most particulars, that a description of any one of them would present it
to the imagination--a town strung upon a stream, like beads upon a
thread, or charms upon a chain. Sevenoaks was richer in chain than
charms, for its abundant water-power was only partially used. It
plunged, and roared, and played, and sparkled, because it had not half
enough to do. It leaped down three or four cataracts in passing through
the village; and, as it started from living springs far northward among
the woods and mountains, it never failed in its supplies.

Few of the people of Sevenoaks--thoughtless workers, mainly--either knew
or cared whence it came, or whither it went. They knew it as "The
Branch;" but Sevenoaks was so far from the trunk, down to which it sent
its sap, and from which it received no direct return, that no
significance was attached to its name. But it roared all day, and roared
all night, summer and winter alike, and the sound became a part of the
atmosphere. Resonance was one of the qualities of the oxygen which the
people breathed, so that if, at any midnight moment, the roar had been
suddenly hushed, they would have waked with a start and a sense of
suffocation, and leaped from their beds.

Among the charms that dangled from this liquid chain--depending from the
vest of a landscape which ended in a ruffle of woods toward the north,
overtopped by the head of a mountain--was a huge factory that had been
added to from time to time, as necessity demanded, until it had become
an imposing and not uncomely pile. Below this were two or three
dilapidated saw-mills, a grist-mill in daily use, and a fulling-mill--a
remnant of the old times when homespun went its pilgrimage to town--to
be fulled, colored, and dressed--from all the sparsely settled country
around.

On a little plateau by the side of The Branch was a row of stores and
dram-shops and butchers' establishments. Each had a sort of square,
false front, pierced by two staring windows and a door, that reminded
one of a lion _couchant_--very large in the face and very thin in the
flank. Then there were crowded in, near the mill, little rows of
one-story houses, occupied entirely by operatives, and owned by the
owner of the mill. All the inhabitants, not directly connected with the
mill, were as far away from it as they could go. Their houses were set
back upon either acclivity which rose from the gorge that the stream had
worn, dotting the hill-sides in every directi