MINOTAURUS TYPHŒUS 137 



Stooping a little, he digs his fork into the piece, thence- 

 forth rendered stationary, for it is caught between the 

 prongs of the implement. The fore-legs are free ; with 

 their toothed armlets they can saw the morsel, lacerate it 

 and reduce it to particles which gradually fall through 

 the crevices of the flooring and reach the mother below. 



The substance which the miller sends scooting down is 

 not a flour passed through the bolting-machine, but a 

 coarse grain, a mixture of pulverized remnants and of 

 pieces hardly ground at all. Incomplete though it be, 

 this preliminary trituration is of the greatest assistance 

 to the mother in her tedious job of bread-makmg : it 

 shortens the work and allows the best and the middling 

 to be separated straight away. When everything, in- 

 cluding the floor itself, is ground to powder, the horned 

 miller returns to the upper air, gathers a fresh harvest 

 and recommences his shredding labours at leisure. 



Nor is the baker inactive in her laboratory. She collects 

 the remnants pouring down around her, subdivides them 

 yet further, refines them and makes her selection : this, 

 the tenderer part, for the central crumb ; that, tougher, 

 for the crust of the loaf. Turning this way and that, she 

 pats the material with the battledore of her flattened 

 arms ; she arranges it in layers, which presently she 

 compresses by stamping on them where they lie, much 

 after the manner of a vine-grower treading his vintage. 

 Rendered firm and compact, the mass wiU keep better 

 and longer. 



After some ten days of this united labour, the couple at 

 last obtain the long, cylindrical loaf. The father has done 

 the grinding, the mother the kneading. 



I have even succeeded in watching the digging of this 

 very deep burrow, thanks to a complicated series of 



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