"It's bad enough yet," said Mrs. Dunstall. "Mr. Ledge has done all he could to build things to catch hold of where you'd go head over heels to heaven if he hadn't, but it's a awful walk still. And then the steps! Why, Nathan and Lizzie was there last summer, and Lizzie says all the way down she was thinking how she was ever going to be able to get back, and all the way back she was thinking just the same thing. Going, you go down steps till it seems like there never would come the bottom, and coming back you come up steps till you're ready to move to Ledgeville and live on the bottoms for life. You know how that is, Pinkie?"
"Yes," said Pinkie.
"It wouldn't do any good to move to Ledgeville to get rid of the Lower Falls," said Mrs. Ray, "because the dam is going to do away with the Lower Falls and drown Ledgeville entirely. That's the next little surprise the city folks will be giving us."
"I shall like to stand on the bridge the day they let the water in over the dam the first time," said Mrs. Dunstall. "It'll be a great sight to see the valley turn into a lake, and South Ledge and Ledgeville go under."
"I wouldn't look forward to it too much if I was you," said Mrs. Ray; "it's going to take three or four years to dig that dam, they tell me. You can't lay out a lake and break up three sets of falls in a minute."
"They haven't got to do something to all the Falls," said Mrs. Dunstall. "Josiah Bates was holding stakes for one of the surveyors yesterday, and he heard him say as the Lower Falls wouldn't need a thing, for it was a mill-race already."
"Well, it's a blessing if there's one thing ready to their hands," said Mrs. Ray, "for I must say the way the State has took hold of us, since Mr. Ledge set out to give it something for nothing, is a caution. If he'd offered to sell the Falls at cost price, we'd of had a petition and our taxes increased and been marked 'keep off the grass,' in all directions; but just because he offered to give it to 'em all cleared up and in order, they must tear around and build a dam and drown five villages and go cutting up monkey-shines generally. Yes, indeed."
"They do say that the dam will keep the Falls, instead of spoiling them," said Mrs. Dunstall; "they say the Falls is stratifying backward, and is most through being falls, anyway, and if the dam is built, we'll all have that to look at always."
"It'll be all one to me," said Mrs. Ray; "I never get time to look at nothing, anyway, unless it's folks waiting for their mail, and goodness knows they've long ceased to interest me."
Mrs. Dunstall looked a bit uncertain as to how to receive this outburst of confidence. "It does you good to take a little rest," she said at last; "you work too hard for a woman of your time of life, Mrs. Ray."