alue of their residence by building a new chimney, and setting up an
additional pair of millstones.

Overcombe Mill presented at one end the appearance of a hard-worked house
slipping into the river, and at the other of an idle, genteel place, half-
cloaked with creepers at this time of the year, and having no visible
connexion with flour. It had hips instead of gables, giving it a round-
shouldered look, four chimneys with no smoke coming out of them, two
zigzag cracks in the wall, several open windows, with a looking-glass
here and there inside, showing its warped back to the passer-by; snowy
dimity curtains waving in the draught; two mill doors, one above the
other, the upper enabling a person to step out upon nothing at a height
of ten feet from the ground; a gaping arch vomiting the river, and a
lean, long-nosed fellow looking out from the mill doorway, who was the
hired grinder, except when a bulging fifteen stone man occupied the same
place, namely, the miller himself.

Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not
visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many of
them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and
corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos. These
were the miller's private calculations. There were also chalked in the
same place rows and rows of strokes like open palings, representing the
calculations of the grinder, who in his youthful ciphering studies had
not gone so far as Arabic figures.

In the court in front were two worn-out millstones, made useful again by
being let in level with the ground. Here people stood to smoke and
consider things in muddy weather; and cats slept on the clean surfaces
when it was hot. In the large stubbard-tree at the corner of the garden
was erected a pole of larch fir, which the miller had bought with others
at a sale of small timber in Damer's Wood one Christmas week. It rose
from the upper boughs of the tree to about the height of a fisherman's
mast, and on the top was a vane in the form of a sailor with his arm
stretched out. When the sun shone upon this figure it could be seen that
the greater part of his countenance was gone, and the paint washed from
his body so far as to reveal that he had been a soldier in red before he
became a sailor in blue. The image had, in fact, been John, one of our
coming characters, and was then turned into Robert, another of them. This
revolvin