OLD mills which were built to be worked by water power are mostly picturesque objects in the landscape. They command without fail certain advantages of situation. Certainly they are not likely to possess extensive views, where they stand in the low lands which claim a fall of water. But water is their specialty, and where there is water, there is generally wood. My readers must call up without any difficulty before their minds’ eyes pleasant pictures of such mills with their placid dams and flashing weirs, their great mill wheels and their noisy clappers, their dusty sacks and their equally dusty millers, so proverbial for their white coats as to have lent a popular name to one pollen sprinkled auriculus. Mill and water, wheel and man, are all set in a green leafy nook which forms the broadest possible contrast to the grey bare downs on which the windmill extends its giant arms and swings its flapping sails. Picture and song have enshrined the old water mills from the days when Constable the painter loved to represent on canvas such a Suffolk mill as that which was familiar to his youth, to the later days when Tennyson wrote his idyll of the Miller’s Daughter. Of all mills which had their sites chosen with reference to water, though the millers—not anticipating Mr. Ruskin’s objections—had long before the present day, by the help of machinery, set seasons of drought at defiance, none was more thoroughly picturesque in its own line of picturesqueness, pleasanter to all the senses, more homelike, restful and sweet, like a thrush’s nest or a tuft of primroses, than Friarton Mill in Holmshire. It was so evidently agreeable to the eye, and had attained to such an amount of fame for this desirable quality, that it had been suffered to remain where it had been built in primitive easy-going times, within a stone’s throw of the park of Copley Grange, and in full view of the manor-house. In fact it had been found that, after the fashion of those happy accidents which create leaning towers and whispering galleries, and which can never be copied with any certainty of success, the indifference to æsthetics which had made the old squire of Copley Grange permit the miller of his day to erect his mill at his liege lord’s elbow, had been oddly enough rewarded by furnishing the Squire’s descendants or successors with one of the choicest bits of what we may call landscape vertu—a home lion which, as the modern squires were not needy men, and had further acquired the modern culture of beauty to their finger tips, they would not have lacked for a good many broad acres. If the reigning miller and owner of Friarton Mill had been Vandal enough to propose to demolish it—which he could have done since his fathers had bought it and certain pasture fields of the original suzerain—he would have awakened the liveliest consternation in the breasts of his social superiors.