evel bottomlands, and
the newborn townships, in a region of blue lakes and black loam that was
destined to be a thriving community of prosperous farmer folk. The
broad, unrotted stumps of the trees that not so long ago possessed the
ground, were thickly interstrewn among the houses of the town and in the
little fields that began to show as angular invasions of the woodland,
one by every settler's house of logs. Through the woods and through the
town there ran the deep, brown flood of the little bog-born river, and
streaking its current for the whole length were the huge, fragrant logs
of the new-cut pines, in disorderly array, awaiting their turn to be
shot through the mill and come forth as piles of lumber, broad waste
slabs, and heaps of useless sawdust.

Two or three low sawmills were there, each booming, humming, busied all
the day. And the purr of their saws, or the scream when they struck some
harder place in the wood, was the dominant note, the day-long
labour-song of Links. At first it seemed that these great, wasteful
fragrant, tree-destroying mills were the only industries of the town;
and one had to look again before discovering, on the other side of the
river, the grist mill, sullenly claiming its share of the water power,
and proclaiming itself just as good as any other mill; while radiating
from the bridge below the dam, were the streets--or, rather, the rough
roads, straight and ugly--along which wooden houses, half hidden by tall
sunflowers, had been built for a quarter of a mile, very close together
near the bridge, but ever with less of house and sunflower and more of
pumpkin field as one travelled on, till the last house with the last
pumpkin field was shut in by straggling, much-culled woods, alternating
with swamps that were densely grown with odorous cedar and fragrant
tamarac, as yet untouched by the inexorable axe of the changing day.

Seen from the road, the country was forest, with about one quarter of
the land exposed by clearings, in each of which were a log cabin and the
barn of a settler. Seen from the top of the tallest building, the sky
line was, as yet, an array of plumy pines, which still stood thick among
the hardwood trees and, head and shoulders, overtopped them.

Links was a town of smells. There were two hotels with their complex,
unclean livery barns and yards, beside, behind, and around them; and on
every side and in every yard there were pigs--and still more pigs--an
evidence