As the train wound along the valley beside the river, and as the familiar outlines of the mountains rose up like the faces of dear, unforgotten friends, J.M. expanded and bloomed with delight in his new idea; but it was a very shriveled and dusty little old scholar who finally arrived at the farther end of the Main Street of Woodville and stood, in the hush of the noon hour, gazing back with a stricken face at the row of slovenly unlovely front yards separating the wretched old houses from the street.
He stood before the house that had been his home, and when he looked at it he turned very pale and sat down quickly as though his knees had failed him. Apparently the house had not been painted since his childhood, and certainly it had not been repaired. Broken, dangling shutters gave it a blear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidily pin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of the yard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes and crates and unsightly rags, and hung with a flapping, many-legged wash. From the three rural mail-delivery boxes at the gate, he gathered that three families were crowded into the house which had seemed none too large for his father, his mother, and himself. He put on his glasses and read the names shudderingly--Jean-Baptiste Loyette, Patrick McCartey, and S. Petrofsky.
"Good heavens!" he observed feebly to the vacant, dusty road beside him, and in answer a whistle from the big, barrack-like building at the other end of the street screamed so stridently that the heavy August air seemed to vibrate about him in hot waves.
At once, as if all the houses on the street were toy barometers, every door swung open and a stream of men and boys in dirty shirts and overalls flowed out through the squalid yards along the sidewalks toward the factory. From the house before which the librarian of Middletown College sat in a crushed heap of resentment came three men to correspond to the three mail-boxes: one short and red-haired; one dark, thick-set, and grizzle-bearded; and the third tall, clumsily built, with an impassive face and dark, smoldering eyes. They stared at the woebegone old stranger before their gate, but evidently had no time to lose, as their house was the last on the street, and hurried away toward the hideous, many-windowed factory.