It was, as I have said, one of the pleasantest places in the world. To begin with, the colour and softness of it all! The window-glass was powdered white, and the light came through white and dim, and lay about in long powdery shafts, and these were white, too, instead of yellow. So was the very dust white; or rather, it was good oatmeal and wheat flour that lay thick and crumbling on the rafters above, and the wheels and pulleys and other gear. As for Ham, the first time Yvon saw him in the mill, he cried out "Mont Blanc!" and would not call him anything else for some time. For Ham was whiter than all the rest, in his working-dress, cap and jacket and breeches, white to begin with, and powdered soft and furry, like his face and eyebrows, with the flying meal. Down-stairs there was plenty of noise; oats and corn and wheat pouring into the hoppers, and the great stones going round and round, and wheels creaking and buzzing, and belts droning overhead. Yvon could not talk at all here, and I not too much; only Ham's great voice and his father's (old Mr. Belfort was Ham over again, gray under the powder, instead of pink and brown) could roar on quietly, if I may so express it, rising high above the rattle and clack of the machinery, and yet peaceful as the stream outside that turned the great wheels and set the whole thing flying. So, as he could not live long without talking, Yvon loved best the loft above, where the corn was stored, both in bags and unground, and where the big blowers were, and the old green fire-engine, and many other curious things. I had known them all my life, but they were strange to him, and he never tired, any more than if he had been a boy of ten. Sometimes I wondered if he could be twenty-two, as he said; sometimes when he would swing himself on to the slide, where the bags of meal and flour were loaded on to the wagons. Well, Melody, it was a thing to charm a boy's heart; it makes mine beat a little quicker to think of it, even now; perhaps I was not much wiser than my friend, after all. This was a slide some three feet wide, and say seven or eight feet long, sloping just enough to make it pleasant, and polished till it shone, from the bags that rubbed along it day after day, loading the wagons as they backed up under it. Nothing would do but we must slide down this, as if, I say, we were children of ten years old, coming down astride of the meal-sacks, and sending a plump of flour into the air as we struck the wagon. Father Belfort thought Yvon was touched in the brain; but he was all the more gentle on this account. Boys were not allowed on the slide, unless it were a holiday, or some boy had had a hard time with sickness or what not; it was a treat rarely given, and the more prized for that. But Yvon and I might slide as much as we pleased. "Keep him cheerful, Jakey!" the dear old man would say. "Let him kibobble all he's a mind to! I had a brother once was looney, and we