ge distance perhaps;) having twelve persons in family,
having forty pigs to feed, and twenty hogs to fatten, the savings of such
a mill would pay the whole expenses of it the very first year. Such a
farmer cannot send less than _fifty times_ a year to the mill. Think of
that, in the first place! The elements are not always propitious:
sometimes the water fails, and sometimes the wind. Many a farmer's wife
has been tempted to vent her spleen on both. At best, there must be horse
and man, or boy, and, perhaps, cart, to go to the mill; and that, too,
observe, in all weathers, and in the harvest as well as at other times of
the year. The case is one of imperious necessity: neither floods nor
droughts, nor storms nor calms, will allay the cravings of the kitchen,
nor quiet the clamorous uproar of the stye. Go, somebody must, to some
place or other, and back they must come with flour and with meal. One
summer many persons came down the country more than fifty miles to a mill
that I knew in Pennsylvania; and I have known farmers in England carry
their grists more than fifteen miles to be ground. It is surprising, that,
under these circumstances, hand-mills and horse-mills should not, long
ago, have become of more general use; especially when one considers that
the labour, in this case, would cost the farmer next to nothing. To grind
would be the work of a wet day. There is no farmer who does not at least
fifty days in every year exclaim, when he gets up in the morning, "What
shall I set _them_ at to-day?" If he had a mill, he would make them pull
off their shoes, sweep all out clean, winnow up some corn, if he had it
not already done, and grind and dress, and have every thing in order. No
scolding within doors about the grist; no squeaking in the stye; no boy
sent off in the rain to the mill.

97. But there is one advantage which I have not yet mentioned; and which
is the greatest of all; namely, that you would have the power of supplying
your married labourers; your blacksmith's men sometimes; your
wheelwright's men at other times; and, indeed, the greater part of the
persons that you employed, with good flour, instead of their going to
purchase their flour, after it had passed through the hands of a Corn
Merchant, a Miller, a Flour Merchant, and a Huckster, every one of whom
does and must have a profit out of the flour, arising from wheat grown
upon, and sent away from, your very farm! I used to let all my people have
flour a