Country Life
Tan LAST OF TILE Alms.
The wheel of a water-mill that is recorded in Domesday and has plied ever since has just gone out of commission. One after another such mills have been closing and this is one of the last and most historic within the circle of the Home Counties. You must poke about in its mysterious depths and talk with those who have known the mill in its heyday to understand how completely both a mechanical and a human epoch has receded into the past. The disuse of the ponderous, but very efficient machinery, the wheat grindstones and the barley grindstones, the hoists and hoppers and granaries and corridors and mighty beams, is less to be regretted than the loss of the human qualities and social habits they supported. I heard this week the human tale, as-well as the mechanical, while with the aid of a candle we peered into the many dark places where this and that con- trivance lurks inactive, or sat on a beam to watch the little river and the fifteenth-century house beside it through a chink in the boards and a dusty window.
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