s into a dingy lake; it is not a
picturesque or a pretty stream, in spite of its Indian name. Beyond it
the land slopes away into a range of long, low hills, which the autumn
has browned; the long swaths of fog stretching between river and hill
are so like to them and to the dissolving gray sky that they all blend
in one general gloom. This picture filling my eye narrows and shapes
itself into the beginning of my story: I see a lazy, dirty river on the
outskirts of a manufacturing city; where the stream has broadened into a
sort of pond it is cut short by the dam, and there is a little cluster
of mills. They all belong to one work, however, and they look as if they
had been set down there for a few months only; 'contract' seems written
all over them, and very properly, for they are running on a Government
order for small arms. There is no noise but an underhum of revolving
shafts and the smothered thud of trip hammers. Ore dust blackens
everything, and is scattered everywhere, so that the whole ground is a
patchwork of black and gray; elsewhere there is snow, but here the snow
is turned to the dingy color of the place. It is very quiet outside,
being early morning yet; a cold mist hides the dawn, and the water falls
with a winter hiss; the paths are indistinct, for the sky is only just
enough lightening to show the east.

The coal dust around one door shows that the fires are there; a
cavernous place, suddenly letting a lurid glow out upon the night, and
then black again. It is only a narrow alley through the building, making
sure of a good draft; on one side are the piles of coal, and on the
other a row of furnace doors. The stoker is sitting on a heap of
cinder. He is only an old man, a little stooping, with a head that is
turning ashes color; his eye is faded, and his face nearly
expressionless, while he sits perfectly still on the heap, as if he were
a part of the engine which turns slowly in a shed adjoining and pants
through its vent in the roof. He has been sitting there so long that he
has a vague notion that his mind has somehow gone out of him into the
iron doors and the rough coal, and he only goes round and round like the
engine. Yet he never considered the matter at all, any more than the
engine wanted to use its own wheel, which it turned month after month in
the same place, to propel itself through the world; just so often he
opened and shut each door in its turn, fed the fires, and then sat down
and sat