As he went he was unconscious, as he was always unconscious, of the little street. He saw the market square, not as the heart of the town, but as a place for buying and selling, and the little shops were to him not ways of providing the town with life, but ways of providing their keepers with a livelihood. Beyond these was a familiar setting, arranged that day with white background and heaped roofs and laden boughs, the houses standing side by side, like human beings. There they were, like the chorus to the thing he was thinking about. They were all thinking about it, too. Every one of them knew what he knew. Yet he never saw the bond, but he thought they were only the places where men lived who had been his factory hands and would be so yet if he had not cut them away: Ben Torrey, shoveling off his front walk with his boy sweeping behind him; August Muir, giving his little girl a ride on the snow shovel; Nettie Hatch, clearing the ice out of her mail box, while her sister--the lame one--watched from her chair by the window, interested as in a real event. Ebenezer spoke to them from some outpost of consciousness which his thought did not pass. The little street was not there, as it was never there for him, as an entity. It was merely a street. And the little town was not an entity. It was merely where he lived. He went behind Buff Miles and the snowplow--as he always went--as if space had been created for folk to live in one at a time, and as if this were his own turn. When he reached the bend from the Old Trail to the road where the factory was, he understood at last that he had been hearing a song sung over a great many times. "... One for the way it all begun, Two for the way it all has run, What three'll be for I do forget, But what's to be has not been yet.... So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, Over and over and over, oh." Buff, who was singing it, looked over his shoulder, and nodded. "They said you can't have no Christmas on Christmas Day," he observed, grinning, "but I ain't heard nothing to prevent singing Christmas carols right up to the day that is the day." Ebenezer halted. "How old are you?" he abruptly demanded of Buff--whom he had known from Buff's boyhood. "Thirty-three," said Buff, "dum it." "You and Bruce about the same age, ain't you?" said Ebenezer. Buff nodded. "Well," said Ebenezer, "well...." and stood looking at him. Malcolm would have been his age, too. "Going down to the factory, are you?" Buff said. "Wait a bit. I'll hike on down ahead of you." He turned the snowplow down the factory road, as if he were making a triumphal progress, fashioning his snow borders with all the freedom of some sculpturing wind on summer clouds. "One for the way it all begun, Two for the way it all has run...."