22 POWERS OF VEGETATION. 



THE POWERS OF VEGETATION. 



In those good days of old, when there were no 

 corn-factors in England to counteract that part 

 of our Redeemer's prayer, " Give us this day 

 our daily bread," by hoarding up vast stores 

 of grain, until mouldiness and vermin have 

 rendered it unfit for the use of man, there 

 stood at Walton Hall a water-mill, for the 

 interest of the proprietor and the good of the 

 country round. Time, the great annihilator of 

 all human inventions, saving taxation and the 

 national debt, laid this fabric low in ruins some 

 sixty years ago ; and nothing now remains to 

 show the place where it once stood except a 

 massive millstone, which measures full 17 ft. 

 in circumference. The ground where the mill 

 stood having been converted into meadow, this 

 stone lay there unnoticed and unknown (save 

 by the passing hay-maker) from the period of 

 the mill's dissolution to the autumn of the year 

 1813, when one of our nut-eating wild animals, 

 probably by way of a winter store, deposited a 

 few nuts under its protecting cover. In the 



