Clearfield is a fairly typical New England mill town, lying some two miles in from the coast. Doubtless the early settlers had been attracted by the water power to be derived from the river which flows around the town on the north. Certainly, they could not have been influenced by æsthetic or sanitary considerations, for the town occupies what must have been in their time a more or less level meadow a few feet above the river and a very few more above the sea, and, aside from the possibility of good drainage――which probably never occurred to them――those first residents of the future Clearfield found few natural advantages and little of the picturesque. To be sure, northward and westward the country breaks into low hills and is attractive enough, but a distant view of those hills could scarcely have made up for mosquitoes and malaria, for Needham’s Mill, as the first settlement was called, was surrounded by marsh. However, the Clearfield of to-day is no longer Needham’s Mill. The marshes have disappeared――although it is still no uncommon thing to strike a peat-bed when excavating for a cellar――and there is a small-sized city of some seventeen thousand inhabitants, with broad, well-shaded streets, some fine buildings and many manufactories. Clearfield is famous for its knitting mills, but has divers other industries as well. The railroad crosses Mill River from the north, and the trains stop at a new and commodious station, post-card pictures of which you can purchase at Wadsworth’s Book Store and at Castle’s Pharmacy. It is no longer quite correct to say that the river flows around the town, for within the past ten or fifteen years the town has crossed the river and the larger mills and the boat-yards are built along the stream in what is known as the North Side and which is reached by two well-built bridges. Clearfield is served by a trolley system, and, if one wants to reach the shore he may step into a big yellow-sided car at Town Square and be whisked to Rutter’s Point, where the summer hotel and the cottages face the ocean, in a very few minutes. The Common, a square of turf bisected by paths and set with benches and a band-stand, occupying a block in the older part of town, is the center of the business section. Facing the Common are Clearfield’s best and newest business blocks and the Town Hall and the post office, and it was toward the Common that Dick Lovering conducted Eli and Gordon Merrick at the conclusion of football practice.