Another trout broke water, feeding on the other side of the boat. They sprinkled the surface like a handful of shot thrown into the water. As the trout’s back came up out of the water the minnows jumped wildly. Nick pulled hard on one oar so the boat would turn and the bait, spinning far behind, would pass where the trout was feeding. She loved to fish with Nick.Ĭlose beside the boat a big trout broke the surface of the water. She was intent on the rod all the time they trolled, even when she talked. They rowed on out of sight of the mill, following the shore line. “It seems more like a castle,” Marjorie said. “Can you remember when it was a mill?” Marjorie asked. Nick, rowing, looked at the white stone in the green trees. “There’s our old ruin, Nick,” Marjorie said. They were trolling on their way to set night lines for rainbow trout. They were trolling along the edge of the channel-bank where the bottom dropped off suddenly from sandy shallows to twelve feet of dark water. Ten years later there was nothing of the mill left except the broken white limestone of its foundations showing through the swampy second growth as Nick and Marjorie rowed along the shore. The one-story bunk houses, the eating-house, the company store, the mill offices, and the big mill itself stood deserted in the acres of sawdust that covered the swampy meadow by the shore of the bay. Its open hold covered with canvas and lashed tight, the sails of the schooner filled and it moved out into the open lake, carrying with it everything that had made the mill a mill and Hortons Bay a town. The schooner moved out of the bay toward the open lake, carrying the two great saws, the travelling carriage that hurled the logs against the revolving, circular saws and all the rollers, wheels, belts and iron piled on a hull-deep load of lumber. The big mill building had all its machinery that was removable taken out and hoisted on board one of the schooners by the men who had worked in the mill. All the piles of lumber were carried away.

The lumber schooners came into the bay and were loaded with the cut of the mill that stood stacked in the yard. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. “The End of Something” by Ernest Hemingway

The end of something tsw