indows, begrizzled and begrimed, nothing was wanted but a little
imagination to hear it cough and spit and give one final puff at its
pipe and say: "Lu'd but o'ive wur-rek hard an' o'im toired to-day!"

Around it in the next few years had sprung up Cottontown.

The factory had been built on the edge of an old cottonfield which
ran right up to the town's limit; and the field, unplowed for several
years, had become sodded with the long stolens of rank Bermuda grass,
holding in its perpetual billows of green the furrows which had been
thrown up for cotton rows and tilled years before.

This made a beautiful pea-green carpet in summer and a comfortable
straw-colored matting in winter; and it was the only bit of sentiment
that clung to Cottontown.

All the rest of it was practical enough: Rows of scurvy three-roomed
cottages, all exactly alike, even to the gardens in the rear, laid
off in equal breadth and running with the same unkept raggedness up
the flinty side of the mountain.

There was not enough originality among the worked-to-death
inhabitants of Cottontown to plant their gardens differently; for all
of them had the same weedy turnip-patch on one side, straggling
tomatoes on another, and half-dried mullein-stalks sentineling the
corners. For years these cottages had not been painted, and now each
wore the same tinge of sickly yellow paint. It was not difficult to
imagine that they had had a long siege of malarial fever in which the
village doctor had used abundant plasters of mustard, and the disease
had finally run into "yaller ja'ndice," as they called it in
Cottontown.

And thus Cottontown had stood for several years, a new problem in
Southern life and industry, and a paying one for the Massachusetts
directors.

In the meanwhile another building had been put up--a little cheaply
built chapel, of long-leaf yellow pine. It was known as the Bishop's
church, and sat on the side of the mountain, half way up among the
black-jacks, exposed to the blistering suns of summer and the winds
of winter.

It had never been painted: "An' it don't need it," as the Bishop had
said when the question of painting it had been raised by some of the
members.

"No, it don't need it, for the hot sun has drawed all the rosin out
on its surface, an' pine rosin's as good a paint as any church needs.
Jes' let God be, an' He'll fix His things like He wants 'em any way.
He put the paint in the pine-tree when He made it. Now man is mi