Country Life
ALmosT the last of the old country mills within a wide district of the Home and Eastern Counties has just been dismantled. I know only of one that continues ; and its activities are capricious and few. The water has been turning wheels along the Valley of the Lea since Domesday ; and in this neighbourhood other antiquities remain in evidence of the busy past. For example a beam was renewed the other day in an old inn within a hand-shake of an even older mill ; and it bore the date 1280. These mills had a long span of prosperity, some of them a good thousand years ; for they were hardly less prosperous fifty years ago than in the Golden Days. " They were little gold-mines, even in my recollection," is the phrase of one of the Last of the Millers. But their day seems to be done. The utmost ambition of the inland village miller of to-day is, he says, to live rent-free. Some of these mills have been converted into country houses ; and in the Mesopotamia that every mill must be, some most beautiful private gardens now flourish ; and rainbow trout are successfully nursed in the old mill-race. Such happy conversion is not common, and what to do with the rest is a problem.
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