eye was at once drawn to the
huge red-painted sawmill, with its very tall smokestacks, its row of
water barrels along the ridge, its uncouth and separate conical sawdust
burner, and its long lines of elevated tramways leading out into the
lumber yard where was piled the white pine held over from the season
before. As Bob looked, a great, black horse appeared on one of these
aerial tramways, silhouetted against the sky. The beast moved
accurately, his head held low against his chest, his feet lifted and
planted with care. Behind him rumbled a whole train of little cars each
laden with planks. On the foremost sat a man, his shoulders bowed,
driving the horse. They proceeded slowly, leisurely, without haste,
against the brightness of the sky. The spider supports below them seemed
strangely inadequate to their mass, so that they appeared in an occult
manner to maintain their elevation by some buoyancy of their own, some
quality that sustained them not only in their distance above the earth
but in a curious, decorative, extra-human world of their own. After a
moment they disappeared behind the tall piles of lumber.

Against the sky, now, the place of the elephantine black horse and the
little tram cars and the man was taken by the masts of ships lying
beyond. They rose straight and tall, their cordage like spider webs, in
a succession of regular spaces until they were lost behind the mill.
From the exhaust of the mill's engine a jet of white steam shot up
sparkling. Close on its apparition sounded the exultant, high-keyed
shriek of the saw. It ceased abruptly. Then Bob became conscious of a
heavy _rud, thud_ of mill machinery.

All this time he and Fox were walking along a narrow board walk,
elevated two or three feet above the sawdust-strewn street. They passed
the mill and entered the cool shade of the big lumber piles. Along their
base lay half-melted snow. Soggy pools soaked the ground in the exposed
places. Bob breathed deep of the clear air, keenly conscious of the
freshness of it after the murky city. A sweet and delicate odour was
abroad, an odour elusive yet pungent, an aroma of the open. The young
man sniffed it eagerly, this essence of fresh sawdust, of new-cut pine,
of sawlogs dripping from the water, of faint old reminiscence of cured
lumber standing in the piles of the year before, and more fancifully of
the balsam and spruce, the hemlock and pine of the distant forest.

"Great!" he cried aloud, "I never kne