All over the town it quivered through the
fine entangling threads, making the pattern change in colour, loosening
and tightening the weaving. In this fashion Life came forth from the
body which it inhabited.

This is the way the town lay underneath it. From a large round of
foot-tramped earth five wide streets radiated out in as many directions
for a length of eight or ten houses and yards. Then the wide dirt street
became a narrow road, the narrow board walks flanking it on either side
stopped suddenly and faintly worn paths carried out their line for a
space of three minutes' walk when all at once up rose the wall of the
forest, the road plunged through and was immediately swallowed up. This
is the way it was in all five directions from Five Points.

Round about the town forests lay thick and dark like the dark heavens
around the cities of the sky, and held it off secure from every other
life-containing place. The roads that pierced the wall of the forest led
in deeper and deeper, cutting their way around shaggy foothills down to
swift streams and on and up again to heights, in and out of obscure
notches. They must finally have sprung out again through another wall of
forest to other towns. But as far as Five Points was concerned, they led
simply to lumber mills sitting like chained ravening creatures at safe
distances from one another eating slowly away at the thick woods as if
trying to remove the screen that held the town off to itself.

In the beginning there was no town at all, but miles and miles of virgin
forest clothing the earth that humped itself into rough-bosomed hills
and hummocks. Then the forest was its own. Birds nested in its dense
leafage, fish multiplied in the clear running streams, wild creatures
ranged its fastnesses in security. The trees, touched by no harsher hand
than that which turns the rhythmically changing seasons, added year by
year ring upon ring to their girths.

Suddenly human masters appeared. They looked at the girth of the trees,
appraised the wealth that lay hidden there, marked the plan of its
taking out. They brought in workers, cleared a space for head-quarters
in the midst of their great tracts, cut roads out through the forest,
and wherever swift streams crossed they set mills. The cleared space
they laid out symmetrically in a tree-fringed centre of common ground
encircled by a main street for stores and offices, with streets for
houses leading out to the edge of the cle