with its very tall smokestacks, its row of water barrels along the ridge, its uncouth and separate conical sawdust burner, and its long lines of elevated tramways leading out into the lumber yard where was piled the white pine held over from the season before.  As Bob looked, a great, black horse appeared on one of these aerial tramways, silhouetted against the sky.  The beast moved accurately, his head held low against his chest, his feet lifted and planted with care.  Behind him rumbled a whole train of little cars each laden with planks.  On the foremost sat a man, his shoulders bowed, driving the horse.  They proceeded slowly, leisurely, without haste, against the brightness of the sky.  The spider supports below them seemed strangely inadequate to their mass, so that they appeared in an occult manner to maintain their elevation by some buoyancy of their own, some quality that sustained them not only in their distance above the earth but in a curious, decorative, extra-human world of their own.  After a moment they disappeared behind the tall piles of lumber.

Against the sky, now, the place of the elephantine black horse and the little tram cars and the man was taken by the masts of ships lying beyond.  They rose straight and tall, their cordage like spider webs, in a succession of regular spaces until they were lost behind the mill.  From the exhaust of the mill’s engine a jet of white steam shot up sparkling.  Close on its apparition sounded the exultant, high-keyed shriek of the saw.  It ceased abruptly.  Then Bob became conscious of a heavy rud, thud of mill machinery.

All this time he and Fox were walking along a narrow board walk, elevated two or three feet above the sawdust-strewn street.  They passed the mill and entered the cool shade of the big lumber piles.  Along their base lay half-melted snow.  Soggy pools soaked the ground in the exposed places.  Bob breathed deep of the clear air, keenly conscious of the freshness of it after the murky city.  A sweet and delicate odour was abroad, an odour elusive yet pungent, an aroma of the open.  The young man sniffed it eagerly, this essence of fresh sawdust, of new-cut pine, of sawlogs dripping from the water, of faint old reminiscence of cured lumber standing in the piles of the year before, and more fancifully of the balsam and spruce, the hemlock and pine of the distant forest.

“Great!” he cried aloud, “I never knew anything like it!  What a country to train in!”

“All this lumber here is going to be sold within the next two months,” said Fox with the first approach to enthusiasm Bob had ever observed in him.  “All of it.  It’s got to be carried down to the docks, and tallied there, and loaded in those vessels.  The mill isn’t much—­too old-fashioned.  We saw with ‘circulars’ instead of band-saws.  Not like our Minnesota mills.  We bought the plant as it stands.  Still we turn out a pretty good cut every day, and it has to be run out and piled.”