ogether all night long, John Stanley, perhaps,
snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the
sun now shot an arrow. There was the floor, in much the same state as
the one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there
was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the
window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one.
Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with
a beginning of despair. The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and
shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight
drove us at last into the open.

Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all
alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature;
and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it
were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a bird, not a beast, not a
reptile. There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we
passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the
shaft.

We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber--wood and
iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of trucks. We gazed
up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We sat by the margin of the
dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the
clear air. Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came
to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.
But still there was no word of Hanson.

I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft,
till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I
had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder,
the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the
sky. Night began early in our cleft. Before us, over the margin of the
dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick
below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther
side.

There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we
betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform. If the
platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to
represent the line of the footlights, then our house would be the first
wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge, although no match
for it in size, the foremost on the right. It was