house slipping into the river, and at the other of an idle, genteel
place, half-cloaked with creepers at this time of the year, and
having no visible connexion with flour. It had hips instead of
gables, giving it a round-shouldered look, four chimneys with no
smoke coming out of them, two zigzag cracks in the wall, several
open windows, with a looking-glass here and there inside, showing
its warped back to the passer-by; snowy dimity curtains waving in
the draught; two mill doors, one above the other, the upper enabling
a person to step out upon nothing at a height of ten feet from the
ground; a gaping arch vomiting the river, and a lean, long-nosed
fellow looking out from the mill doorway, who was the hired grinder,
except when a bulging fifteen stone man occupied the same place,
namely, the miller himself.

Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not
visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many
of them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and
corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos.
These were the miller's private calculations. There were also
chalked in the same place rows and rows of strokes like open
palings, representing the calculations of the grinder, who in his
youthful ciphering studies had not gone so far as Arabic figures.

In the court in front were two worn-out millstones, made useful
again by being let in level with the ground. Here people stood to
smoke and consider things in muddy weather; and cats slept on the
clean surfaces when it was hot. In the large stubbard-tree at the
corner of the garden was erected a pole of larch fir, which the
miller had bought with others at a sale of small timber in Damer's
Wood one Christmas week. It rose from the upper boughs of the tree