he power of falling water to make turned articles,
spin cotton, and so forth. Then the railroads came, and it was easy to
haul coal to make steam. And the same railroads that hauled the coal
to make steam, were there to haul away the articles manufactured by
steam power. So in time the little manufacturing plants on the river
back in the hills quit business and moved to railroad stations. Then
New England, from being a manufacturing community made up of many
small isolated water plants, came to be a community made up of huge
arteries and laterals of smoke stacks that fringed the railroads.
Where the railroad happened to follow a river course--as the
Connecticut River--the water-power plants remained; but the little
plants back in the hills were wiped off the map--because steam power
with railroads at the front door proved cheaper than water-power with
railroads ten miles away.

One night Perkins came in late from a long drive with his next-door
neighbor. He had learned the first rule of courtesy in the country,
which is to unhitch his own side of the horse and help back the buggy
into the shed. They stumbled around in the barn putting up the horse,
and getting down hay and grain for it, by the light of an oil lantern,
which was set on the floor in a place convenient to be kicked over. He
went inside and took supper by the light of a smoky smelly oil lamp,
that filled the room full of dark corners; and when supper was over,
the farmwife groped about in the cellar putting things away by the
light of a candle.

The next day his neighbor was grinding cider at his ramshackle water
mill--one of the operations for which a week must be set aside every
fall. Perkins sat on a log and listened to the crunch-crunch of the
apples in the chute, and the drip of the frothy yellow liquid that
fell into waiting buckets.

"How much power have you got here?" he asked.

"Thirty or forty horsepower, I guess."

"What do you do with it, besides grinding cider to pickle your
neighbors' digestion with?"

"Nothing much. I've got a planer and a moulding machine in there, to
work up jags of lumber occasionally. That's all. This mill was a
chair-factory in my grandfather's day, back in 1830."

"Do you use it thirty days in a year?"

"No; not half that."

"What are you going to do with it this winter?"

"Nothing; I keep the gate open and the wheel turning, so it won't
freeze, but nothing else. I am going to take the family to Texas to
v