walking by my side, with his bowed shoulders and white hair, and then once more at his house, lit up and pouring smoke like some industrious factory. And then my curiosity broke forth. ‘In Heaven’s name,’ I cried, ‘what do you make in this inhuman desert?’

He looked at me with a peculiar smile, and answered with an evasion—

‘This is not the first time,’ said he, ‘that you have seen my furnaces alight. One morning, in the small hours, I saw you driving past; a delicate experiment miscarried; and I cannot acquit myself of having startled either your driver or the horse that drew you.’

‘What!’ cried I, beholding again in fancy the antics of the figure, ‘could that be you?’

‘It was I,’ he replied; ‘but do not fancy that I was mad. I was in agony. I had been scalded cruelly.’

We were now near the house, which, unlike the ordinary houses of the country, was built of hewn stone and very solid. Stone, too, was its foundation, stone its background. Not a blade of grass sprouted among the broken mineral about the walls, not a flower adorned the windows. Over the door, by way of sole adornment, the Mormon Eye was rudely sculptured; I had been brought up to view that emblem from my childhood; but since the night of our escape, it had acquired a new significance, and set me shrinking. The smoke rolled voluminously from the chimney top, its edges ruddy with the fire; and from the far corner of the building, near the ground, angry puffs of steam shone snow-white in the moon and vanished.

The doctor opened the door and paused upon the threshold. ‘You ask me what I make here,’ he observed. ‘Two things: Life and Death.’ And he motioned me to enter.

‘I shall await my mother,’ said I.

‘Child,’ he replied, ‘look at me: am I not old and broken? Of us two, which is the stronger, the young maiden or the withered man?’

I bowed, and passing by him, entered a vestibule or kitchen, lit by a good fire and a shaded reading-lamp. It was furnished only with a dresser, a rude table, and some wooden benches; and on one of these the doctor motioned me to take a seat; and passing by another door into the interior of the house, he left me to myself. Presently I heard the jar of iron from the far end of the building; and this was followed by the same throbbing noise that had startled me in the valley, but now so near at hand as to be menacing by loudness, and even to shake the house with every 

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