pine tree is surely his own; we know his hand as well as his turn of mind. But who can say if this be his Kaaba, this his pine-mosque? Might he not only have passed through these glades to other parts? Signs, indeed, are here of his feet and hands, if not of his tent-pegs. And what signifies his stay? No matter how long he might have put up here, it is but a passage, deeply considered: like Thoreau’s passage through Walden woods, like Mohammad’s through the desert.
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