master of his craft,
and the mind he put into it made him an artist. Tibbald went on that
he did not care for the Derby or Welsh millstones. These were in one
piece, but they were too hard for the delicate grinding necessary to
make the fine flour needed for good bread. They answered best for
barley meal. Now, the French burr was not only hard but mild, and
seemed to feel the corn as it crushed it. A sack of wheat lost 4 lb.
in grinding. I asked about the toll: he showed me the old measure,
reckoned at the tenth of a sack; it was a square box. When the lord's
tenants in the olden times were forced to have their corn ground at
the lord's mill, the toll was liable to be abused in a cruel manner;
hence the universal opinion that a miller must be a knave. Even in
much more recent times, when the labourers took part of their wages in
flour, there is said to have been a great deal of sleight-of-hand in
using the toll-box, and the miller's thumb grew fat by continually
dipping into other folk's sacks.

But Tibbald had an argument even here, for he said that men nowadays
never grew so strong as they used to do when they brought their own
wheat to be ground at the mill, and when they made their bread and
baked it at home. His own father once carried the fattest man in the
parish on his back half a mile; I forget how much he weighed exactly,
but it was something enormous, and the fat man, moreover, held a 56
lb. weight in each hand. He himself remembered when Hilary used to be
the strongest man in the place; when the young men met together they
contended who should lift the heaviest weight, and he had seen Hilary
raise 5 cwt., fair lifting, with the hands only, and without any
mechanical appliance. Hilary, too, used to write his name with a
carpenter's flat cedar pencil on the whitewashed ceiling of the
brewhouse, holding the while a 1/2 cwt. of iron hung on his little
finger. The difficulty was to get the weight up, lifting it fairly
from the ground; you could lift it very well half-way, but it was just
when the arm was bent that the tug came to get it past the hip, after
which it would go up comparatively easily.

Now this great strength was not the result of long and special
training, or, indeed, of any training at all; it came naturally from
outdoor life, outdoor work, plain living (chiefly bacon), and good
bread baked at home. At the present time men ate the finest and
whitest of bread, but there was no good in it. Folk gr