good o' one's for the good
of all. You just wait till we're setting together up in the old shed
chamber! You know, my dear Mis' Katy Strafford give me a han'some
present o' money that day she come to see me; and I'd be'n a-dreamin'
by night an' day o' seein' that Centennial; and when I come to think
on't I felt sure somebody ought to go from this neighborhood, if 'twas
only for the good o' the rest; and I thought I'd better be the one. I
wa'n't goin' to ask the selec'men neither. I've come back with
one-thirty-five in money, and I see everything there, an' I fetched ye
all a little somethin'; but I'm full o' dust now, an' pretty nigh beat
out. I never see a place more friendly than Pheladelphy; but 't ain't
natural to a Byfleet person to be always walkin' on a level. There,
now, Peggy, you take my bundle-handkercher and the basket, and let
Mis' Dow sag on to me. I 'll git her along twice as easy."

With this the small elderly company set forth triumphant toward the
poor-house, across the wide green field.

* * * * *

_The Gray Mills of Farley_

The mills of Farley were close together by the river, and the gray
houses that belonged to them stood, tall and bare, alongside. They had
no room for gardens or even for little green side-yards where one
might spend a summer evening. The Corporation, as this compact village
was called by those who lived in it, was small but solid; you fancied
yourself in the heart of a large town when you stood mid-way of one of
its short streets, but from the street's end you faced a wide green
farming country. On spring and summer Sundays, groups of the young
folks of the Corporation would stray out along the country roads, but
it was very seldom that any of the older people went. On the whole, it
seemed as if the closer you lived to the mill-yard gate, the better.
You had more time to loiter on a summer morning, and there was less
distance to plod through the winter snows and rains. The last stroke
of the bell saw almost everybody within the mill doors.

There were always fluffs of cotton in the air like great white bees
drifting down out of the picker chimney. They lodged in the cramped
and dingy elms and horse-chestnuts which a former agent had planted
along the streets, and the English sparrows squabbled over them in
eaves-corners and made warm, untidy great nests that would have
contented an Arctic explorer. Somehow the Corporation homes looked