At the foot of a gentle eminence she entered the narrow, winding street of the town, a crooked little town physically both in the matter of this meandering alley-like thoroughfare and in the matter of the hastily builded, unprepossessing houses; a crooked town in its innermost character, it was easy to believe. On either hand as she rode forward were low, squat, ugly shacks jammed tight together or with narrow passageways between their unlovely walls, these spaces more often than not cluttered and further disfigured by piles of rusty tins, old clothing and shoes and other discarded refuse. As she rode farther she saw now and then the more pretentious buildings, some with the false fronts which deceived nobody, the houses appearing shoddy and aged and sinister, one here and there deserted and given over to ruin, disintegration and spiders spinning unmolested in dark corners. The next peculiar impression created upon her was that some evil charm was over the place, that in the sweet sunlight it lay drugged, that in those rows of slatternly shacks where the sunlight did not enter men either hid in dark secrecy or lay in some unnatural stupour. The whole settlement seemed preternaturally quiet; the fancy came to her that the town had died long ago and that she merely looked on its ghost. She had shrunk before now at the thought of men coming to the doors to stare after her, and perhaps even to call coarsely after her; now it seemed the dreariest thing in all the world to ride down this dirty, muddy street and see no man or woman or child, not so much as a saddled horse at a hitching pole. She came abreast of the most pretentious building of Hill's Corners; its swing doors were closed, but from within she heard a low, monotonous hum of languid voices. Upon the crazy false front, a thing to draw the wondering eye of a stranger, was a gigantic and remarkably poorly painted picture of a bear holding a glass in one deformed paw, a bottle in the other, while the drunken letters of the superfluous sign spelled: "The Brown Bear Saloon." Almost directly across the street from the Brown Bear was a rival edifice which though slightly smaller was no less squat and ugly and which bore its own highly ambitious sign: a monster hand clutching a monster whiskey glass, with the illuminating words beneath, "The Here's How Saloon." That the two works of art were from the same brain and hand there was no doubting. In the inscriptions the n's and s's were all made backwards, presenting an interesting and entirely suitable air of maudlin drunkenness.