grinding-room

Updated: June 15, 2025

This done, he walked round the mill in a more regardful attitude, and surveyed its familiar features one by one the panes of the grinding-room, now as heretofore clouded with flour as with stale hoar- frost; the meal lodged in the corners of the window-sills, forming a soil in which lichens grew without ever getting any bigger, as they had done since his smallest infancy; the mosses on the plinth towards the river, reaching as high as the capillary power of the walls would fetch up moisture for their nourishment, and the penned mill-pond, now as ever on the point of overflowing into the garden.

Thomas Hardy - The Trumpet-Major