Rause: What’s want?
Tummas: Woot, or wootn’t?
Off went Rause at a run, and Tummas clattering after. Thought the listener, “Was ever the important question put in straighter terms? Woot, or wootn’t? Will you, or won’t you?”
Tu-whit—tu-what! Steadily the scythe was swung, and the swathe fell in rows behind it.
Chapter Three.
The Nether Millstone.
The huge water-wheel in the mill by Warren House went slowly round and round, grinding the corn. The ancient walls of the mill trembled under the ponderous motion, trembled but stood firm, as they had for centuries; so well did the monks see that their workmen mixed their mortar and dressed their stone in the days of the old world. A dull rumbling sound came from the chinks in the boarding that sheltered the wheel from the weather; a sound that could only be caused by an enormous mass in movement. Looking through into the semi-darkness, a heaving monster, black and direful, rolled continually past, threatening, as it seemed, to crush the life out of those who ventured within reach, as the stones within crushed form and shape out of the yellow wheat—the individual grain ground into the general powder. Yet the helpless corn by degrees wore away the solid adamant of its oppressor. Under the bowed apple-tree, clothed with moss, hard by, stood a millstone, grey and discoloured by the weather, thus rendered useless by the very corn it had so relentlessly annihilated.
Old Andrew Fisher sat at the mullioned western window of the house that stood higher up above the mill-pond, listening drowsily to the distant clack of the hopper. The mill, the manor-house, and many hundred fair acres of meadow and ploughed land and sheep-walk on the Down behind were his, and had been his forefathers’ down from the days of the last Harry. More than one fair fortune had the mill ground out for them in the generations past; money—accumulated coin by coin, like the grains that together fill the bushel—accumulated by one and dissipated by the next. If report spoke truly, still another fortune had slowly piled itself up in Andrew’s withered hand—weak in its grasp on his staff, but firm in its grasp on gold. Rich as he was known to be, he lived in the rude old way, spoke in the old rude tongue, and seemingly thought the old rude thought. His beehive chair was drawn up close to the open window, so that the light air of the hot summer afternoon might wander in and refresh him.