le vibrant and
intolerable gamut as the saw bit through the fibres from end to end. In
the occasional brief moments of comparative silence, when several of the
saws would chance to be disengaged at the same instant, might be heard,
far down in the lower story of the mill, the grumbling roar of the two
great turbine wheels, which, sucking in the tortured water from the
sluices, gave life to all the wilderness of cranks and shafts above.

That end of the mill which looked down river stood open, to a height of
about seven feet, across the whole of the upper story. From this opening
ran a couple of long slanting ways each two feet wide and about a
hundred feet in length, raised on trestles. The track of these "slides,"
as they are technically termed, consisted of a series of wooden rollers,
along which the deals raced in endless sequence from the saws, to drop
with a plunge into a spacious basin, at the lower end of which they were
gathered into rafts. Whenever there was a break in the procession of
deals, the rollers would be left spinning briskly with a cheerful
murmur. There was also a shorter and steeper "slide," diverging to the
lumber yard, where clapboards and such light stuff were piled till they
could be carted to the distant station.

In former days it had been the easy custom to dump the sawdust into the
stream, but the fish-wardens had lately interfered and put a stop to the
practice. Now, a tall young fellow, in top boots, gray homespun trousers
and blue shirt, was busy carting the sawdust to a swampy hollow near the
lower end of the main slides.

Sandy MacPherson was a new hand. Only that morning had he joined the
force at the Aspohegan Mill; and every now and then he would pause,
remove his battered soft felt from his whitish yellow curls, mop his red
forehead, and gaze with a hearty appreciation at the fair landscape
spread out beyond the mill. With himself and with the world in general
he felt on fairly good terms--an easy frame of mind which would have
been much jarred had he been conscious of the fact that from a corner in
the upper story of the mill his every movement was watched with a
vindictive and ominous interest.

In that corner, close by the head of one of the main slides, stood a
table whose presiding genius was a little swinging circular. The
circular was tended by a powerful, sombre-visaged old mill-hand called
'Lije Vandine, whose office it was to trim square the ragged ends of the
"stuff"