THE MILLER.
WATER-MILL.
There is scarcely a boy to be found who, when he has been into the country and seen the wheel of the old water mill going round, or the fans of the windmill slowly revolving in the air, has not thought that it would be pleasant to follow the business of a Miller.
Millers are proverbially jolly fellows, and their houses and the mills themselves are generally very picturesque, and stand in pleasant country places; then, again, what wonderful fat perch and chub and pike can be caught in the weir or the mill stream, and what a quiet sleepy occupation it must be to lie on the grass or in some great room in the mill, watching the fans, or listening to the summer breeze wafting through the sails!
If anybody should think, however, that the Miller’s life is a lazy one he had better alter his opinion; for, unless he wishes to starve amidst plenty, the Miller must be up betimes, and, besides working himself, keeping a good look-out amongst his men, lest both he and his customers should suffer by their negligence.
The mortar would seem to be the earliest machine used for the purpose of bruising or reducing grain to a powder, or into a state fit for the making of bread. By means of the handle the pestle would with tolerable facility be driven round the mortar, and the grain reduced to a powder, as is done with certain drugs by the pestle of the apothecary of the present day.
In process of time, shafts were added to these machines; and in the opinion of Beckmann, the oldest cattle mills resembled those described in Sonnerat’s Voyage to the East Indies, in which the pestle of a mortar, fastened to a stake driven into the earth, is affixed to a shaft, to which two oxen are yoked. These oxen are driven by a man, while another is employed in dropping the grain into the mortar and placing it under the pestle.
We have good reason for knowing that the Romans, for a long time, used no other instrument than the pestle and mortar.