on. There was a clumsy
town-hall, there were three or four churches, there was a high school
and a low tavern. It was, on the whole, a village of importance, but the
great mill was somehow its soul and center. A fair farming and grazing
country stretched back from it eastward and westward, and Sevenoaks was
its only home market.

It is not proposed, in this history, to tell where Sevenoaks was, and is
to-day. It may have been, or may be, in Maine, or New Hampshire, or
Vermont, or New York. It was in the northern part of one of these
States, and not far from the border of a wilderness, almost as deep and
silent as any that can be found beyond the western limit of settlement
and civilization. The red man had left it forever, but the bear, the
deer and the moose remained. The streams and lakes were full of trout;
otter and sable still attracted the trapper, and here and there a
lumberman lingered alone in his cabin, enamored of the solitude and the
wild pursuits to which a hardly gentler industry had introduced him.
Such lumber as could be drifted down the streams had long been cut and
driven out, and the woods were left to the hunter and his prey, and to
the incursions of sportsmen and seekers for health, to whom the rude
residents became guides, cooks, and servants of all work, for the sake
of occasional society, and that ever-serviceable consideration--money.

There were two establishments in Sevenoaks which stood so far away from
the stream that they could hardly be described as attached to it.
Northward, on the top of the bleakest hill in the region, stood the
Sevenoaks poor-house. In dimensions and population, it was utterly out
of proportion to the size of the town, for the people of Sevenoaks
seemed to degenerate into paupers with wonderful facility. There was one
man in the town who was known to be getting rich, while all the rest
grew poor. Even the keepers of the dram-shops, though they seemed to do
a thriving business, did not thrive. A great deal of work was done, but
people were paid very little for it. If a man tried to leave the town
for the purpose of improving his condition, there was always some
mortgage on his property, or some impossibility of selling what he had
for money, or his absolute dependence on each day's labor for each day's
bread, that stood in the way. One by one--sick, disabled, discouraged,
dead-beaten--they drifted into the poor-house, which, as the years went
on, grew into a shabby, do