e was not sure, but it was to hear a metallic
click-click come to him through the clear air of night. It was
a pleasant noise as of steel and rock: the work of some lonely
stone-cutter of the hills. The sound reached him with strange,
increasing distinctness. Was this Titan that had saved him sculpturing
some figure from the metal hill? Click-click! it vibrated as regularly
as the keen pulse of a watch. He lay and wondered for a long time, but
fell asleep again; and the steely iteration went on in his dreams.

In the morning The Man came to him, and cared for his hurts, and gave
him food; but still would speak no word. He was gone nearly all day in
the hills; yet when evening came he sought the place where Pierre had
seen him the night before, and the same weird scene was re-enacted. And
again in the night the clicking sound went on; and every night it was
renewed. Pierre grew stronger, and could, with difficulty, stand upon
his feet. One night he crept out, and made his way softly, slowly
towards the sound. He saw The Man kneeling beside The Stone, he saw a
hammer rise and fall upon a chisel; and the chisel was at the base of
The Stone. The hammer rose and fell with perfect but dreadful precision.
Pierre turned and looked towards the village below, whose lights were
burning like a bunch of fire-flies in the gloom. Again he looked at The
Stone and The Man.

Then the thing came to him sharply. The Man was chiselling away the
socket of The Stone, bringing it to that point of balance where the
touch of a finger, the wing of a bird, or the whistle of a north-west
wind, would send it down upon the offending and unsuspecting village.

The thought held him paralysed. The Man had nursed his revenge long past
the thought of its probability by the people beneath. He had at first
sat and watched the village, hated, and mused dreadfully upon the thing
he had determined to do. Then he had worked a little, afterwards more,
and now, lastly, since he had seen what they had done to Pierre, with
the hot but firm eagerness of an avenging giant. Pierre had done some
sad deeds in his time, and had tasted some sweet revenges, but nothing
like to this had ever entered his brain. In that village were men
who--as they thought--had cast him to a death fit only for a coward or
a cur. Well, here was the most exquisite retaliation. Though his hand
should not be in the thing, he could still be the cynical and approving
spectator.

But yet: had a