tions revived and flourished apace in that household of
well-cared-for children to whom both parents were devoted. It cost her a
heartache to leave them; but six months ago burly Jim McCann, one of the
best workmen in the sheds--although of unruly spirit and a source of
perennial trouble among the men--began to make such determined love to
the mother's helper that the Caukinses found themselves facing
inevitable loss. Maggie had been married three months; and already
McCann had quarrelled with the foreman, and, in a huff, despite his
wife's tears and prayers, sought of his own accord work in another and
far distant quarry.

"Maggie told me she'd never leave off teasing Jim to bring her back,"
said the fifth eldest Caukins.--"Oh, look!" he cried as they rumbled
over the bridge; "there's Mrs. Googe and Champney on the porch waving to
us!"

The Colonel took off his hat with a flourish; the boys swung theirs;
Mrs. Caukins waved her sunshade to mother and son.

"I declare, I'd like to stop just a minute," she said regretfully, for
the Colonel continued to drive straight on. "I'm so glad for Aurora's
sake that he's come home; I only hope our Romanzo will do as well."

"It would be an intrusion at such a time, Elvira. The effusions of even
the best-intentioned friends are injudicious at the inopportune moment
of domestic reunion."

Mrs. Caukins subsided on that point. She was always depressed by the
Colonel's grandiloquence, which he usually reserved for The Greenbush
and the town-meeting, without being able to account for it.

"He'll see a good many changes here; it's another Flamsted we're living
in," she remarked later on when they passed the first stone-cutters'
shed on the opposite shore of the lake; and the family proceeded to
comment all the way to church on the various changes along the route.

* * * * *

It was in truth another Flamsted, the industrial Flamsted which the
Colonel predicted six years before on that memorable evening in the
office of The Greenbush.

To watch the transformation of a quiet back-country New England village
into the life-centre of a great and far-reaching industry, is in itself
a liberal education, not only in economics, but in inherited
characteristics of the human race. Those first drops of "the deluge,"
the French priest and the Irish orphan, were followed by an influx of
foreigners of many nationalities: Scotch, Irish, Italians, Poles,
Swedes, Ca