all trades, but I don't remember a drunken miller. There is something in their trade that keeps them to it, and out of the ale-house. The wind and the water will be attended to, and so there is not much opportunity to attend to the beer or the gin-shop. Besides, if a miller were apt to get drunk, he would be apt to get drowned very soon, in the mill stream, or knocked on the head by a sail.

There's something pleasant and sober and serious in a mill. The wheel goes coursing round, and the pleasant water sparkles and plunges under it, or the great sails go whirling and whirling round, and the clear air of the hill top gives you more cheeriness than any drink; and the clapper claps pleasantly; and the mill keeps up a pleasant swaying and tremor, and the flour comes sliding down the hoppers into the sacks, and all is white and dusty, and yet clean; the mill and the sacks and the hoppers and the flour, and the miller's clothes, and his whiskers, and his hat; and his face is meally, and ruddy through the meal, and all is wholesome and peaceful, and has something in it that makes a man quietly and pleasantly grave.

Luke Barnicott was now the staid and grey-haired man of sixty: he had no actual need of the hair-powder of the mill to make him look venerable. On Sundays, when he was washed and dressed-up to appear at church, his head seemed still to retain the flour, though it had gone from his clothes, and his ruddy face had no mealy vail on it. Beckey, his wife, was grown the sober old woman, but still hale and active. She came to church in her black gipsy hat, all her white mob cap showing under it, in large patterned flouncing gown, in black stockings, high-heeled shoes, and large brass buckles that had been her grandmother's. On week days she might be seen in a more homely dress fetching water from the spring below, or digging up the potatoes in the garden for dinner. At other times she sat knitting in the fine weather on a seat facing to the evening sun, but giving shade in the earlier part of the day, under a rude porch of poles and sticks over the door, up which she trained every year a growth of scarlet runners, whilst around and under the windows grew the usual assortment of herbs, rue and camomile, rosemary and pennyroyal.

The Barnicotts lived at the old Reckoning House, so called because, when the collieries were active, just in that quarter, the men were paid their wages there. It was a very ordinary-looking brick tenement, now divided into two dwellings, in one of which to the west lived Luke and Beckey, and on the east side lived Tom Smith, the stockinger or stocking-weaver, and Peggy his wife. Tom Smith's frame kept up a pretty constant grating and droning sound, such as you hear in many a village of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire, and in some parts of Normandy, and it was almost the only sound that you heard about the Reckoning House, for neither of the families had any children, except one boy, the young Luke Barnicott, the grandson of the old Barnicotts. The Barnicotts' only son Patrick had been a great trouble to his parents, the shadow-spot in their lives. He had got amongst a wild set of young fellows of the neighbourhood, had been sharply scolded by old Luke, and in a fit of passion had gone for a soldier. He had died in the war in Spain, and his wife had died soon after of a fever, caught in nursing somebody suffering under that contagious affection. They had left their only child to the old folks, who was now a lad of about fourteen, and as mercurial and mischievous an imp as the neighbourhood could furnish. From the moment that he could run about he was in some scrape or some danger. He strolled about the common, plaguing asses and sheep and cattle that were grazing there, hunting up birds' nests and wasps' nests, hanging over the sides of a deep pond just below the Reckoning House, surrounded by thick trees, and more than once had gone headlong in, and came home streaming with water like a spout on a rainy day. Old Luke said he would go after his father if he escaped drowning or tumbling into some pit; and poor old Beckey was just like a hen with a duckling with this one little vagabond. Sometimes he was seen climbing on the mill sails, sometimes on the very ridge of a house, and looking down the chimney for swallow nests, at other times he was up in trees so high, swinging out on a long bough after some nests, so dizzily, that it made his poor old granny's head ache for a week after. They put him as soon as possible to the school in Monnycrofts to keep him out of danger, but sometimes, instead of reaching the school, he had been wiled away by his love of rambling into some distant wood, or along some winding brook, and looking after fish, when he should be conning his lesson. At others, instead of returning home at night after school, he was got into the blacksmith's shop, watching old Blowbellows at the glowing forge, and often in danger of having his eyes burnt by the large flying sparks, or having a kick from a horse that was being shod. Sometimes poor old Beckey had to go to the village of a dark stormy winter's evening to hunt up the truant with her lanthorn, and would find him after all at one of the pits sitting by the blazing fire, in a cabin made of blocks of coal, listening to the talk of the colliers over their ale.

When, however, young Luke Barnicott had nearly reached the age of fourteen, and had been set to scare birds in the fields, and to drive plough for the farmers, and gather stones from the land, and had gleaned in the autumn, and slid on the Marlpool in the winter, he took a fancy to become a collier. He was arrayed in a suit of coarse flannel, consisting of wide trousers and a sort of short slop, with an old hat with the brim cut off, and was sent down sitting on a chain at the end of a rope into the yawning pit sixty yards deep. There he was sent to drive a little railway train of coal waggons drawn by a pony in these subterranean regions, from the benk or face of the coal stratum, where the colliers were at work, to the pit's mouth; but Luke soon grew tired of that. He did not fancy living in the dark, and away from the sun and pleasant fields, so one day, as the master of the pits was standing on the pit-bank, up was turned Luke Barnicott, as invalided. He was lifted out of the chain by the colliers, and as he writhed about and seemed in great pain, the coal-master asked where he was hurt. He replied, in his leg. "Show me the place," said the master. Luke, with a good deal of labour and a look of much distress, drew off a stocking and showed a leg black enough with coal dust, but without any apparent wound. "Where is the hurt?" asked the master. "Here," said Luke, putting his hand tenderly on the calf. The master pressed it. Luke pretended to flinch, but the master did not feel satisfied. "Bring some water and wash the leg," he said, and water was soon brought in an old tin. The leg was washed, but no bruise, no blueness were visible. "Pshaw!" said the master, "that is nothing to make a squeak about." "Oh, it is the other leg, I think," said Luke. "The other leg!" exclaimed the master. "What! the fox has a wound and he does not know where! Pull off the other stocking." The stocking was pulled off by the colliers, but no injury was to be found! "Come, Barnicott," said the master, "so you are playing the old soldier over us! Why, what is the meaning of it?" "To say the truth, master," said Luke, with a sheepish look, "the fact was—I was daunted!"

At this confession the colliers set up a shout of laughter; and the master, with a suppressed smile, bade him begone about his business. After this Luke was some time at a loose end; he had nothing to do, and nobody would employ him. The story of his being "daunted" flew all round the neighbourhood, and he was looked on as a lazy, shifty lad, that was not to be trusted to. He strolled about the common, the asses and the sheep, and the geese, and the young cattle grazing there had a worse time of it than ever. The old people were in great distress about him; the grandfather's prediction that he would