should receive small word of thanks.

Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist's eye, the picturesque
oddity of the scene might have made her step stagger less, and
the path seem shorter; but to her the mills were only "summat
deilish to look at by night."

The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid
rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-
covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on
the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-
like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side.
Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that
burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible
form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames
writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons
filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches
stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-
clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light,
hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a
street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as she crept through,
"looks like t' Devil's place!" It did,--in more ways than one.

She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on
a furnace. He had not time to eat his supper; so she went
behind the furnace, and waited. Only a few men were with him,
and they noticed her only by a "Hyur comes t'hunchback, Wolfe."

Deborah was stupid with sleep; her back pained her sharply; and
her teeth chattered with cold, with the rain that soaked her