ire the mountain air at inexpensive rates. The Eagle House
is delightfully mismanaged. It is full of ancient instead of modern
improvements, and it is altogether as comfortably neglected and
pleasingly disarranged as your own home. But you are furnished with
clean rooms and good and abundant fare: yourself and the piny woods
must do the rest. Nature has provided a mineral spring, grape-vine
swings, and croquet--even the wickets are wooden. You have Art to
thank only for the fiddle-and-guitar music twice a week at the hop in
the rustic pavilion.

The patrons of the Eagle House are those who seek recreation as a
necessity, as well as a pleasure. They are busy people, who may be
likened to clocks that need a fortnight's winding to insure a year's
running of their wheels. You will find students there from the lower
towns, now and then an artist, or a geologist absorbed in construing
the ancient strata of the hills. A few quiet families spend the
summers there; and often one or two tired members of that patient
sisterhood known to Lakelands as "schoolmarms."

A quarter of a mile from the Eagle House was what would have been
described to its guests as "an object of interest" in the catalogue,
had the Eagle House issued a catalogue. This was an old, old mill that
was no longer a mill. In the words of Josiah Rankin, it was "the only
church in the United States, sah, with an overshot-wheel; and the only
mill in the world, sah, with pews and a pipe organ." The guests of
the Eagle House attended the old mill church each Sabbath, and heard
the preacher liken the purified Christian to bolted flour ground to
usefulness between the millstones of experience and suffering.

Every year about the beginning of autumn there came to the Eagle House
one Abram Strong, who remained for a time an honoured and beloved
guest. In Lakelands he was called "Father Abram," because his hair was
so white, his face so strong and kind and florid, his laugh so merry,
and his black clothes and broad hat so priestly in appearance. Even
new guests after three or four days' acquaintance gave him this
familiar title.

Father Abram came a long way to Lakelands. He lived in a big, roaring
town in the Northwest where he owned mills, not little mills with pews
and an organ in them, but great, ugly, mountain-like mills that the
freight trains crawled around all day like ants around an ant-heap.
And now you must be told about Father Abram and the mill that was a