64 FEBRUARY 



Elizabethan inn. The unemployed, or half-employed 

 population, has been reduced by two, and reached the 

 vanishing point ; and there is good reason to rejoice 

 whether or no you are acquainted at all with the hamlet 

 or its workers : the wheel of the old mill revolves again. 

 It was stopped and seemed likely to be condemned to rot 

 in cold obstruction till its flanges fell to pieces by decay. 

 Other country mills in these easterly streams had ceased 

 one after the other ; and the silence of this survivor was 

 taken as sign and symbol of a departed epoch. No more 

 would local farmers and gleaning workers take grain to 

 the milling neighbour, and the people do traffic in the 

 sharps and middlings and other forms of fodder shed 

 from the flour. It had run continuously from before 

 the Domesday survey was begun ; and some of the 

 machinery, made doubtless at home, looks as if dated from 

 the mill s birthday. How rough and lumbering ; but how 

 efficient it is. The oak beams are of unknown antiquity ; 

 and if you take an electric torch into the darke&quot;&quot; rooms 

 and passages you will find that these great oak .runks are 

 punctured, wherever light was needed, by deep holes, 

 into which the handles of the &quot; carry candles &quot; were 

 thrust. 



The stream hits the main road through the village at 

 right-angles, and the wheel is hung by the upper mouth 

 of the tunnel. It is a pleasure to see again the thick 

 white counters of foam come bubbling out of the arch 

 and floating down the main stream ; and to watch the 

 quaint sideways weir above it, holding up the stream till 

 it is still almost as a pond under the willows and by the 

 weeping ash. The place is very lovely, especially before 

 sunset at this season of the year. Among minor attrac 

 tions is a little garden in which over-worn millstones 

 play a decorative part. February Fill-dyke has played its 



