proper. Cotting's Store contains the postoffice and telephone booth, and
is naturally the central point of interest. Seth Davis' blacksmith shop
comes next; Widow Clark's Emporium for the sale of candy, stationery and
cigars adjoins that; McNutt's office and dwelling combined is next, and
then Thorne's Livery and Feed Stables. You must understand they are not
set close together, but each has a little ground of its own. On the
other side of the street is the hardware store, with farm machinery
occupying the broad platform before it, and then the Millville House, a
two-storied "hotel" with a shed-like wing for the billiard-room and card
tables. Nib Corkins' drug store, jewelry store and music store combined
(with sewing machines for a "side line"), is the last of the "business
establishments," and the other three buildings are dwellings occupied by
Sam Cotting, Seth Davis and Nick Thorne.

Dick Pearson's farm house is scarcely a quarter of a mile up the
highway, but it isn't in Millville, for all that. There's a cross lane
just beyond Pearson's, leading east and west, and a mile to westward is
the Wegg Farm, in the wildest part of the foothills.

It is a poor farming country around Millville. Strangers often wonder
how the little shops of the town earn a living for their proprietors;
but it doesn't require a great deal to enable these simple folk to live.
The tourist seldom penetrates these inaccessible foothills; the roads
are too rough and primitive for automobiles; so Millville is shamefully
neglected, and civilization halted there some half a century ago.

However, there was a genuine sensation in store for this isolated
hamlet, and it was the more welcome because anything in the way of a
sensation had for many years avoided the neighborhood.