Inserting a key into the rusty lock, which was much too large for it, Abel opened the door, and counted Solomon Hatch’s sacks of grist, which stood in a row beside a raised platform where an old mill-stone was lying.  Other sacks belonging to other farmers were arranged in an orderly group in one corner, and his eye passed to them in a businesslike appraisement of their contents.  According to an established custom of toll, the eighth part of the grain belonged to the miller; and this had enabled him to send his own meal to the city markets, where there was an increasing demand for the coarse, water-ground sort.  Some day he purposed to turn out the old worn-out machinery and supply its place with modern inventions, but as yet this ambition was remote, and the mill, worked after the process of an earlier century, had raised his position to one of comparative comfort and respectability.  He was known to be a man of character and ambition.  Already his name had been mentioned as a possible future representative of the labouring classes in the Virginia assembly.  “There is no better proof of the grit that is in the plain people than the rise of Abel Revercomb out of Abner, his father,” some one had said of him.  And from the day when he had picked his first blackberries for old Mr. Jonathan and tied his earnings in a stocking foot as the beginning of a fund for schooling, the story of his life had been one of struggle and of endurance.  Transition had been the part of the generation before him.  In him the democratic impulse was no longer fitful and uncertain, but had expanded into a stable and indestructible purpose.

Before starting the wheel, which he did by thrusting his arm through the window and lifting the gate on the mill-race, Abel took up a broom, made of sedges bound crudely together, and swept the smooth bare floor, which was polished like that of a ballroom by the sacks of meal that had been dragged back and forth over the boards.  From the rafters above, long pale cobwebs were blown gently in the draught between the door and window, and when the mill had started, the whole building reverberated to the slow revolutions of the wheel outside.

The miller had poured Solomon Hatch’s grist into the hopper, and was about to turn the wooden crank at the side, when a shadow fell over the threshold, and Archie Revercomb appeared, with a gun on his shoulder and several fox-hounds at his heels.

“You’ll have to get Abner to help you dress that mill-rock, Abel,” he said, “I’m off for the morning.  That’s a good pup of yours, but he’s old enough to begin learning.”

With the inherited idleness of the Revercombs, he combined the headstrong impulses and dogged obstinacy of his mother’s stock, yet because of his personal charm, these faults were not only tolerated but even admired by his family.

“You’re always off in the mornings when there’s work to be done,” replied Abel, “but for heaven’s sake, bring home a string of hares to put ma into a better humour.  She whets her tongue on me and I’ll be hanged if it’s right.”