I can't say these towns have given up the ghost quite yet, but the depressed mill towns of rural New England are like an old creature too sad to live but not quite too sick to justify euthanizing. The grand Victorian and Italianate mill owners' mansions have been tar-shingle-sided and chopped into studio apartments, their ornate woodwork covered or gone. The wide main streets, lined with vacant shops displaying nothing but dusty 'for rent' signs in their cracked windows, are quiet save for the occasional elderly person in faded clothes walking slowly along the worn sidewalks of his hometown. The mills themselves sit dark and silent. There's no clacking of a mechanical loom or squeaking of large wood and steel gears powering dozens of lathes and presses. Graffiti decorates their crumbling brick, the freshest paint they've seen in nearly a century. Pigeons flutter in and out through missing panes. And still the rivers flow by that once powered the mills, which themselves are now nothing more than a feature of the landscape to someone watching from the other side.