A glance around caused him to wonder how many slept in that one room before “the mill ’uz shot down.” The bedsteads were made from pieces of undressed scantling, nailed together; not one of them had ever felt a plane or seen a chisel. The little forest of posts and frames looked like a railway trestle; and the groans and sighs issuing from it sounded as if an express train had just plunged over, mangling passengers and crew. The mill “hands” lay uncovered in that stifling atmosphere, tumbled and tangled into all shapes and attitudes, looking like a band of contortionists struck dead, each in the midst of his favorite trick. There lay Bill Ed—two hundred fifty pounds of mountaineer—spread along the front railing, his arm thrown out and hanging over, to keep him from rolling back and wedging himself under the rafters of the roof. His was the “empty bed”—fairly on the way to occupancy! The new guest, lifting his lamp and peering over huge Bill Ed to the sleeping place beyond, observed to himself, “In the language of the sweet girl graduate, ‘Beyond the Alps lies Italy.’ The ‘valley’ is all right, if I can ever scale the mountain.” But he found an easier way. He undressed, sneaked into the “valley” from the foot of the bed, and taking care not to thrust his nose against the roof, he stretched himself out, but not to sleep—to listen! His entrance had not disturbed the snorers. In fact, it had seemed to give them a new inspiration, for the expiration grew louder. They might have supplied steam enough to keep the mill from shutting down. They made up a whole band of wind instruments, each blowing a different horn. The listener now had time to analyze and classify them. One sounded like a March gust whistling through the splinters on the end of a hickory rail. Another had the hiss of the air-brake under a passenger coach, when the train is about to start. There was one gasp like the continued tearing of brown domestic, and another that made you look around for a stream of broken stones pouring into a tin bucket. One long-winded horn, out of tune with all others, hissed like a jet of steam escaping from the steam-chest when a heavy freight engine is beginning to move. Bill Ed, evidently the sawyer of the mill, had a long-drawn snort like the sound of a circular saw ripping through a seasoned oak, closing with the confused ring of the steel as it clears the end of the log, combined with the clatter of the “carriage” rushing back for a fresh start. To sleep amid such a din was a problem. By and by the traveler dozed off, but not out of reach of that roar—it lingered in the distance. At last it ceased—the snorers had risen and gone! Just when well asleep—so it seemed to him—, a bell—it must have been first cousin to the little lamp—tinkled on the gangway. The traveler withdrew from the crevice between rafter and railing—where he had literally lodged,—and turned over.