“Follow the boardwalk!” was the simple command I received.  “Keep right along until you come to the mill.”

I presently fell in with a drayman, who was calling alternately to his horse as it sucked in and out of the mud and to a woman on the plank walk.  She had on a hat with velvet and ostrich plumes, a black frock, a side bag with a lace handkerchief.  She was not young and she wore spectacles; but there was something nervous about her step, a slight tremolo as she responded to the drayman, which suggested an adventure or the hope of it.  The boardwalk, leading inevitably to the mill, announced our common purpose and saved us an introduction.

“Going down to get work?” was the question we simultaneously asked of each other.  My companion, all eagerness, shook out the lace handkerchief in her side bag and explained: 

“I don’t have to work; my folks keep a hotel; but I always heard so much about Perry I thought I’d like to come up, and,” she sighed, with a flirt of the lace handkerchief and a contented glance around at the rows of white frame houses, “I’m up now.”

“Want board?” the drayman called to me.  “You kin count on me for a good place.  There’s Doctor Meadows, now; he’s got a nice home and he just wants two boarders.”

The middle-aged woman with the glasses glanced up quickly.

“Doctor Meadows of Tittihute?” she asked.  “I wont go there; he’s too strict.  He’s a Methodist minister.  You couldn’t have any fun at all.”

I followed suit, denouncing Doctor Killjoy as she had, hoping that her nervous, frisky step would lead me toward the adventure she was evidently seeking.

“Well,” the drayman responded indulgently, “I guess Mr. Norse will know the best place for you folks.”

We had come at once to the factory and the end of the boardwalk.  It was but a few minutes before Mr. Norse had revealed himself as the pivot, the human hub, the magnet around which the mechanism of the mill revolved and clung, sure of finding its proper balance.  Tall, lank and meager, with a wrinkled face and a furtive mustache, Mr. Norse made his rounds with a list of complaints and comments in one hand, a pencil in the other and a black cap on his head which tipped, indulgent, attentive to hear and overhear.  His manner was professional.  He looked at us, placed us, told us to return at one o’clock, recommended a boarding-house, and, on his way to some other case, sent a small boy to accompany us on future stretches of boardwalk to our lodgings.  The street we followed ended in a rolling hillside, and beyond was the mysterious blue that holds something of the infinite in its mingling of clouds and shadows.  The Geneseo Valley lay near us like a lake under the sky, and silhouetted against it were the factory chimney and buildings.  The wood’s edge came close to the town, whose yards prolong themselves into green meadows and farming lands.  We knocked at a rusty screen door and