The latter offered the great excitement of
sitting on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which
was cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to
escape a sudden and gory death. But the flouring mill was much
more beloved. It was full of dusky, floury places which we
adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a
basement, with piles of bran and shorts which were almost as good
as sand to play in, whenever the miller let us wet the edges of
the pile with water brought in his sprinkling pot from the
mill-race.
In addition to these fascinations was the association of the mill
with my father's activities, for doubtless at that time I
centered upon him all that careful imitation which a little girl
ordinarily gives to her mother's ways and habits. My mother had
died when I was a baby and my father's second marriage did not
occur until my eighth year.
I had a consuming ambition to posses a miller's thumb, and would
sit contentedly for a long time rubbing between my thumb and
fingers the ground wheat as it fell from between the millstones,
before it was taken up on an endless chain of mysterious little
buckets to be bolted into flour. I believe I have never since
wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to
be flattened, as my father's had become, during his earlier years
of a miller's life.
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