BA Cee ee eye

 

 

 

 

 

A WIND-MILL PILGRIMAGE.

wind-milly side,” let him go to Zaandam and be
‘surfeited forever after.”

Who invented them, whose idea it was to make
the wind a miller to grind meal or a servant to
pump water, no man knows, though it is said in
one place that they may be traced to Holland,
where their use was to remove the water from the
marshes; and in another, that it was the East, in

 

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The wind roared, and the rains fell.

The poor white man came and sat under our tree,
He has no mother to bring him milk,
No wife to grind his corn, /

Let us pity the white man, no mother has he.

No matter where the wind-mill originated, the
hand-mill was before it, in the East, and almost
everywhere. Even the Roman soldiers carried

 

“BUT ABOVE ALL AT ZAANDAM.”

a sandy region where there were no water brooks,
and as John Ridd says in Lorna Doone, “folk
made bread with wind.”

But there is another side to that last statement,
because the Orientals ground their grain between
two stones, and the women didit. It was one of the
sounds of home-life— that grinding. It always
makes one think of the careful, busy, frugal mis-
tress, the bread-maker, the loaf-giver. Who of you
that has ever read the travels of Mungo Park in
Africa can forget the pathetic little story of that
lone stranger, benighted, weary, sick, among in-
hospitable people, preparing to pass the night in
a tree for safety, when the native woman took him
to her hut and gave him food and a mat to sleep
on; and as he lay there, he heard her maidens
sing these plaintive lines which they improvised
on the spot:

little mills along with them and ground their own
corn to make their own bread, which they baked
in pan-cakes on a flat plate over the fire — which
was indeed a primitive way of doing things fora
people so great and grand. Froissart tells time
and again how the armies of France and England
among their incumbrances had hand-mills of some
kind.

The Scotch had something they called the
“knockin’-stane,” by means of which they “un-
hulled” and broke up their oats and barley, with
a “knockin’-mell” or mallet. The “mell” was of
a solid kind of wood, the mortar of close-grained —
stone, and so big that one has been seen in some
old Scottish house in use for a pig’s trough, or
turned bottom upwards for a seat. The cottagers
kept it near the door, to be at hand when they
wanted barley for broth; too handy, in fact, ready