So she hurried along, past the rows of tenements, past the few women that she met and past the small children playing in the street. The women paid no attention to her, being intent upon their own business and having enough of it to keep them well occupied. She passed a mill, with its throbbing of looms and its clattering and clicking of spindles. The long rows of windows were just beginning to be lighted as she passed. She went on, past more tenements, less closely set, and past another mill. The windows of this second mill were already lighted, and the same throbbing and clattering came faintly to her ears. In front of this mill was a broad street, almost a square, and beyond the street an open lot,--I had almost said a field, but it lacked one essential to being a field,--evidently used by the population, old and young, as a playground. This lot was surrounded by the remains of an old stone wall, a relic of the better days, when it had been a field. Now, there was no vestige of vegetation; no living thing. A pig would have died of starvation in that lot. Both street and lot were covered with frozen mud and dirty snow, and a film of repulsive dirt, that would not wash off, coated the old stones of the wall. The whole place filled Sally with disgust. If these mills had to be somewhere, why must they put them here? Why must they? Weren't there other places, without robbing-- Sally broke off. She had been almost talking aloud to herself in fierce rebellion. Mills! Mills! Nothing but mills! They had taken up every foot of the shore in Whitby except what was occupied by the wharves. What were the people thinking of, that they suffered it? They had seen foot after foot, mile after mile, of shore given to the mills, and not a single feeble voice had been raised to prevent. They had seen the mills stretch forth surreptitious, grasping hands and take unto themselves pieces of their beautiful old shore road, a quarter of a mile at a time. That road had been unequaled for beauty, thirty years before. Sally had heard Patty speak of it often, mourning its loss. She, herself, had seen great stretches of that shore taken by the mills within the past ten years, and she had not known enough to speak or even to care. The people were mill-mad--or sleeping. Well--and Sally sighed--a haughty spirit before destruction; just before it, she hoped. A thousand times rather the few hardened sailor-men in their place than that horde everywhere.