So they had supper, and Norris fished a volume of Shelley from his pocket and read _The Cloud_, which Dick followed by a really funny story from a magazine. They fell to talking about their own affairs, which to the young are the chief interests. It takes years "that bring the philosophic mind" to make abstractions stimulating. Finally they wafted homeward under a sky dark at the zenith and becoming paler and paler, violet, rose, wan white, with a line of intense violet along the horizon, and, as they sailed, Madeline sang softly as one does in the immediate presence of nature. This was one day. On another Dick was full of his adventures of the week. He was learning to know his St. Etienne in all its phases. He told them of the lumber mills down by the river, where brawny men, primitive in aspect, fought with a never-ending stream of logs which came down with the current and raised themselves like uncanny water-monsters, up a long incline, finally to meet their death at the hands of machinery that ripped and snarled and clutched. Who would dream, to look at the great commonplace piles of boards that lined the riverbank for miles, that their birth-pangs had been so picturesque? Or again, Dick told them of those other mills, which were the chief foundation of St. Etienne's wealth, piles of gray stone, for ever dust-laden and dingy, into which poured a never-ending stream of grain, and out of which poured an equally unceasing stream of bags and barrels laden with flour. Around the wide interiors wandered a few men, gray too, who peeped now and then into caverns where hidden machinery did all the work. Outside, locomotives whistled and puffed and snorted, as they switched the miles of cars to and from the mills. Great vans rolled up with their burdens of fresh empty barrels to be filled and rolled away again. It was the commonplace of daily toil, but Dick made it vivid, because it was in him to see all things as the work of men, and whenever you catch them doing real work, men are interesting.