Selected Tales and Sketches (63 page)

To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn; while echo caught up the notes and intertwined them into a rich, and varied, and elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each contributing a strain of airy sweetness.

Little Joe's face brightened at once.

“Dear father,” cried he, skipping cheerily to and fro, “that strange man is gone, and the sky and the mountains all seem glad of it!”

“Yes,” growled the lime-burner with an oath, “but he has let the fire go down, and no thanks to him, if five hundred bushels of lime are not spoilt. If I catch the fellow hereabouts again I shall feel like tossing him into the furnace!”

With his long pole in his hand he ascended to the top of the kiln. After a moment's pause he called to his son.

“Come up here, Joe!” said he.

So little Joe ran up the hillock and stood by his father's side. The marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface, in the midst of the circle—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted into lime-lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say—was the shape of a human heart.

“Was the fellow's heart made of marble?” cried Bartram, in some perplexity at this phenomenon. “At any rate, it is burnt into what looks like special good lime; and, taking all the bones together, my kiln is half a bushel the richer for him.”

So saying, the rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and letting it fall upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crum- . bled into fragments.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A
Biography
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948).

 

Richard Harter Fogle,
Hawthorne's
Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952; rev. ed., 1964).

 

Hyatt H. Waggoner,
Hawthorne:
A
Critical Study
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955; rev. ed., 1963).

 

Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers:
Hawthorne's
Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).

 

Michael Davitt Bell,
Hawthorne
and the Historical
Romance
of New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).d

 

Neal Frank Doubleday,
Hawthorne's
Early Tales: A Critical Study (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972).

 

Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976).

 

Kenneth Dauber, Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

 

Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne's Mad Scientists (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978).

 

Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

 

Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in
Hawthorne's Early
Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

 

Carol Marie Bensick, La
Nouvelle
Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in “Rappaccini's
Daughter”
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985).