Located fifteen miles from the outskirts of North Dormer, the Mountain symbolizes poverty, indolence, and debauchery. The mind-set attributed to its residents is completely antithetical to that of the prototypical industrious New Englander. The area fascinates Lucius Harney. Local residents tell him that the first colonists of the Mountain were railway workers who “[…] took to drink, or got into trouble with the police” (33). The area has no school, church, or law enforcement presence; they merely send for the local minister when one of their number has died. Charity, who was born on the Mountain, adopted by Royall, and raised in North Dormer, has a love/hate relationship with the locale. On one hand, she is appalled by any association with the dissolute lifestyles the residents are rumored to lead and aims to behave in a manner appropriate to a young, middle-class girl who was raised in town. Conversely, she is instinctively drawn back to the area and attempts to find her mother in order to ask for assistance after realizing that she is pregnant. 

Honorius Hatchard, for whom the library where Charity works is named, enjoyed brief celebrity as an author in the early 1800s. His great-niece,