“None better! I built her mostly myself, when I was laying up the treasure that rusted; stone on stone, log on log. Heavy, slow work. The sluice is like a city wall; the anvil bedded on seven feet of oak. It's right! But if I'd known then I should have put up a temple to Jehovah.” Hulings could scarcely contain his impatience. “Why,” he ejaculated, “you might have made a fine thing out of it! Opportunity, opportunity, and you let it go by. For sheer——” He broke off at a steady gaze from Claypole's calm blue eyes. It was evident that he would have to restrain any injudicious characterizations of the other's belief. He spoke suddenly: “I came up here because I was sick and had to get out of Eastlake. I left everything but what little money I had. You see—I was a failure. I'd like to stay with you a while; when perhaps I might get on my feet again. I feel easier than I have for weeks.” He realized, surprised, that this was so. He had a conviction that he could sleep here, by the stream, in the still, flowering woods. “I haven't any interest in temples,” he continued; “but I guess—two men—we won't argue about that. Some allowance on both sides. But I am interested in iron; I'd like to know this forge of yours backward. I've discovered a sort of hankering after the idea; just that—iron. It's a tremendous fact, and you can keep it from rusting.” III THE following morning Claypole showed Alexander Hulings the mechanics of Tubal Cain. A faint reminiscent pride shone through the later unworldly preoccupation. He lifted the sluice gate, and the water poured through the masoned channel of the forebay and set in motion the wheel, hung with its lower paddles in the course. In the forge shed Claypole bound a connection, and the short haft of the trip hammer, caught in revolving cogs, raised a ponderous head and dropped it, with a jarring clang, on the anvil. The blast of the hearths was driven by water wind, propelled by a piston in a wood cylinder, with an air chamber for even pressure. It was all so elemental that the neglect of the last years had but spread over the forge an appearance of ill repair. Actually it was as sound as the clear oak largely used in its construction. James Claypole's interest soon faded; he returned to his chair by the door of the dwelling, where he laboriously spelled out the periods of a battered copy of Addison's “Evidences of the Christian Religion.” He broke the perusal with frequent ecstatic ejaculations; and when Hulings reluctantly returned from his study of the forge the other was again on his knees, lost in passionate prayer. Hulings grew hungry—Claypole was utterly lost in visions—cooked some bacon and found cold biscuit in the shedlike kitchen.