s out on the oak table
the cloth no longer covered, so that you might see all round. Then the
cistern--which after all had nothing to do with Sister Nora--was
carefully filled with water so that none should spill and make marks,
neither on the table nor yet on the mill itself, and then it was wound
up like a clock till you couldn't wind no further and it went click. And
then the water in the cistern was let run, and the wheels went round;
and Dave knew exactly what a water-mill was like, and was assured--only
this was a pious fiction--that the water made the wheels go round. The
truth was that the clockwork worked the wheels and made them pump back
the water as fast as ever it came down. And this is much better than in
real mills, because the same water does over and over again, and the
power never fails. But you have to wind it up. You can't expect
everything!

Granny Marrable gave a brief description of the model. Her brother, who
died young, made it because he was lame of one leg; which meant that
enforced inactivity had found a sedentary employment in mechanisms, not
that all lame folk make mills. Those two horses were Mr. Pitt and Mr.
Fox. That was her father standing at the window, with his pipe in his
mouth, a miracle of delicate workmanship. And that was the carman, Mr.
Muggeridge, who used to see to loading up the cart.

Children are very perverse in their perception of the relative
importance of things they are told, and Dave was enormously impressed
with Mr. Muggeridge. Silent analysis of the model was visible on his
face for awhile, and then he broke out into catechism:--"Whoy doesn't
the wheel-sacks come down emptied out?" said he. He had not got the
expression "wheat-sacks" right.

"Well, my dear," said Granny Marrable, who felt perhaps that this
question attacked a weak point, "if it was the mill itself, they would.
But now it's only done in small, we have to pretend." Dave lent himself
willingly to the admission of a transparent fiction, and it was
creditable to his liberality that he did so. For though the sacks were
ingeniously taken into the mill-roof under a projecting hood, they
reappeared instantly to go up again through a hole under the cart. Any
other arrangement would have been too complex; and, indeed, a pretence
that they took grain up and brought flour down might have seemed
affectation. A conventional treatment was necessary. It had one great
advantage, too: it liberated the carman for ac