added to from time to time, as necessity demanded, until it had become
an imposing and not uncomely pile. Below this were two or three
dilapidated saw-mills, a grist-mill in daily use, and a fulling-mill--a
remnant of the old times when homespun went its pilgrimage to town--to
be fulled, colored, and dressed--from all the sparsely settled country
around.

On a little plateau by the side of The Branch was a row of stores and
dram-shops and butchers' establishments. Each had a sort of square,
false front, pierced by two staring windows and a door, that reminded
one of a lion _couchant_--very large in the face and very thin in the
flank. Then there were crowded in, near the mill, little rows of
one-story houses, occupied entirely by operatives, and owned by the
owner of the mill. All the inhabitants, not directly connected with the
mill, were as far away from it as they could go. Their houses were set
back upon either acclivity which rose from the gorge that the stream had
worn, dotting the hill-sides in every direction. There was a clumsy
town-hall, there were three or four churches, there was a high school
and a low tavern. It was, on the whole, a village of importance, but the
great mill was somehow its soul and center. A fair farming and grazing
country stretched back from it eastward and westward, and Sevenoaks was
its only home market.

It is not proposed, in this history, to tell where Sevenoaks was, and is
to-day. It may have been, or may be, in Maine, or New Hampshire, or
Vermont, or New York. It was in the northern part of one of these
States, and not far from the border of a wilderness, almost as deep and
silent as any that can be found beyond the western limit of settlement
and civilization. The red man had left it forever, but the bear, the
deer and the moose remained. The streams and lakes were full of trout;