Now people don't generally think there is any thing very picturesque about saw-mills, but I do. The weather-beaten boards of the low structure, some hanging awry, some with great knot-holes, as if they were gifted with orbs of vision, or were placed there for the mill to breathe through, some fractured, as if the saw had at times become outrageous at being always shut up and made to work there for other people, and had dashed against them, determined to gain its liberty--whilst some seem as if they had become so tantalized by the continual jar of the machinery, that they had loosened their nails, and had set up a clatter and shake themselves in opposition--these are quite picturesque. Then the broad opening in front, exposing the glittering saw bobbing up and down, and pushing its sharp teeth right through the bowels of the great peeled log fastened with iron claws to the sliding platform beneath--the gallows-like frame in which the saw works--the great strap belonging to the machinery issuing out of one corner and gliding into another--the sawyer himself, in a red shirt, now wheeling the log into its place with his handspike and fastening it--and now lifting the gate by the handle protruding near him--the axe leaning at one side and the rifle at the other--the loose floor covered with saw-dust--the stained rafters above with boards laid across for a loft--the dark sloping slab-roof--the great black wheel continually at war with the water, which, dashing bravely against it, finds itself carried off its feet into the buckets, and whirled half around, and then coolly dismissed into the stream below--the long flume through which the water rushes to the unequal fray, and--what next!