Excerpt from Sawdust a Romance of the Timberlands A strange object it looked, in truth, planted there in the midst of the Arcadian landscape - a great rec tangular wooden building, not more ornamental to look at than a sort of magnified barn; bare, gaunt, hideously new and hideously naked - a monster with a body of wood and a soul of iron and steel. You would have said that it felt aware of its nakedness, and aware, too, of its general incongruity with its surroundings, with such sullen breadth did it fill its place, so ill-tempered was the expression of its wide-open jaws, those great wooden portals that were flung back for the first time to-day. Even the tall brick chimney, which had never yet smoked in earnest, seemed astonished to see the church tower so far below it, and to be squinting down inquiringly at the acres of bare Space which stretched to the right and to the left. They would not remain bare for long; soon piles of neatly ranged boards would cover the ground which had been gained by the clear ing away of many a straw-thatched hut. Was it not already crossed and recrossed by the narrow iron rails that were to assist locomotion, and were not the electric lamp-posts all standing in order, like so many soldiers, prepared at the word of command to turn the darkest night into day? It would seem as though the heavens were propi tious to the new undertaking, for the March sky had 'never been bluer than on the great afternoon, and never had the fragrant green valley, still streaked here and there with the white of unmelted snow, stretched itself more complacently in the spring sunshine. 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.