rs and about her relations in London.

The miller is a MAN. He showed us all over the mills--both kinds--and
let us go right up into the very top of the wind-mill, and showed us
how the top moved round so that the sails could catch the wind, and
the great heaps of corn, some red and some yellow (the red is English
wheat), and the heaps slice down a little bit at a time into a square
hole and go down to the mill-stones. The corn makes a rustling soft
noise that is very jolly--something like the noise of the sea--and you
can hear it through all the other mill noises.

Then the miller let us go all over the water-mill. It is fairy palaces
inside a mill. Everything is powdered over white, like sugar on pancakes
when you are allowed to help yourself. And he opened a door and showed
us the great water-wheel working on slow and sure, like some great,
round, dripping giant, Noel said, and then he asked us if we fished.

'Yes,' was our immediate reply.

'Then why not try the mill-pool?' he said, and we replied politely; and
when he was gone to tell his man something we owned to each other that
he was a trump.

He did the thing thoroughly. He took us out and cut us ash saplings for
rods; he found us in lines and hooks, and several different sorts of
bait, including a handsome handful of meal-worms, which Oswald put loose
in his pocket.

When it came to bait, Alice said she was going home with Dora and Daisy.
Girls are strange, mysterious, silly things. Alice always enjoys a rat
hunt until the rat is caught, but she hates fishing from beginning to
end. We boys have got to like it. We don't feel now as we did when
we turned off the water and stopped the competition of the competing
anglers. We had a grand day's fishing that day. I can't think what made
the miller so kind to us. Perhaps he felt a thrill of fellow-feeling in
his manly breast for his fellow-sportsmen, for he was a noble fisherman
himself.

We had glorious sport--eight roach, six dace, three eels, seven perch,
and a young pike, but he was so very young the miller asked us to put
him back, and of course we did. 'He'll live to bite another day,' said
the miller.

The miller's wife gave us bread and cheese and more Eiffel Tower
lemonade, and we went home at last, a little damp, but full of
successful ambition, with our fish on a string.

It had been a strikingly good time--one of those times that happen in
the country quite by themselves. Country people are muc