ust up their clean, bright faces. If
Claude happened to step on one, the acrid smell made him think of
Mahailey, who had probably been out this very morning, gouging
the sod with her broken butcher knife and stuffing dandelion
greens into her apron. She always went for greens with an air of
secrecy, very early, and sneaked along the roadsides stooping
close to the ground, as if she might be detected and driven away,
or as if the dandelions were wild things and had to be caught
sleeping.

Claude was thinking, as he walked, of how he used to like to come
to mill with his father. The whole process of milling was
mysterious to him then; and the mill house and the miller's wife
were mysterious; even Enid was, a little--until he got her down
in the bright sun among the cat-tails. They used to play in the
bins of clean wheat, watch the flour coming out of the hopper and
get themselves covered with white dust.

Best of all he liked going in where the water-wheel hung dripping
in its dark cave, and quivering streaks of sunlight came in
through the cracks to play on the green slime and the spotted
jewel-weed growing in the shale. The mill was a place of sharp
contrasts; bright sun and deep shade, roaring sound and heavy,
dripping silence. He remembered how astonished he was one day,
when he found Mr. Royce in gloves and goggles, cleaning the
millstones, and discovered what harmless looking things they
were. The miller picked away at them with a sharp hammer until
the sparks flew, and Claude still had on his hand a blue spot
where a chip of flint went under the skin when he got too near.

Jason Royce must have kept his mill going out of sentiment, for
there was not much money in it now. But milling had been his
first business, and he had not found many things in life to be
sentimental about. Sometimes one still came upon him in dusty
miller's clothes, giving his man a day off. He had long ago
ceased to depend on the risings and fallings of Lovely Creek for
his power, and had put in a gasoline engine. The old dam now lay
"like a holler tooth," as one of his men said, grown up with
weeds and willow-brush.

Mr. Royce's family affairs had never gone as well as his
business. He had not been blessed with a son, and out of five
daughters he had succeeded in bringing up only two. People
thought the mill house damp and unwholesome. Until he built a
tenant's cottage and got a married man to take charge of the
mill, Mr. Royce was nev