My father was a just and upright man,—I can see him now dipping his bent wooden measure into the hopper of grain and taking out his toll, never a single kernel more than was his due. No doubt the suspicious farmers who brought their sacks of wheat and corn often thought that he dipped out more grain than he had a right to take; and even many of those who knew that he did not, still thought he was a fool because he failed to make the most of the opportunities he had. As I grew up, I learned that there are all sorts of people in the world, and that selfishness and greed and envy are, to say the least, very common in the human heart; but I never could be thankful enough that my father was honest and simple, and that his love of truth and justice had grown into his being as naturally as the oaks were rooted to the earth along the little stream. The old wheel ceased turning long ago. The last stick of timber in its wondrous mechanism has rotted and decayed; the old mill itself has vanished from the earth. The drying stream and the great mills of the new Northwest long since conspired to destroy my father’s simple trade. Even the dam has been washed away, and a tiny thread of water now trickles down over the hill where the rushing flood fell full upon the great turning wheel. Last summer I went back to linger, like a ghost, around the old familiar spot; and I found that even the great unexplored pond had dried up, and a field of corn was growing peacefully upon the soil that once upheld this treacherous sea. And the old miller too, with his kindly, simple, honest face,—the old miller with his great white coat,—he too is gone, gone as completely as his father and all the other fathers and grandfathers who have come and gone; the dear, kind old miller, who listened to my childish questions, and taught me, or rather tried to teach me, what was right and wrong, has grown weary and lain down to rest, and will soon be quite forgotten by the world,—unless this story shall bring his son so much fame that some of the glory shall be reflected back to him. Somehow the mill seems to have made a stronger impression than the house on my young mind. Perhaps it was because it was the only mill that I had ever seen or known; perhaps because the associations that naturally attached to the mill and its surroundings were such as appeal most to the mind of a little child. Of course, from the very nature of things the home and family must have been among my earliest recollections; yet I cannot help feeling that much of the literature about childhood’s home has been written for effect,—or not to describe home as it really is to the child, but from someone’s ideal of what home ought to be.