THE MILL WHEEL TURNS 65 



part, though not in full force ; and the volume of the 

 stream is heavy enough to set the great wheel you can 

 see it through cracks in the boards revolving power 

 fully and regularly enough to set the stones and rumbling 

 machinery in motion ; and keep continuity with the 

 days of the Conqueror. 



The new revolutions of the mill-wheel are not an 

 isolated whirligig. The stream, the creatures that fre 

 quent the stream, and to some degree the vegetation, have 

 all altered habit since the mill stopped. With no one to 

 care for the good of the current, except some few fisher 

 men, mudbanks appeared in new places. One of them, 

 at any rate, has become a very fair spectacle, for the 

 monkey-flower has found on it just the conditions it 

 seeks ; and though the plant has flourished of late years 

 out of all conscience, it is a splendid thing. For truths 

 sake, the beauty of the mudbank must be acknowledged ; 

 but mudbanks are not good for a river. These have alto 

 gether repelled the finer fish, and perhaps killed some of 

 them. The mud generates nasty gases ; and a trout 

 caught in the poisoned water may perish incontinent, like 

 the fish that are carried by the Jordan into the Dead Sea, 

 expecting, perhaps, another Tiberias, which is a fishes 

 Paradise. Even the sticklebacks are fewer, and the bit of 

 gravel shore just below the mill was a favourite hunting 

 ground for tiddlers. The gudgeon and roach remain 

 lower down, and are said to be fewer even in the shade of 

 the sycamore, a favourite haunt of fishers, two hundred 

 yards lower down. 



The mud kills the eggs of the Mayfly as surely as the 

 debris of mines has destroyed the ova offish in the greater 

 and once merrier streams of Merioneth. Even that wolf 

 of the stream, the dytiscus beetle, which abounds, does 

 not like it. It has been previously recorded in the annals 



T.V.E. 



