The setting is the north Michigan woods, familiar territory in Hemingway's early fiction. Nick Adams is now a young man, dating a girl named Marjorie. The story concerns not only the "end of something," but the end of three things: the end of the heydays of logging, the end of the mill town on Hortons Bay, and the end of a romance between Nick and Marjorie.
Hortons Bay is no longer a lively, fun place; its great saws, rollers, belts, and pulleys have been removed. What remains barely resembles the once-bustling, full-of-life mill town. There is nothing to remind a stranger what it used to be. Marjorie points out the ruin of the mill, romantically likening it to a castle. Nick doesn't comment on the romantic parallel that Marjorie points out.
The setting that Hemingway describes is proof that when Hortons Bay ended its noisy, financially booming years, the finale was indeed an end — and a time to move on — because the way of life that the town's inhabitants had taken for granted had vanished. This shocking revelation must have been momentous.
