corner, the flour was trickling down out of two wooden spouts into a
wooden receptacle below. The whole place was full of its own faint
but pleasant odour. No man was visible. The spouts went on pouring
the slow torrent of flour, as if everything could go on with perfect
propriety of itself. I could not even see how a man could get at the
stones that I heard grinding away above, except he went up the rope
that hung from the ceiling. So I walked round the corner of the
place, and found myself in the company of the water-wheel, mossy and
green with ancient waterdrops, looking so furred and overgrown and
lumpy, that one might have thought the wood of it had taken to
growing again in its old days, and so the wheel was losing by slow
degrees the shape of a wheel, to become some new awful monster of a
pollard. As yet, however, it was going round; slowly, indeed, and
with the gravity of age, but doing its work, and casting its loose
drops in the alms-giving of a gentle rain upon a little plot of
Master Rogers's garden, which was therefore full of moisture-loving
flowers. This plot was divided from the mill-wheel by a small stream
which carried away the surplus water, and was now full and running
rapidly.

Beyond the stream, beside the flower bed, stood a dusty young man,
talking to a young woman with a rosy face and clear honest eyes. The
moment they saw me they parted. The young man came across the stream
at a step, and the young woman went up the garden towards the
cottage.

"That must be Old Rogers's cottage?" I said to the miller.

"Yes, sir," he answered, looking a little sheepish.