Old Andrew Fisher sat at the mullioned western window of the house that stood higher up above the mill-pond, listening drowsily to the distant clack of the hopper. The mill, the manor-house, and many hundred fair acres of meadow and ploughed land and sheep-walk on the Down behind were his, and had been his forefathers' down from the days of the last Harry. More than one fair fortune had the mill ground out for them in the generations past; money--accumulated coin by coin, like the grains that together fill the bushel--accumulated by one and dissipated by the next. If report spoke truly, still another fortune had slowly piled itself up in Andrew's withered hand--weak in its grasp on his staff, but firm in its grasp on gold. Rich as he was known to be, he lived in the rude old way, spoke in the old rude tongue, and seemingly thought the old rude thought. His beehive chair was drawn up close to the open window, so that the light air of the hot summer afternoon might wander in and refresh him. High up in the cloudless azure, the swift, extending his wings like a black crescent, slid to and fro; the swallows, mere white specks in the dizzy blue, wheeled in ceaseless circles. For ninety seasons, as man and boy--for three generations of thirty years each--had Andrew looked from that window. There he played in his childhood; there he rested from his labours in the time of manhood; there he sat in his old age. The deep gashes he had made with his first boy's clasp-knife still showed in the edge of the oaken window-seat. They were cut when the First Napoleon was winning his earlier victories. There on the seat he had drummed with his knuckles--one heavy knock with the left hand, then two with the right in quick succession, and an inch apart on the board to change the sound, imitating the noise of the mill. Thence he had noted the changing seasons and the cycle of the years. Ninety times the snowdrop had hung her white flower under the sheltering wall. For ninety springs the corncrake's monotonous cry had resounded in the mowing-grass. The cuckoo came and went; the swallows sailed for the golden sands of the south; the leaves, brown and orange and crimson, dropped and died; the plover whistled over the uplands; the rain beat with pitiless fury against the pane, and swept before the howling blast along the fallow, ninety times. Hard as his own nether millstone was the heart of Andrew Fisher. The green buds of spring, the flowers of summer, the fruits of autumn, the dead leaves of winter--all the beauty and the glory of nigh on a century touched him not. Unchanged at heart still, like the everlasting hills around him. But even they bear flowers--ling, loved by the bees, and thyme.