he men, weary of my dear Island now
its chief jewel was gone, irritated by the tramping feet and tuneless
whistling where I had heard so much the patter of _petite Marie's_
slippers and the rich melody of her mother's voice.

It was then that I fell upon Lockwood Prynne's library and learned
more of his mind, I believe, than anyone else could ever know. I wish
I had known the man himself. The little I have been able to find out
about him in the South (the war practically wiped out the family) only
confirmed my first idea of him. I actually succeeded in tracking an
old album of daguerreotypes to a shiftless darkey cabin and
identifying a picture of him as a boy from a half-blind negro mammy,
with one of his father in full uniform and a singularly beautiful head
that I am sure from the likeness of the brow and the set of the eyes
must have been his mother, though here the old slave could not or
would not help me. I rescued, too, for Margarita, a rich carved
mahogany chair from a cow stall ("ole Marse Lockwood's pay chair") and
a graceful, brass-handled serving-table, "what his grandpa done leave
fo' li'l Marse Lockwood fer ter rec'leck' him by." I picked up a
silver cup, at a roadside auction (and bid high for it against a Fifth
Avenue dealer) engraved with his mother's coat-of-arms, and
shamelessly inveigled Margarita into taking it, later, and giving me
in return the silver bowl that stood for so long under the Henner
etching. It stands there still, but not in the old place. Not Caliban,
but Hodgson fills that bowl to-day and every day that I am in America
with the most beautiful flowers Uncle Winthrop's money can buy; though
Lockwood Prynne no longer lies in the army cot that faces it, one of
his best friends does--a friend who loves him no less, that he never
saw his face.

Well, we got that furnace in and fifty tons of coal, too, towed over
in an old scow and binned down in the cellar, and when I saw the bills
for this last, I received the impression (which I have never been able
wholly to abandon) that I must have been underpaid for those
coal-lands!

Many a time have we discussed it since, with a curious, frightened
wonder: why should that furnace have seemed so all-important to me? At
best we expected to spend but few days at the Island when it could
have been necessary; Margarita had grown up among Atlantic winters and
had more times than she could count broken the ice in her bedroom
ewer; such a luxurious wh