"I declare, I'd like to stop just a minute," she said regretfully, for the Colonel continued to drive straight on. "I'm so glad for Aurora's sake that he's come home; I only hope our Romanzo will do as well." "It would be an intrusion at such a time, Elvira. The effusions of even the best-intentioned friends are injudicious at the inopportune moment of domestic reunion." Mrs. Caukins subsided on that point. She was always depressed by the Colonel's grandiloquence, which he usually reserved for The Greenbush and the town-meeting, without being able to account for it. "He'll see a good many changes here; it's another Flamsted we're living in," she remarked later on when they passed the first stone-cutters' shed on the opposite shore of the lake; and the family proceeded to comment all the way to church on the various changes along the route. * * * * * It was in truth another Flamsted, the industrial Flamsted which the Colonel predicted six years before on that memorable evening in the office of The Greenbush. To watch the transformation of a quiet back-country New England village into the life-centre of a great and far-reaching industry, is in itself a liberal education, not only in economics, but in inherited characteristics of the human race. Those first drops of "the deluge," the French priest and the Irish orphan, were followed by an influx of foreigners of many nationalities: Scotch, Irish, Italians, Poles, Swedes, Canadian French; and with these were associated a few American-born. Their life-problem, the earning of wages for the sustenance of themselves and their families, was one they had in common. Its solution was centred for one and all in their work among the granite quarries of The Gore and in the stone-cutters' sheds on the north shore of Lake Mesantic. These two things the hundreds belonging to a half-dozen nationalities possessed in common--these, and their common humanity together with the laws to which it is subject. But aside from this, their speech, habits, customs, religions, food, and pastimes were polyglot; on this account the lines of racial demarkation were apt, at times, to be drawn all too sharply. Yet this very fact of differentiation provided hundreds of others--farmers, shopkeepers, jobbers, machinists, mechanics, blacksmiths, small restaurant-keepers, pool and billiard room owners--with ample sources of livelihood.