OS fay ry

A WIND-MILL

thing a-going. Well, then, if you won’t, I’ll tell
you what. Carpet the place, and put up a rack
full of newspapers and things to sell, and send out
the town crier to tell, and get the people in. O,
you're a jolly old keeper!” And the little Portu-
guese would cackle
again iilke a piece of
wheezy machinery, “ya
ya if ”

This one was built
about a hundred and
forty years ago — the
date is there, cut into
the stone doorstep after
an ancient and useful
fashion; and it is of
solid “oak that grew in
the Dead Horse Valley
over there,” though it is
questionable if an oak-
tree is now growing any-
where around; and it is
battered and worn, and
eaten, and scrawled over with visitors’ names.
They tell that during the Revolution, a British
man-of-war fired a cannon ball which went through
it, and nearly hit the miller, giving him a terrible
scare ; but legends are apt to gather, as moss does,
about those antique buildings.

At any rate, it has stood a good
deal of some kind of bombard-
ment; maybe of the kind which
that same John Ridd tells of, when
he went out with his father’s match-
_ lock gun “which he could hardly
carry to his shoulders, to practice
shooting: “Perhaps for a boy there
is nothing better than a good wind-
mill to shoot at, as I have seen in
the Low Countries, but we have no
wind-mills upon the great moor-

 

 

THE OLD MILL AT

PILGRIMAGE. 139
lands, yet here and there a barn door. . . there
is a fair chance of hitting the door if you lay your
cheek to the barrel and try not to be afraid.”

It was “down on the Cape” that we saw one of
the mills in operation, and were shown all about
it. Such a rude, strong
door with a wooden
latch that must have
been two feet long, such
winding stairs, such
heavy beams, such a
tower and look-out, such
a mealy, odd, pictur-
esque, never-to-be-for-
gotten place! We were
even given leave to
bring away as relics
for an antiquarian so-
ciety, two or three of
the crumbling, mossy
shingles that had been
sunning on its sides
nearly a hundred years.
The owner showed us how he managed, how he
hooked the canvas sails to the great vanes, and
told us that the long stick of timber outside,
clamped with iron, and with a big wheel at the
end was “the tail,” and how
they changed it about for the
wind; and as we listened the
vanes went round and round,
and the corn in the hopper came
out meal,

All the region round had al-
ways come there for meal, and
when the wind was right the
sound of the grinding did not
cease even when the sun went
down. Strangers from a part of
the country where there are no
wind-mills came to wonder at

NEWPORT, R. 1.

 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
   

   

SOME FOREIGN WIND-MILLS: THE MILL AT SAN SOUCI; AT ROTTERDAM; ON THE ELBE ; MILL AT DORDRECHT;
AT MONTMARTRE, PARIS.