of mind and married happily,
only attained these objects through the assistance of some noble though
humble unsecular person whose example and instruction led them to adopt
unsecular views. The point of view of Janway's Mills was narrow and far
from charitable when it was respectable; its point of view, when it was
not respectable, was desperate. Even sinners, at Janway's Mills, were
primitive and limited in outlook. They did not excuse themselves with
specious argument for their crimes of neglecting church-going, using bad
language, hanging about bar-rooms, and loose living. They were not
brilliant wrongdoers and made no attempt at defending themselves or
pretending that they did not know they were going to perdition. The New
England mind is not broad or versatile, and, having begun life in a
Puritan atmosphere, it is not quick to escape its influence. Society at
the Mills recognised no social distinction which was not founded upon the
respectability of church-going and the observance of social laws made by
church-goers; it recognised none because it absolutely _knew_ of none.
The great world was not far from Janway's Mills, but they did not touch
each other. Willowfield was near, Boston and New York themselves were not
far distant, but the curious fact being that millions of human minds may
work and grow and struggle as if they were the minds of dwellers upon
another planet, though less than a hundred miles may separate them, the
actual lives, principles, and significances of the larger places did not
seem to touch the smaller one. The smaller one was a village of a few
streets of small houses which had grown up about the Mills themselves.
The Mills gave employment to a village full of hands, so the village
gradually evolved itself. It was populated by the uneducated labouring
class; some were respectable, some were dissolute and lived low and gross
lives, but all were uneducated in any sense which implies more than the
power to read, write, and make a few necessary calculations. Most of them
took some newspaper. They read of the multi-millionaires who lived in New
York and Chicago and California, they read of the politicians in
Washington, they found described to them the great entertainments given
by millionaires' wives and daughters, the marvellous dresses they wore,
the multifarious ways in which they amused themselves, but what they read
seemed so totally unlike anything they had ever seen, so far apart from
their