Excerpt from Broken Shackles Great Moosehead River was a stream of much vicissitude. It rose, as you of course must know, near Canada. It started life as though it purposed going north, then like some pretty wilful woman changed, and shortly found its way on south, on by sharp peaks and quiet valleys of the Adirondacks. Silver at even ing, at noon it held the color of the sky; and the woods that lay about it sighed in comfort and in happiness, so that at night their voices joined the noise of little waves and polished stones to make the quiet places glad. Its valley was a woods-set gem that Heaven long ago had hall-marked beauty. There occurred a speculator and a mill man, two in one, and the timber over-night changed hands. A mill screeched its siren one morning, and Slab Fork was come to stay. Waste wood littered the forest and town, slabs lay scattered about like water-lily petals on a long-fouled pond; and billed-up sawdust blown around the mill formed drumlins high as that structure itself, but much more vast. At that time there was no insurance on the mill nor on the homes of its de pendants. The latter were not worth it, but the former would not stand it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.