Bales of rags, loads of straw, packages
of woody pulp, boxes of ultramarine dye, pipes leading from the
distant mountain springs, and, above all, the rumble and the groaning
of the beating-engines told to every sense that this was one of
the great hillside centres of paper-manufacture in New England.
The elegant residences of the owners were romantically situated
on some half-isolated promonotory around which the stream sweeps,
embowered with maples and begirt with willows at its base; or
nestled away in some nook, moss-lined and hemlock-shaded, which
marks where some spring brook bubbles down its brief career to the
larger stream; or in some plateau upon the other side, backed by a
scraggly old orchard, and hidden among great groves of rock-maples
which the careful husbandman spared a hundred years ago for a
"sugar-bush," little dreaming that the nabobs of the rushing streams
would build homesteads beneath their shade. And all along, here
and there, wherever a house could find a foothold or the native
ruggedness be forced to yield one lodgment, houses and shops
and crowded tenements stood thick. It was a busy and a populous
village, full of wealth and not barren of poverty, stretched along
the rushing tributary for more than a mile, and then branching with
its constituent forks up into the mountain gorges.
In the very centre of this busy whirl of life stood the little
white two-story school-house, flanked on one side by the dwelling
of a mill-owner, and on the other by a boarding-house; and just
below it, across the street, a machine-shop, and a little cottage
of cased logs, with minute-paned windows, and a stone chimney
which was built before the Revolution by the first inhabitant of
the little valley.
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