Ponder as he would he could evolve no answer save one, which,
eminently unsatisfactory as it was, he felt it would be unreasonable
not to accept: that she was simply skittish and ambitious by nature,
and would not be hunted into matrimony till he had provided a well-
adorned home.

Jim retrod the miles to the kiln, and looked to the fires. The kiln
stood in a peculiar, interesting, even impressive spot. It was at
the end of a short ravine in a limestone formation, and all around
was an open hilly down. The nearest house was that of Jim's cousin
and partner, which stood on the outskirts of the down beside the
turnpike-road. From this house a little lane wound between the steep
escarpments of the ravine till it reached the kiln, which faced down
the miniature valley, commanding it as a fort might command a defile.

The idea of a fort in this association owed little to imagination.
For on the nibbled green steep above the kiln stood a bye-gone, worn-
out specimen of such an erection, huge, impressive, and difficult to
scale even now in its decay. It was a British castle or
entrenchment, with triple rings of defence, rising roll behind roll,
their outlines cutting sharply against the sky, and Jim's kiln nearly
undermining their base. When the lime-kiln flared up in the night,
which it often did, its fires lit up the front of these ramparts to a
great majesty. They were old friends of his, and while keeping up
the heat through the long darkness, as it was sometimes his duty to
do, he would imagine the dancing lights and shades about the
stupendous earthwork to be the forms of those giants who (he
supposed) had heaped it up. Often he clambered upon it, and walked
about the summit, thinking out the problems connected with his