When Mr. Fenwick reached the mill, he found old Brattle sitting alone on a fixed¹ bench in front of the house door with a pipe in his mouth. Mary Lowther was quite right in saying that the mill, in spite of its dilapidations,—perhaps by reason of them,—was as pretty as anything in Bullhampton. In the first place it was permeated² and surrounded by cool, bright, limpid³ little streams. One of them ran right through it, as it were, passing between the dwelling-house and the mill, and turning the wheel, which was there placed. This course was, no doubt, artificial, and the water ran more rapidly in it than it did in the neighbouring streamlets. There were sluice-gates, too, by which it could be altogether expelled, or kept up to this or that height; and it was a river absolutely under man’s control, in which no water-god could take delight. But there were other natural streams on each side of the building, the one being the main course of the Avon, and the other some offspring of a brooklet⁴, which joined its parent two hundred yards below, and fifty yards from the spot at which the ill-used working water was received back into its mother’s idle bosom⁵. Mill and house were thatched, and were very low. There were garrets in the roof, but they were so shaped that they could hardly be said to have walls to them at all, so nearly were they contained by the sloping roof. In front of the building there ran a road,—which after all was no more than a private lane. It crossed the smaller stream and the mill-run by two wooden bridges; but the river itself had been too large for the bridge-maker’s efforts, and here there was a ford⁶, with stepping-stones for foot passengers. The banks on every side were lined with leaning willows⁷, which had been pollarded over and over again, and which with their light-green wavy⁸ heads gave the place, from a distance, the appearance of a

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