his feet and hands, if not of
his tent-pegs. And what signifies his stay? No matter how long he
might have put up here, it is but a passage, deeply considered: like
Thoreau's passage through Walden woods, like Mohammad's through the
desert.

This leisure hour is the nipple of the soul. And fortunate they who
are not artificially suckled, who know this hour no matter how brief,
who get their nipple at the right time. If they do not, no pabulum
ever after, will their indurated tissues assimilate. Do you wonder why
the world is full of crusty souls? and why to them this infant
hour, this suckling while, is so repugnant? But we must not intrude
more of such remarks about mankind. Whether rightly suckled or not,
we manage to live; but whether we do so marmot-like or Maronite-like,
is not the question here to be considered. To pray for your bread
or to burrow in the earth for it, is it not the same with most people?
Given a missionary with a Bible in his hip-pocket or a peasant with
a load of brushwood on his back and the same gastric coefficient, and
you will have in either case a resulting expansion for six feet of
coffin ground and a fraction of Allah's mercy. Our poor missionary,
is it worth while to cross the seas for this? Marmot-like or
Maronite-like--but soft you know! Here is our peasant with his
overshadowing load of brushwood. And there is another, and another.
They are carrying fuel to the lime-pit ahead of us yonder. What
brow-sweat, what time, what fire, what suffering and patient toil,
the lime-washing, or mere liming, of our houses and sepulchres,
requires. That cone structure there, that artificial volcano, with its
crackling, flaming bowels and its fuliginous, coruscating crater,
must our hardy peasants feed continually for twenty days and nights.

But the book and the name on the pine, we would know more of these
signs, if possible. And so, we visit the labourers of the kiln. They
are yoedling, the while they work, and jesting and laughing. The
stokers, with flaming, swollen eyes, their tawny complexion waxing a
brilliant bronze, their sweat making golden furrows therein, with
their pikes and pitchforks busy, are terribly magnificent to behold.
Here be men who would destroy Bastilles for you, if it were nominated
in the bond. And there is the monk-foreman--the kiln is of the
monastery's estate--reading his breviary while the lime is in making.
Indeed, these sodalities of the Lebanons are not what their v