if they
belonged to a toy village, and had been carefully put in rows by a
childish hand; it was easy to lose all sense of size in looking at
them. A cold wind was blowing bits of waste and paper high into the
air; now and then a snowflake went swiftly by like a courier of
winter. Mary Cassidy and Mrs. Kilpatrick hugged their old woolen
shawls closer about their round shoulders, and the little girl
followed with short steps alongside.

II.

The agent of the mills was a single man, keen and business-like, but
quietly kind to the people under his charge. Sometimes, in times of
peace, when one looks among one's neighbors wondering who would make
the great soldiers and leaders if there came a sudden call to war, one
knows with a flash of recognition the presence of military genius in
such a man as he. The agent spent his days in following what seemed
to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of
purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and
powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an
opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen
pleasure. A man in his place must know not only how to lead men, but
how to make the combination of their force with the machinery take its
place as a factor in the business of manufacturing. To master workmen
and keep the mills in running order and to sell the goods successfully
in open market is as easy to do badly as it is difficult to do well.

The agent's father and mother, young people who lived for a short time
in the village, had both died when he was only three years old, and
between that time and his ninth year he had learned almost everything
that poverty could teach, being left like little Maggie to the mercy
of his neighbors. He remembered with a grateful heart those who were
good to him, and told him of his mother, who had married for love but
unwisely. Mrs. Kilpatrick was one of these old friends, who said that
his mother was a lady, but even Mrs. Kilpatrick, who was a walking
history of the Corporation, had never known his mother's maiden name,
much less the place of her birth. The first great revelation of life
had come when the nine-years-old boy had money in his hand to pay his
board. He was conscious of being looked at with a difference; the very
woman who had been hardest to him and let him mind her babies all the
morning when he, careful little soul, was hardly more than a baby
himself, a