[Illustration: _The stone dresser often steadied his forearm on a sack of meal as he worked. His hands were constantly bombarded with bits of stone and slivers of metal from the point of his pick or “millbill.” Some of these slivers became imbedded under the skin, and an itinerant stone dresser looking for work could prove his experience by “showing his metal,” i.e., the backs of his hands._] The grain, raised bag by bag through trapdoors on a rope sack hoist, is poured into a hopper above the stones, which are themselves entirely enclosed in an octagonal wooden box called the “stone casing” or “vat.” Suspended from the bottom of the hopper, an inclined trough or “shoe” carries the grain to the central opening of the runner stone. The turning of the drive shaft constantly joggles the shoe, and by raising or lowering one end of it the miller can regulate the flow of grain to the stones. The grain is ground as it works its way outward between the stones. At the outer edge of the bed stone the meal falls into the narrow space between the stone and the casing. There, air currents moving with the turning stone continually sweep the meal around to an opening in the floor of the casing. From this opening a chute leads downward to the sifting device on the lower floor. The sifter, on the left side of the mill as you look in from the platform, separates the bran from the meal. The miller can bag each product almost automatically, since the sifter, too, is constantly shaken by an ingenious connection to the mill’s driving mechanism. The entire mill, thus, is about as simple a machine as one could devise. The moving parts are few and could be called primitively clumsy in comparison to some of the sleek masterpieces of modern industrial design. The miller can make only three operating adjustments: in the sail area presented to the wind, in the rate of grain fed to the stones, and in the distance between the stones. He has no control over wind speed, cannot shift the gear ratio of the mill—or even shift the stones out of gear—and, finally, cannot determine his own hours of work and rest. Perhaps the reader will be inclined to marvel a bit that the product of such a mill is so good. And perhaps he will look with some compassion on a man who is so completely a slave to the elements. If some of the miller’s fellows have been disposed—on occasion—to take just a trifle more toll than law and custom allow, well, let him who is without fault cast the first stone. Millstone, that is. _SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING_ Greville Bathe and Dorothy Bathe, _Oliver Evans: A Chronicle of Early American Engineering_. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1935. Richard Bennett and John Elton, _History of Corn Milling_. 4 vols. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1897-1904.