It so fell out the next day that this seemed no dream. He was so surely dead that he walked the ways of this world an alien. He was not more of it than if the turf in the far cemetery, beside the marble that bore his name, grew green and lush with its first summer veritably above his breast. He had no premonition of the deterioration of the spurious animation which had of late informed the days. The dawn came early, as was its wont in these slow diurnal measures of July, and cheer came with it. The explanation he had given of his strange words was more than satisfactory, and all about him was instinct with a sort of radiant pleasure in him which diffused its glow into his own heart. As he stood in the passage lighting his pipe, after breakfast, he noticed a salient change in the landscape. No smoke was rising from the high promontory where was situated the primitive kiln of the lime-burners. “Ye jes’ f’und that out?” said Tubal Cain, with a chuckle, as, tilted against the wall in his chair, he listlessly dangled his feet. “Thar ain’t been no lime bu’nt thar fur six weeks.” He chuckled anew, so cordially did he accept the sentimental cause of the juggler’s lapse of observation. “I reckon that thar lime is made up inter morter an’ air settin’ up prideful ez plaister now, an’ hev done furgot it ever war rock.” The young man placidly endured the raillery; in fact he relished it, for it was proof how genuine had been his absorption, and he was deprecatory of self-deception. That alert commercial interest never quite moribund prompted his next question. “I don’t see that lime is used in the Cove,” he said, reflecting on the stick-and-clay chimneys, and the clay daubing in the chinking between the logs of the walls of the houses. “What was the purpose of that extensive burning of lime, Mr. Sims?” “Ain’t you-uns hearn?” demanded the host, with another cheerful grin expanding his corrugated leathern-textured countenance. “Pete Knowles wouldn’t tell a-fust; he got the job somehows.” “Afraid of underbidding.” The juggler nodded comprehension of the motive. “So he bu’nt, an’ bu’nt, an’ bu’nt, an’ the lime it piled up in heaps in that thar dry rock-house what ’minds me powerful o’ the sepulturs o’ the Bible. But it air six weeks sence they bar’led it up an’ wagoned it off ’bout ten mile or mo’.” “What did they want it for, and who are ‘they’?” inquired Royce, still interested. “‘They’ is them hotel men over yander at New Helveshy Springs, an’ they wanted the lime ter plaister the old hotel what hev hed ter be repaired an’ nigh made over. They ’lowed ’twar cheaper ter git the lime bu’nt at the nearest limestun rocks ’n ter buy it bar’led an’ haul it fifty mile from a railroad.”