nadian French; and with these were associated a few
American-born.

Their life-problem, the earning of wages for the sustenance of
themselves and their families, was one they had in common. Its solution
was centred for one and all in their work among the granite quarries of
The Gore and in the stone-cutters' sheds on the north shore of Lake
Mesantic. These two things the hundreds belonging to a half-dozen
nationalities possessed in common--these, and their common humanity
together with the laws to which it is subject. But aside from this,
their speech, habits, customs, religions, food, and pastimes were
polyglot; on this account the lines of racial demarkation were apt, at
times, to be drawn all too sharply. Yet this very fact of
differentiation provided hundreds of others--farmers, shopkeepers,
jobbers, machinists, mechanics, blacksmiths, small restaurant-keepers,
pool and billiard room owners--with ample sources of livelihood.

This internal change in the community of Flamsted corresponded to the
external. During those six years the very face of nature underwent
transformation. The hills in the apex of The Gore were shaved clean of
the thin layer of turf, and acres of granite laid bare to the drill.
Monster derricks, flat stone-cars, dummy engines, electric motors, were
everywhere in evidence. Two glittering steel tracks wound downwards
through old watercourses to the level of the lake, and to the huge
stone-cutting sheds that stretched their gray length along the northern
shore. Here the quarried stones, tons in weight, were unloaded by the
great electric travelling crane which picks up one after the other with
automatic perfection of silence and accuracy, and deposits them wherever
needed by the workmen.

A colony of substantial three-room houses, two large boarding-houses, a
power house and, farther up beyond the pines, a stone house and a long
low building, partly of wood, partly of granite waste cemented, circled
the edges of the quarry.

The usual tale of workmen in the fat years was five hundred quarrymen
and three hundred stone-cutters. This population of working-men, swelled
to three thousand by the addition of their families, increased or
diminished according as the years and seasons proved fat or lean. A
ticker on Wall Street was sufficient to give to the great industry
abnormal life and activity, and draw to the town a surplus working
population. A feeling of unrest and depression, long-continued in
m