f the emerald waves. Far, far
beyond the steeples which rise dimly from the distant town a range of
hills; beyond it still, a faint film of blue, the indistinct and misty
semblance of towering mountains.

To the north a lovely plain that rises a few miles away into a long
low ridge which forms the sharp and clear horizon. To the south and
east a narrow valley that is little more than a deep ravine, the sides
of the precipitous hills covered with forest to the brink of the
stream, which twists and turns at sharp angles like a wounded snake,
shining as burnished silver when one catches glimpses of it through
the trees, and playing an important part in a landscape which at brief
distance seems as wild and as unconscious of the presence of man as if
it were a part of the wilderness of Oregon rather than the adjunct of
a busy town which feels continually the stir and impulse of the huge
city only a dozen miles away.

He who descends from the top of the village hill will pass pretty
mansions set apart from their neighbors in leafy and flowery solitudes
wherein the most unsocial hermit might find elbow-room enough; he will
see little cottages which stand nearer to the roadside, as if they
shunned isolation and wished to share in the life that often fills
the highway in front of them. Farther down the houses become more
companionable; they cling together in groups with the barest
possibility of retaining their individuality, until at last the
thoroughfare becomes a street wherein small shops do their traffic in
quite a spirited sort of a way.

Clear down at the foot of the hill, by the brink of the sweet and
placid river, there are iron mills and factories and furnaces, whose
chimneys in the daytime pour out huge columns of black smoke, and from
which long tongues of crimson and bluish flame leap forth at night
against the pitchy darkness of the sky. Here, as one whirls by in the
train after nightfall, he may catch hurried glimpses of swarthy men,
stripped to the waist, stirring the molten iron with their long levers
or standing amid showers of sparks as the brilliant metal slips to and
fro among the rollers that mould it into the forms of commerce. If
upon a summer evening one shall rest amid the sweet air and the
rustling trees upon the hill-top, he may hear coming up from this
dusky, grimy blackness of the mills and the railway the soughing of
the blowers of the blast-furnaces, the sharp crack of the exploding
gases in t