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Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot by Charles Heber Clark
page 12 of 304 (03%)
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 the white-hot iron, the shriek of the locomotive whistle
and all night long the roar and rattle of the passing trains, but
so mellowed by the distance that the harsh sounds seem almost
musical--almost as pleasant and as easily endured as the voices of
nature. And in the early morning a look from the chamber window
perhaps may show a locomotive whirling down the valley around the
sharp curves with its white streamer flung out upon the green
hillside, and seeming like a snowy ribbon cut from the huge mass of
vapor which lies low upon the surface of the stream.

The name of this town among the hills is--well, it has a very
charming Indian name, to reveal which might be to point with too much
distinctness to the worthy people who in some sort figure in the
following pages. It shall be called Millburg in those pages, and its
inhabitants shall tell their stories and play their parts under the
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