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