There were other things to do at Grandfather Crittenden's, all the other things that boys do in the country, and Neale did them all. But none of them came up to the mill. Day in and day out it was around the mill that he spent his time, lying on the piles of fresh sawed boards in the sunlight, watching teamsters roll huge logs on the skidway with cant-hooks. Or he went below where you could look through the doorway at the flapping belts, and watch the sawdust raining down and making a great yellow pyramid. Even such an experienced millhand as Neale was not allowed to go into the cellar while the mill was running, under pain of all sorts of violent and disagreeable deaths. Getting your coat caught by the shafting and being whirled round and round and beaten to a pulp against the beams was one of the mildest. But after supper, when the mill was shut down, he used to saunter out to it, in the long soft twilight, and then tip-toe down into the cellar and play uneasily in the sawdust, casting scared looks now and then at the shining semi-circle of the saw, with its wicked hooked teeth just over his head. One day, as he played thus about the mill, his destiny came and tapped him on the shoulder, and he knew not that day from any other day. As he was watching Silas take up the slack in a belt, a strange man, an elderly, powerful, bent, old countryman came into the mill, and asked, without salutations to any one, "Where's Jo?" "Gone to town for feed," said Silas. He added with a grin, "Mr. Burton, make you acquainted with a relation of yours, Dan'el's boy." He jerked his head at Neale. The stranger looked hard at the boy, out of sharp gray eyes, and the harder he looked the sharper grew his eyes. "What's he doin' here?" he asked Silas. "Oh, he's always hangin' round. He knows the trade as well as some folks twice his size," said Silas. "Well, what do you think of the sawyer's trade?" asked the old man suddenly of Neale. Neale could not think of anything to answer except that he guessed he liked it all right. The stranger seemed to dismiss him from his mind, fingered his gray goatee, and looked all around as if seeing the establishment for the first time. "Mebbe. Mebbe. All right for Massachusetts pine and saft maple. But if you want to see a real mill, that'll handle tough Vermont yellow birch and rock-maple, you come back to Ashley with me." The stranger stayed to supper, and Neale learned that he was his great-uncle Burton Crittenden. He asked many sharp-sounding questions that made his brother, Neale's grandfather, snort and say hotly, "Oh, we all know there ain't any proper mill practice outside Vermont, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is managing to worry along somehow, in her shiftless fashion." But when the old man spoke to Neale there was a gentler note in his voice. He talked of sugaring-off, and twenty-two-foot snowdrifts, and asked Neale's mother if she wouldn't send the boy to Ashley some time, to visit his great-uncle.