The night was very dark, although the great whorls of constellations were splendidly abloom in the clear sky. If a raylet fell to earth in the forest, it was not appreciable in the sombre depths, and the juggler, with all his craft, might hardly have made shift to follow his companion but for the spark and the light luminous smoke of the mountaineer’s pipe. Suddenly, as they turned a sharp edge of a series of great rocks, that like flying buttresses projected out from the steep perpendicular wall of a crag above them, all at once growing visible, a white flare shone before their eyes, illumining all the surrounding woods. There in an open space near the edge of a bluff was a great fire of logs burning like a funeral pyre. The juggler had paused as if spellbound. From the opposite side of the glowing mass a face, distorted, tremulous, impossibly hideous, elongated almost out of the proportion of humanity, peered at him. “For God’s sake, what’s that?” he cried out, clutching at his guide’s arm. The slow mountaineer, surprised out of his composure, paused, and took his pipe from his mouth to stare uncomprehendingly at his companion. “Jes’ burnin’ lime,” he said. Their shadows, suddenly evolved, stretched over the ground in the white flare. The Cove, not far beneath, for this was on a low spur of the great range, now flickered into full view, now receded into the darkness. Above the vague mountain the stars seemed all gone, and the sky was elusive and cloaked. For all the art of the juggler, he could show naught of magic more unnatural, more ghastly, than the face of the lime-burner as it appeared through the medium of the heated air arising from the primitive kiln,--protean, distorted by every current of the night’s breath,--although it was of much significance to him, and later he came to know it well to his cost. As the man caught the sound of their approach, he walked around to the side of the kiln, and his face and figure, no longer seen through the unequally refracting medium of the heated air, dwindled to normal proportions. It was not a prepossessing face in its best estate,--long, thin-lipped, grim, with small eyes set close together, and surmounted by a wide wool hat, which, being large for his head, was so crushed together that its crown rose up in a peak. His clothes were plentifully dusted with powdery flakes, and the scalding breath of the unslaked lime was perceptible to the throats of the newcomers. “Ye ’pear ter be powerful late,” the young mountaineer hazarded.