wheels instinct with service, wondrous messengers of the Most High
vouchsafed in vision to the later prophets?

Maybe he did, and going forth from before the avenging sword of his
own forging to the bitterness of an accursed earth, took with him
this bright memory of perfect, ceaseless service, and so fashioned
our labouring wheel--pathetic link with the time of his innocency.
It is one of many unanswered questions, good to ask because it has
no answer, only the suggestion of a train of thought: perhaps we
are never so receptive as when with folded hands we say simply,
"This is a great mystery." I watched and wondered until Jem
called, and I had to leave the rippling weir and the water's side,
and the wheel with its untold secret.

The miller's wife gave me tea and a crust of home-made bread, and
the miller's little maid sat on my knee while I told the sad tale
of a little pink cloud separated from its parents and teazed and
hunted by mischievous little airs. To-morrow, if I mistake not,
her garden will be wet with its tears, and, let us hope, point a
moral; for the tale had its origin in a frenzied chicken driven
from the side of an anxious mother, and pursued by a sturdy,
relentless figure in a white sun-bonnet.

The little maid trotted off, greatly sobered, to look somewhat
prematurely for the cloud's tears; and I climbed to my place at the
top of the piled-up sacks, and thence watched twilight pass to
starlight through my narrow peep, and, so watching, slept until
Jem's voice hailed me from Dreamland, and I went, only half awake,
across the dark fields home.