little fellow's presence had been a barrier between his guest and
himself, and that he must now deal, heart to heart, with a man who, on
his own confession, had committed the one only crime for which Heaven
could afford no mercy. That crime, in its indistinct blackness, seemed
to overshadow him. The lime-burner's own sins rose up within him, and
made his memory riotous with a throng of evil shapes that asserted
their kindred with the Master Sin, whatever it might be, which it was
within the scope of man's corrupted nature to conceive and cherish.
They were all of one family; they went to and fro between his breast
and Ethan Brand's, and carried dark greetings from one to the other.

Then Bartram remembered the stories which had grown traditionary in
reference to this strange man, who had come upon him like a shadow of
the night, and was making himself at home in his old place, after so
long absence that the dead people, dead and buried for years, would
have had more right to be at home, in any familiar spot, than he.
Ethan Brand, it was said, had conversed with Satan himself in the
lurid blaze of this very kiln. The legend had been matter of mirth
heretofore, but looked grisly now. According to this tale, before
Ethan Brand departed on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a
fiend from the hot furnace of the lime-kiln, night after night, in
order to confer with him about the Unpardonable Sin; the man and the
fiend each laboring to frame the image of some mode of guilt which
could neither be atoned for nor forgiven. And, with the first gleam of
light upon the mountain-top, the fiend crept in at the iron door,
there to abide the intensest element of fire, until again summoned
forth to share in the dreadful task of extending man's possible guilt
beyond the scope of Heaven's else infinite mercy.

While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these