The mill was about four miles from Brookside, and the children enjoyed the drive intensely. Good-natured Peter allowed each one 84 to “drive,” holding the reins carefully as he told them, “Because,” said Peter seriously, “even if you’re only learning, you might as well begin right.”
When they reached the mill, Jerry and Terry were tied to a post and Peter and the children went inside. Bobby was rather disappointed with the outside of the mill; he had expected it to look like the mills he saw in pictures, with great wide sails flattened against the sky.
“Electric power runs this mill,” Peter explained when Bobby asked where the sails were. “You’ll find plenty to see inside.”
A short, stout man in a dusty white coat met them, and Peter gave him his order.
“I’ve some little folks from down the state a way with me,” Peter told the man. “Guess you can show ’em round the mill a bit this morning?”
“I should say so!” was the hearty answer. “Come along, everybody, and we’ll see just how grain is milled.”
It was not a real flour mill. That is, not one of the great mills that turn millions of bushels 85 of wheat into flour; but it did grind buckwheat for the farmers and made coarse flour and feed for their stock, cracked corn for poultry and so on. The four little Blossoms saw much to interest them, but the great round stones that ground the grains and the arrangements for sifting the dust and chaff from the grain interested them the most.
“It must be fun to be a miller!” said Bobby, when they were ready to go and the noon whistle blew and the big stones stopped turning as the power was shut off. “Maybe when I grow up I’ll run a mill.”
Rattling home in the big wagon with two sacks of “middlings” in the back with them, Twaddles and Dot decided that they, too, would have a mill some day.