CHAPTER I.

WHICH TELLS ABOUT SEVENOAKS, AND HOW MISS BUTTERWORTH PASSED ONE OF HER EVENINGS.

Everybody has seen Sevenoaks, or a hundred towns so much like it, in most particulars, that a description of any one of them would present it to the imagination—­a town strung upon a stream, like beads upon a thread, or charms upon a chain.  Sevenoaks was richer in chain than charms, for its abundant water-power was only partially used.  It plunged, and roared, and played, and sparkled, because it had not half enough to do.  It leaped down three or four cataracts in passing through the village; and, as it started from living springs far northward among the woods and mountains, it never failed in its supplies.

Few of the people of Sevenoaks—­thoughtless workers, mainly—­either knew or cared whence it came, or whither it went.  They knew it as “The Branch;” but Sevenoaks was so far from the trunk, down to which it sent its sap, and from which it received no direct return, that no significance was attached to its name.  But it roared all day, and roared all night, summer and winter alike, and the sound became a part of the atmosphere.  Resonance was one of the qualities of the oxygen which the people breathed, so that if, at any midnight moment, the roar had been suddenly hushed, they would have waked with a start and a sense of suffocation, and leaped from their beds.

Among the charms that dangled from this liquid chain—­depending from the vest of a landscape which ended in a ruffle of woods toward the north, overtopped by the head of a mountain—­was a huge factory that had been added to from time to time, as necessity demanded, until it had become an imposing and not uncomely pile.  Below this were two or three dilapidated saw-mills, a grist-mill in daily use, and a fulling-mill—­a remnant of the old times when homespun went its pilgrimage to town—­to be fulled, colored, and dressed—­from all the sparsely settled country around.

On a little plateau by the side of The Branch was a row of stores and dram-shops and butchers’ establishments.  Each had a sort of square, false front, pierced by two staring windows and a door, that reminded one of a lion couchant—­very large in the face and very thin in the flank.  Then there were crowded in, near the mill, little rows of one-story houses, occupied entirely by operatives, and owned by the owner of the mill.  All the inhabitants, not directly connected with the mill, were as far away from it as they could go.  Their houses were set back upon either acclivity which rose from the gorge that the stream had worn, dotting the hill-sides in every direction.  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.