“Certainly.  I’m a ship-builder.”

“I didn’t know they built vessels a hundred miles from the coast,” said Lynde.

“I am building a ship—­don’t say I’m not!”

“Of course I know nothing about it.”

“A marble ship.”

“A ship to carry marble?”

“No, a ship made of marble; a passenger ship.  We have ships of iron, why not of marble?” he asked fiercely.

“Oh, the fellow is mad!” said Lynde to himself, “as mad as a loon; everybody here is mad, or I’ve lost my senses.  So you are building a marble ship?” he added aloud, good-naturedly.  “When it is finished I trust you will get all the inhabitants of this town into it, and put to sea at once.”

“Then you’ll help me!” cried the man enthusiastically, with his eyes gleaming in their sunken sockets.  More than ever he looked like a specimen escaped from some anatomical museum.

“I do not believe I can be of much assistance,” answered Lynde, laughing.  “I have had so little experience in constructing marble vessels, you see.  I fear my early education has been fearfully neglected.  By the bye,” continued the young man, who was vaguely diverted by his growing interest in the monomaniac, “how do you propose to move your ship to the seaboard?”

“In the simplest manner—­a double railroad track—­twenty-four engines—­ twelve engines on each side to support the hull.”

“That would be a simple way.”

Edward Lynde laughed again, but not heartily.  He felt that this marble ship was a conception of high humor and was not without its pathetic element.  The whimsicality of the idea amused him, but the sad earnestness of the nervous, unstrung visionary at his side moved his compassion.

“Dear me,” he mused, “may be all of us are more or less engaged in planning a marble ship, and perhaps the happiest are those who, like this poor soul, never awake from their delusion.  Matrimony was uncle David’s marble ship—­he launched his!  Have I one on the ways, I wonder?”

Lynde broke with a shock from his brief abstraction.  His companion had disappeared, and with him the saddle and valise.  Lynde threw a hasty glance up the street, and started in pursuit of the naval-architect, who was running with incredible swiftness and bearing the saddle on his head with as much ease as if it had been a feather.

The distance between the two men, some sixty or seventy yards, was not the disadvantage that made pursuit seem hopeless.  Lynde had eaten almost nothing since the previous noon; he had been carrying that cumbersome saddle for the last two or three hours; he was out of breath, and it was impossible to do much running in his heavy riding-boots.  The other man, on the contrary, appeared perfectly fresh; he wore light shoes, and had not a superfluous ounce of flesh to carry.  He was all bone and sinew; the saddle resting upon his head was hardly an impediment to him.  Lynde, however, was not going to be vanquished without a struggle; though he recognized the futility of pursuit, he pushed on doggedly.  A certain tenacious quality in the young man imperatively demanded this of him.