III.] MAKING BREAD. 55 



providing for a dozen of persons and a small lot of 

 pigs. For a farm-house, or a gentleman's house in 

 the country, where there would be room to have a 

 walk for a horse, you might take the labour from the 

 men, clap any little horse, pony, or even ass to the 

 wheel ; and he would grind you off eight or ten 

 bushels of wheat in a day, and both he and you 

 would have the thanks of your men into the bargain. 

 96. The cost of this mill is twenty pounds. The 

 dresser is four more ; the horse-path and wheel might, 

 possibly, be four or five more; and, I am very cer- 

 tain, that to any farmer living at a mile from a mill, 

 (and that is less than the average distance perhaps ;) 

 having twelve persons in family, having forty pigs to 

 feed, and twenty hogs to fatten, the savings of such 

 a mill would pay the whole expenses of it the very 

 first year. Such a farmer cannot send less than fifty 

 times a year to the mill. Think of that, in the first 

 place ! The elements are not always propitious : 

 sometimes the water fails, and sometimes the wind. 

 Many a farmer's wife has been tempted to vent -her 

 spleen on both. At best, there must be horse and 

 man, or boy, and, perhaps, cart, to go to the mill ; 

 and that, too, observe, in all weathers, and in the 

 harvest as well as at other times of the year. The 

 case is one of imperious necessity : neither floods 

 nor droughts, nor storms nor calms, will allay the 

 craving's of the kitchen, nor quiet the clamorous up- 

 roar of the stye. Go, somebody must, to some place 

 or other, and back they .must come with flour and 

 with meal. One summer many persons came down 

 the country more than fifty miles to a mill that I 

 knew in Pennsylvania ; and I have known farmers 

 in England carry their grists more than fifteen miles 

 to be ground. It is surprising, that, under these cir- 

 cumstances, hand-mills and horse-mills should not, 

 long ago, have become of more general use ; espe- 

 cially when one considers that the labour, in this 

 case, would cost the farmer next to nothing. To 

 grind would be the work of a wet day. There is no 

 farmer who does not at least fifty days in every year 



