volcano, with its crackling, flaming bowels and its fuliginous, coruscating crater, must our hardy peasants feed continually for twenty days and nights. But the book and the name on the pine, we would know more of these signs, if possible. And so, we visit the labourers of the kiln. They are yödling, the while they work, and jesting and laughing. The stokers, with flaming, swollen eyes, their tawny complexion waxing a brilliant bronze, their sweat making golden furrows therein, with their pikes and pitchforks busy, are terribly magnificent to behold. Here be men who would destroy Bastilles for you, if it were nominated in the bond. And there is the monk-foreman--the kiln is of the monastery's estate--reading his breviary while the lime is in making. Indeed, these sodalities of the Lebanons are not what their vows and ascetic theologies would make them. No lean-jowled, hungry-looking devotees, living in exiguity and droning in exinanition their prayers,--not by any means. Their flesh-pots are not a few, and their table is a marvel of ascetism! And why not, if their fat estates--three-quarter of the lands here is held in mortmain by the clergy--can yield anything, from silk cocoons to lime-pits? They will clothe you in silk at least; they will lime-wash your homes and sepulchres, if they cannot lime-wash anything else. Thanks to them so long as they keep some reminiscence of business in their heads to keep the Devil out of it.