Years gone by, and not so many years either, you might from one spot have seen half a dozen or more windmills busily at work where now by chance you may see one; and in those past years you might have seen farmers' waggons slowly wending their way to the mill loaded with sacks of corn to be ground, or wending their way back white with fat sacks of flour. Now, except possibly in some parts of Sussex, to see a windmill with its hurtling sails is a rare sight. Grieved indeed am I that it should be so, for as a child I dearly loved the merry bickering windmill--what child does not? Now I have grown to man's estate I have not lost the old love of the sight of one. There is something very cheery and fascinating in watching the mill sails whirling round and round in their never-completed journey, now grey in shade, now white in the glance of the sun. But I sadly fear the dear old picturesque windmill is doomed, unless the manufactured article flour, not the raw material wheat, is taxed. I am no politician--I think I have said so already--for in an age when it seems to me, to misquote Macaulay, "all are for the party and none are for the State," the business of politics, as one of the Georges, I forget now which, remarked, "is not to my fancy." I preach neither free trade nor tariff reform; I have not studied the question, and I do not profess to know the facts of the case without study, as some people do--even members of Parliament who vote for their party right or wrong; it would probably cost them their seat and four hundred golden sovereigns a year if they did otherwise. But this I know, for I have tested it, that stone-ground flour produced by the old-fashioned windmill is infinitely sweeter, more nutritious, and more wholesome than the foreign roller-mill flour that is so starchy, "hence the present-day indigestion and the decay of teeth." Then, again, there is the fact, of which some clever people lose sight, that by importing flour and not wheat to grind at home we lose the valuable asset of "waste" as a fattening food for fowls, pigs, and cattle.