The Mills Grind Slowly 169 



the Roman point of view. They believed in organization. As 

 Big Business men, they quickly set up more mills and com- 

 manded their vassals and tenants to bring their grain there to 

 be ground. One abbot, to insure the use of his mill by the 

 farmers, sent soldiery to carry away the household querns. He 

 used them to pave his parlor. Some years later, when his rever- 

 ence put up the price of corn-grinding, the people marched 

 on the monastery armed with pick-axes and hoicked the quern 

 stones up from under the quaking abbot's feet. 



The miller was a baron's man. Or a bishop's, which was 

 slightly worse. The farmer knew he couldn't trust him; a surly, 

 crafty fellow who held his job on a pledge to his master to 

 weigh short. 



This character of the miller persists through so many old 

 tales and ballads that it has become one of our literary tradi- 

 tions. Just as all carpenters are proverbially simple-minded and 

 good, and tinkers a bad lot. Chaucer's miller is drawn after 

 this pattern. The design is inescapable now. Let a story-teller 

 introduce as a character an honest, generous, warm-hearted 

 miller: his audience will have none of him. 



But who has ever read or heard sung of a miller's daughter 

 who was not young and beautiful and trustingly frail? She 

 allows the young stranger to woo her by the purling mill- 

 stream while her father is safely inside, grinding the lover's 

 corn. At the close of the third stanza the lover rides away, 

 never to return. The miller's daughter lingers through another 

 verse or two, only to die of a broken heart and leave her parent 

 surlier and more crotchety than before, at the end of the song. 



The old water wheels were usually fitted with overshot 

 wheels. The stream was dammed above the mill, and a head 

 of water was carried from the pond through a stone or wooden 

 head-race to a sluice set directly above the wheel. When the 

 sluice was opened, the water fell into the pockets which formed 

 the wheel's rim. The wheel was forced down and around by 

 the weight of water it carried. The pockets emptied at the 

 bottom and, lightened, came up to be refilled at the sluice and 



