lowed the same craft
many a long year, and here, too, on this very spot. But you are a
newcomer in these parts. Did you never hear of Ethan Brand?"

"The man that went in search of the Unpardonable Sin?" asked Bartram,
with a laugh.

"The same," answered the stranger. "He has found what he sought, and
therefore he comes back again."

"What! then you are Ethan Brand himself?" cried the lime-burner, in
amazement. "I am a new-comer here, as you say, and they call it
eighteen years since you left the foot of Graylock. But, I can tell
you, the good folks still talk about Ethan Brand, in the village
yonder, and what a strange errand took him away from his lime-kiln.
Well, and so you have found the Unpardonable Sin?"

"Even so!" said the stranger, calmly.

"If the question is a fair one," proceeded Bartram, "where might it be?"

Ethan Brand laid his finger on his own heart.

"Here!" replied he.

And then, without mirth in his countenance, but as if moved by an
involuntary recognition of the infinite absurdity of seeking throughout
the world for what was the closest of all things to himself, and
looking into every heart, save his own, for what was hidden in no other
breast, he broke into a laugh of scorn. It was the same slow, heavy
laugh, that had almost appalled the lime-burner when it heralded the
wayfarer's approach.

The solitary mountain-side was made dismal by it. Laughter, when out of
place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling,
may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. The laughter of
one asleep, even if it be a little child,--the madman's laugh,--the
wild, screaming laugh of a born idiot,--are sounds that we sometimes
tremble to hear, and would always willingly forget. Poets have imagined
no utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a
laugh. And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this
strange man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into laughter
that rolled away into the night, and was indistinctly reverberated
among the hills.

"Joe," said he to his little son, "scamper down to the tavern in the
village, and tell the jolly fellows there that Ethan Brand has come
back, and that he has found the Unpardonable Sin!"

The boy darted away on his errand, to which Ethan Brand made no
objection, nor seemed hardly to notice it. He sat on a log of wood,
looking steadfastly at the iron door of the kiln. When the child was
out of