Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 17, 2025
The ‘sit-down supper’ was excellent; there were four barley-sugar temples on the table, which would have looked beautiful if they had not melted away when the supper began; and a water-mill, whose only fault was that instead of going round, it ran over the table-cloth. Then there were fowls, and tongue, and trifle, and sweets, and lobster salad, and potted beef—and everything.
She sat on the bank of a narrow stream; she had a red handkerchief on her head and a small basket was lying on the ground near her hand. At a little distance could be seen a cluster of log cabins, with a water-mill over a dammed pool shaded by birch trees and looking bright as glass in the twilight.
Next, the party looked at a Crimean bitch which, though blind and fast nearing her end, had, two years ago, been a truly magnificent dog. At all events, so said Nozdrev. Next came another bitch also blind; then an inspection of the water-mill, which lacked the spindle-socket wherein the upper stone ought to have been revolving "fluttering," to use the Russian peasant's quaint expression.
In her girlhood, a father, a son, and a grandson had been all killed on a lonely part of the higher valley because they had dared to occupy a farm and a water-mill after one of these hillmen had laid down the law that no one was to live on the land or to set the waterwheel moving.
"If I were what I was yesterday, she wouldn't run even with me," thought the King; but they were doing good work together, and he was too true a knight and too true a gentleman to be jealous of Mother o' Pearl, so they raced neck-and-neck through the dawn; with the noisy clatter of water-mill wheels, or the distant sound of a woodman's ax, or the tolling bell of a convent clock, the only sound on the air save the beat of the flying hoofs.
A grassy old embankment to protect low-lying fields is Nature, and so is all the mass of apparatus about a water-mill; a new embankment to store an urban water supply, though it may be one mass of splendid weeds, is artificial, and ugly. A wooden windmill is Nature and beautiful, a sky-sign atrocious. Mountains have become Nature and beautiful within the last hundred years volcanoes even.
Wherever we go, we find anglers sitting patiently by these lovely green banks, and certainly the mere prospect they have before them clear water reflecting water-mill and lofty poplar trees and shelving banks now a tangle of wild flowers is enough to make such indolence agreeable. But, after days and days of fruitless waiting for the prey that always eludes them, we do wonder at such persistence.
Nothing could equal the ease and cordiality with which this charming family received me. The miller with his three elder sons had come straight from the mill. Well-educated gentlemen are not ashamed of manual labour in France. How I wished I could have spent days, nay weeks, in the neighbourhood of the water-mill!
The Constables have been long in the district. The grandfather was a farmer at a village close by. The father, who was well-to-do, purchased a water-mill at Dedham and two windmills at East Bergholt, where he lived.
So they passed down the broad path that led from the garden to the drawbridge by the water-mill, and seating themselves on a bank under the shade of the trees, began to kiss and caress, as may well become a young bridal pair to do. Soon they heard nine o'clock strike from the town, and immediately after, stealthy footsteps coming along the shrubbery towards them.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking