choice had he?
The mills were there and the only alternative before him. It was the
mills or nothing for people seldom came to live at Freeman's Falls if
they did not intend to enter the factories of Fernald and Company. It
was Fernald and Company that had led his father to sell the tumble-down
farm in Vermont and move with his family to New Hampshire.

"There is no money in farming," announced he, after the death of Ted's
mother. "Suppose we pull up stakes and go to some mill town where we
can all find work."

And therefore, without consideration for personal preferences, they had
looked up mill towns and eventually settled on Freeman's Falls, not
because they particularly liked its location but because labor was
needed there. A very sad decision it was for Ted who had passionately
loved the old farm on which he had been born, the half-blind gray
horse, the few hens, and the lean Jersey cattle that his father
asserted ate more than they were worth. To be cooped up in a
manufacturing center after having had acres of open country to roam
over was not an altogether joyous prospect. Would there be any
chestnut, walnut, or apple trees at Freeman's Falls, he wondered.

Alas, the question was soon answered. Within the village there were
almost no trees at all except a few sickly elms and maples whose
foliage was pale for want of sunshine and grimy with smoke. In fact,
there was not much of anything in the town save the long dingy
factories that bordered the river; the group of cheap and gaudy shops
on the main street; and rows upon rows of wooden houses, all identical
in design, walling in the highway. It was not a spot where green things
flourished. There was not room for anything to grow and if there had
been the soot from the towering chimneys would soon have settled upon
any venturesome leaf or flower and quickly shrivelled it beneath a
cloak of cinders. Even the river was coated with a scum of oil and
refuse that poured from the waste pipes of the factories into the
stream and washed up along the shores which might otherwise have been
fair and verdant.

Of course, if one could get far enough away there was beauty in plenty
for in the outlying country stretched vistas of splendid pines, fields
lush with ferns and flowers, and the unsullied span of the river, where
in all its mountain-born purity it rushed gaily down toward the
village. Here, well distant from the manufacturing atmosphere, were the
homes of the Ferna