racted
it from its hole, and, without shade of embarrassment, held it up like
a drowned kitten before the eyes of Miss Letty, intending thereby, no
doubt, to impress her with the fate of all seducing spirits that should
attempt an entrance into her kingdom: Miss Letty only burst into merry
laughter over its fate. So the lode of poetry failed for the present
from Robert's life. Nor did it matter much; for had he not his violin?

I have, I think, already indicated that his grandfather had been a
linen manufacturer. Although that trade had ceased, his family had still
retained the bleachery belonging to it, commonly called the bleachfield,
devoting it now to the service of those large calico manufactures which
had ruined the trade in linen, and to the whitening of such yarn as the
country housewives still spun at home, and the webs they got woven of it
in private looms. To Robert and Shargar it was a wondrous pleasure when
the pile of linen which the week had accumulated at the office under the
ga'le-room, was on Saturday heaped high upon the base of a broad-wheeled
cart, to get up on it and be carried to the said bleachfield, which lay
along the bank of the river. Soft laid and high-borne, gazing into the
blue sky, they traversed the streets in a holiday triumph; and although,
once arrived, the manager did not fail to get some labour out of them,
yet the store of amusement was endless. The great wheel, which drove the
whole machinery; the plash-mill, or, more properly, wauk-mill--a word
Robert derived from the resemblance of the mallets to two huge feet, and
of their motion to walking--with the water plashing and squirting from
the blows of their heels; the beatles thundering in arpeggio upon the
huge cylinder round which the white cloth was wound--each was haunted in
its turn and season. The pleasure of the water itself was inexhaustible.
Here sweeping in a mass along the race; there divided into branches and
hurrying through the walls of the various houses; here sliding through
a wooden channel across the floor to fall into the river in a
half-concealed cataract, there bubbling up through the bottom of a huge
wooden cave or vat, there resting placid in another; here gurgling along
a spout; there flowing in a narrow canal through the green expanse of
the well-mown bleaehfield, or lifted from it in narrow curved wooden
scoops, like fairy canoes with long handles, and flung in showers over
the outspread yarn--the water was