But it roared all day, and roared all night, summer and winter alike, and the sound became a part of the atmosphere.

Resonance was one of the qualities of the oxygen which the people breathed, so that if, at any midnight moment, the roar had been suddenly hushed, they would have waked with a start and a sense of suffocation, and leaped from their beds.
Among the charms that dangled from this liquid chain--depending from the vest of a landscape which ended in a ruffle of woods toward the north, overtopped by the head of a mountain--was a huge factory that had been added to from time to time, as necessity demanded, until it had become an imposing and not uncomely pile.

Below this were two or three dilapidated saw-mills, a grist-mill in daily use, and a fulling-mill--a remnant of the old times when homespun went its pilgrimage to town--to be fulled, colored, and dressed--from all the sparsely settled country around.
On a little plateau by the side of The Branch was a row of stores and dram-shops and butchers' establishments.

Each had a sort of square, false front, pierced by two staring windows and a door, that reminded one of a lion _couchant_--very large in the face and very thin in the flank.

Then there were crowded in, near the mill, little rows of one-story houses, occupied entirely by operatives, and owned by the owner of the mill.