drink the fellow's blood to
the last drop, it would not have lightened his load an ounce. He knew
that it was so now. Nothing could lighten it;--not though an angel
could come and tell him that his girl was a second Magdalen. The
Brattles had ever held up their heads. The women, at least, had
always been decent.

Jacob Brattle, himself, was a low, thickset man, with an appearance
of great strength, which was now submitting itself, very slowly, to
the hand of time. He had sharp green eyes, and shaggy eyebrows, with
thin lips, and a square chin, a nose which, though its shape was
aquiline, protruded but little from his face. His forehead was low
and broad, and he was seldom seen without a flat hat upon his head.
His hair and very scanty whiskers were gray; but, then too, he was
gray from head to foot. The colour of his trade had so clung to him,
that no one could say whether that grayish whiteness of his face came
chiefly from meal or from sorrow. He was a silent, sad, meditative
man, thinking always of the evil things that had been done to him.

CHAPTER VI.

BRATTLE'S MILL.

When Mr. Fenwick reached the mill, he found old Brattle sitting alone
on a fixed bench in front of the house door with a pipe in his mouth.
Mary Lowther was quite right in saying that the mill, in spite of its
dilapidations,--perhaps by reason of them,--was as pretty as anything
in Bullhampton. In the first place it was permeated and surrounded by
cool, bright, limpid little streams. One of them ran right through
it, as it were, passing between the dwelling-house and the mill, and
turning the wheel, which was there placed. This course was, no doubt,
artificial, and the water ran more rapidly in it than it did in the
neighbouring streamlets. There were sluice-gates, too, by which it
could be altogether expelled, or kept up to this or that height; and
it was a river absolutely under man's control, in which no water-god
could take delight. But there were other natural streams on each
side of the building, the one being the main course of the Avon,
and the other some offspring of a brooklet, which joined its parent
two hundred yards below, and fifty yards from the spot at which
the ill-used working water was received back into its mother's
idle bosom. Mill and house were thatched, and were very low. There
were garrets in the roof, but they were so shaped that they could
hardly be said to have walls to them at all, so nearly were they
conta