mic murmur of the wheels. And always
she remembered the days she had spent with Daddy Mason in the factory
where the machines thumped and creaked, and where the long rubber
sheets were cut and sewed, and the clanking rolls of tin and zinc
curled into strips, and Daddy Mason made her a little set of dishes
and all the things she needed in her playhouse from the scraps of tin
and rubber, and she learned to twist the little tin strips on a stick
and make the prettiest bright shiny tin curls for her dolls that a
little girl ever saw in all the world. And once Ellen came from among
the moving shadows of the wheels and drew Jeanette from beneath a
great knife that fell at her feet, and when Daddy Mason saw what had
happened he fainted, poor man, and made her promise never, never, so
long as she lived, to tell Grandma Mason. And then he drove her up
town, and they had some ice-cream, and she was sent to bed without her
lunch because she would not tell Grandma Mason why grandpa bought
ice-cream for her.

It was such a beautiful life, so natural and so exactly what a little
girl should have, that even though she went to the ocean and crossed
it as a child with her mother and grandmother, and even though she
went to the mountains many times, her childish heart always was
homesick for the mill, and at night in her dreams her ears were filled
with the murmur of waters and the wordless song of ceaseless wheels.
And once when she came back a big girl,--an exceedingly big girl with
braids down her back, a girl in the third reader in fact, who could
read everything in the fourth reader, because she had already done so,
and who could read Eugene Aram in the back of the sixth, only she
never did find out what "gyves upon his wrists" meant,--once when she
came back to the dam and was sitting there looking at the sunset
reflected in the bubbling, froth-flecked water at her feet, Ellen came
suddenly, under the noise of the roaring water, and frightened
Jeanette so that she screamed and jumped; and Ellen, who was much
older than Jeanette--four or five and maybe six years older--ran
right over the slippery, moss-covered ridge of the dam, and was gone
before Jeanette could call her back. The child never saw her playmate
again, though often Jeanette would wonder where Ellen lived and who
she was. As the years went by, Jeanette came to remember her playmate
as her dream child, and once when she was a young miss of eighteen,
and something in her