Mr. Carleton walked slowly on toward the mill office, convinced that the Black Forge Mill field did indeed stand in need of immediate Christian work. He found that Mr. Bacon was not in; but a clerk told him that in five minutes more the noon whistle would blow, and from the office door he could see the mill hands file out through the gates.
Scarcely had the first note of the whistle sounded on the air, when men, women, and half-grown children, as if glad for even a brief respite from their monotonous toil, hastened out from the different buildings, and, pressing in one vast throng through the ponderous gateway scattered among the tenement houses for dinner. What a motley crowd it was! The old and the young were there, the weak and the strong, the ragged and the neat, the coarse and the delicate, the grave and the gay. But upon every face there was written more or less of that stolid indifference which comes from pinching poverty, excessive toil, and reckless living.
"Five hundred and sixty-two of them," remarked the clerk to Mr. Carleton; "and a harder set you never saw, men, women, or children. I won't except a single one. By the way," he added, as the minister started down the office steps, "you had better keep the middle of the street as you go up town, or some of those youngsters will be throwing eggs or stones at you. I saw Ray Branford, the biggest scamp among them all, and the greatest daredevil, too, have his eyes on you as he passed; you won't be the first minister he has insulted."
With a laugh Mr. Carleton replied, "Oh, I fear no trouble," and hurried out of the gate.
He had not gone a dozen rods when a stone thrown from some neighboring corner struck his hat, and sent it spinning to the ground, eight or ten feet away.
"Hoorah! Hoorah! Bully for you, Ray!" shouted a chorus of voices.
Mr. Carleton picked up his hat, and turned around, hardly expecting to see any one. To his surprise, however, a tall, well-developed lad of fifteen or sixteen years, stood on the nearest corner, with a stone in his right hand, while back of him was a squad of boys of all ages and sizes, from whom the shouts came.
"Well, parson," the boy with the stone coolly asked, "how was that for a shot?"
Amused at the boy's audacity, Mr. Carleton replied:
"It certainly was well done; but what if the stone had struck my head?"