The little boy did not show himself again.  I had hoped to find him outside.

Pondering, speculating, I now set out for the mill, which, I had already learned, was on the village side of the river.  Coming to a lane leading down to the river, I followed it, and then walked up a path outside the row of pollards, through a lovely meadow, where brown and white cows were eating and shining all over the thick deep grass.  Beyond the meadow, a wood on the side of a rising ground went parallel with the river a long way.  The river flowed on my right.  That is, I knew that it was flowing, but I could not have told how I knew, it was so slow.  Still swollen, it was of a clear brown, in which you could see the browner trouts darting to and fro with such a slippery gliding, that the motion seemed the result of will, without any such intermediate and complicate arrangement as brain and nerves and muscles.  The water-beetles went spinning about over the surface; and one glorious dragon-fly made a mist about him with his long wings.  And over all, the sun hung in the sky, pouring down life; shining on the roots of the willows at the bottom of the stream; lighting up the black head of the water-rat as he hurried across to the opposite bank; glorifying the rich green lake of the grass; and giving to the whole an utterance of love and hope and joy, which was, to him who could read it, a more certain and full revelation of God than any display of power in thunder, in avalanche, in stormy sea.  Those with whom the feeling of religion is only occasional, have it most when the awful or grand breaks out of the common; the meek who inherit the earth, find the God of the whole earth more evidently present—­I do not say more present, for there is no measuring of His presence—­more evidently present in the commonest things.  That which is best He gives most plentifully, as is reason with Him.  Hence the quiet fulness of ordinary nature; hence the Spirit to them that ask it.

I soon came within sound of the mill; and presently, crossing the stream that flowed back to the river after having done its work on the corn, I came in front of the building, and looked over the half-door into the mill.  The floor was clean and dusty.  A few full sacks, tied tight at the mouth—­they always look to me as if Joseph’s silver cup were just inside—­stood about.  In the farther corner, the flour was trickling down out of two wooden spouts into a wooden receptacle below.  The whole place was full of its own faint but pleasant odour.  No man was visible.  The spouts went on pouring the slow torrent of flour, as if everything could go on with perfect propriety of itself.  I could not even see how a man could get at the stones that I heard grinding away above, except he went up the rope that hung from the ceiling.  So I walked round the corner of the place, and found myself in the company of the water-wheel, mossy and green with ancient waterdrops, looking so furred and overgrown