As to the inmates, they were engaged in the yard in a very curious occupation. Just outside the store-house was the most greedy-looking machine we ever set eyes on—all teeth and jaw, without even the decency of a stomach. It turned out to be a stamping-mill for beating flax, which we had already noticed on our way, going through preliminary processes of water-retting and grassing. At first sight the masticator looked like a monstrous variety of the trap which children use for ‘bat and ball;’ it was all of wood, except a metal pivot or axis, on which the upper jaw worked, and its motive power was supplied by two Croats, a man and a woman, who took their stand on the upper jaw, and, placing one foot on each side of the pivot, imparted a see-sawing motion to it, by throwing their weight simultaneously first on one foot and then on the other, from which treading the mill gains the Croatian name _Stupa_ or tread-mill. Meanwhile another woman took a wisp of the ready retted and dried flax, and fed the wooden crocodile with it; and when it had been sufficiently chewed, and the useless stem or boom separated from the useful bark or harl, she handed the wisp on to another woman, who combed out the fibres in a heckle, made by the simple process of sticking iron nails through a paw of wood fixed into the fence, and being now both clawed and chewed, the flax was laid in a heap, and the preparation was concluded. The mill seems a very primitive form of the Scotch foot-brake, but it is at least better than the hand-mill of our forefathers, for the principle of co-operation of labour is invoked, and the flax therefore prepared more expeditiously. One would think that the fact that the rude Croats of the Granitza have arrived at a stage of manufacture even so comparatively advanced as this, may be due to an advantageous influence of the Communistic system. For if self-interest is in the long run the best spur to industry, yet it sometimes keeps it back, owing to a want of readiness to combine with others. But here we find the common interest of the house-community in the results of labour, teaching the great economic lesson of combination, though it certainly discourages extraordinary energy in individuals. Thus the land is tilled in common, the harvest gathered in in common, and, _ceteris paribus_, it is far more probable that agricultural machinery could be introduced in one of the large Granitza families, containing some three hundred members, than in a village of the same population tenanted by the small, selfish peasant-farmers of France or Germany.