“Thar lays your chimbley, Mr. RoBards,” he said, “jest as the Lord left her. I ain’t teched e’er a brick, and I told the wife not to heave none of ’em at me when she lost her temper—so to speak, seein’ as she don’t seem to have ever found it, haw haw haw!” “He will have his joke!” Mrs. Albeson tittered. “A sense of humor certainly helps you through the world,” said her husband as he took the horse in charge. Mrs. Albeson waddled after RoBards, and checked him to murmur: “Haow’s pore little Immy?” That eternal reminder hurt him sore. She startled him by adding, “Old Mis’ Lasher keeps hangin’ about. More trouble! One of her girls has ran away with a hired man from the city, and she’s more lost than the boy that’s went a-whalin’. Mis’ Lasher prob’ly seen you drive past and she’ll likely be along any minute naow.” “Yes, yes; very well; all right,” said RoBards, impatient to be alone. And Mrs. Albeson went back to her kitchen, taking her snub patiently. RoBards studied the course of the thunderbolt and was glad that he had not been present to see it smite and hear it. He would probably have died of fear. He shivered now with the bare imagination, and cravenly wondered if any thrill of it could have stirred Jud Lasher. He was so absorbed in this fantasy that he jumped when Albeson spoke across his shoulder: “Looks like to me, the mason would have to pull the whole thing daown, shore up the walls, dig out the foundation, and set her up all over again!” “Nonsense!” said RoBards. “All right! It’s your haouse. Mend it the way you want to.” RoBards sent him to White Plains to fetch a mason, and remained to study the crevice that split the thick foundation as if Achilles had hurled his own unequaled javelin of Pelian ash into the tomb of another Patroclus. The fabric of the cellar wall was not opened all the way, but the wedge of the gap pointed right at the burial chamber. As he wondered how soon some casual inspector would follow the lead of that arrow head and break open the wall, RoBards heard at his elbow that well-remembered querulous sniffle of Mrs. Lasher’s: “H’are ye, Mist’ RoBards? Too bad what the lightnin’ done to your nice house, ain’t it? But the Lord has his reasons, I expect. Here he hits your home where there’s never been any wickedness and leaves mine alone, as if there had ever been anything else there. “What I wanted to ask you was this, please; I was talkin’ to you about the boy Jud goin’ away to sea. Well, I ain’t heard a word from the pore child sence. Where d’you s’pose he could be now?—ridin’ out on a mast most like; or sinkin’ in a whaleboat that some whale has knocked to flinders with one swat of his tail. A friend of my husband’s was here recent, and he’d been on a whaler and he told me terrible things.