THE MILL


Outside, a high wind was driving the fallen leaves in swirls and eddies,
and as Abel crossed the road to the mill, he smelt the sharp autumn
scent of the rotting mould under the trees. Frost still sparkled on the
bright green grasses that had overgrown the sides of the mill-race, and
the poplar log over the stream was as wet as though the dancing shallows
had skimmed it. Over the motionless wheel the sycamore shed its broad
yellow leaves into the brook, where they fluttered downward with a noise
that was like the wind in the tree-tops.

Inserting a key into the rusty lock, which was much too large for it,
Abel opened the door, and counted Solomon Hatch's sacks of grist, which
stood in a row beside a raised platform where an old mill-stone was
lying. Other sacks belonging to other farmers were arranged in
an orderly group in one corner, and his eye passed to them in a
businesslike appraisement of their contents. According to an established
custom of toll, the eighth part of the grain belonged to the miller;
and this had enabled him to send his own meal to the city markets, where
there was an increasing demand for the coarse, water-ground sort. Some
day he purposed to turn out the old worn-out machinery and supply its
place with modern inventions, but as yet this ambition was remote, and
the mill, worked after the process of an earlier century, had raised his
position to one of comparative comfort and respectability. He was
known to be a man of character and ambition. Already his name had been
mentioned as a possible future representative of the labouring classes
in the Virginia assembly. "There is no better proof of the grit that is
in the plain people than the rise of Abel Revercomb out of Abner, his