The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy

Miller Loveday was the representative of an ancient family of / corn-grinders whose history is lost in the mists of antiquity. His / ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, and De La / Zouche; but, owing to some trifling deficiency in the possessions of the / house of Loveday, the individual names and intermarriages of its members / were not recorded during the Middle Ages, and thus their private lives in / any given century were uncertain. But it was known that the family had / formed matrimonial alliances with farmers not so very small, and once / with a gentleman-tanner, who had for many years purchased after their / death the horses of the most aristocratic persons in the county -- fiery / steeds that earlier in their career had been valued at many hundred / guineas.

It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday's great-grandparents had been / eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen, every one of / whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage backwards his sires / and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they became a vast body of / Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known as ceorls or villeins, full / of importance to the country at large, and ramifying throughout the / unwritten history of England. His immediate father had greatly improved / the value of their residence by building a new chimney, and setting up an / additional pair of millstones.

Overcombe Mill presented at one end the appearance of a hard-worked house / slipping into the river, and at the other of an idle, genteel place, half- / cloaked with creepers at this time of the year, and having no visible / connexion with flour. It had hips instead of gables, giving it a round- / shouldered look, four chimneys with no smoke coming out of them, two / zigzag cracks in the wall, several open windows, with a looking-glass / here and there inside, showing its warped back to the passer-by; snowy / dimity curtains waving in the draught; two mill doors, one above the / other, the upper enabling a person to step out upon nothing at a height / of ten feet from the ground; a gaping arch vomiting the river, and a / lean, long-nosed fellow looking out from the mill doorway, who was the / hired grinder, except when a bulging fifteen stone man occupied the same / place, namely, the miller himself.

Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not / visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many of / them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and / corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos. These / were the miller's private calculations. There were also chalked in the / same place rows and rows of strokes like open palings, representing the / calculations of the grinder, who in his youthful ciphering studies had / not gone so far as Arabic figures.

In the court in front were two worn-out millstones, made useful again by / being let in level with the ground. Here people stood to smoke and / consider things in muddy weather; and cats slept on the clean surfaces / when it was hot. In the large stubbard-tree at the corner of the garden / was erected a pole of larch fir, which the miller had bought with others / at a sale of small timber in Damer's Wood one Christmas week. It rose / from the upper boughs of the tree to about the height of a fisherman's / mast, and on the top was a vane in the form of a sailor with his arm / stretched out. When the sun shone upon this figure it could be seen that / the greater part of his countenance was gone, and the paint washed from / his body so far as to reveal that he had been a soldier in red before he / became a sailor in blue. The image had, in fact, been John, one of our / coming characters, and was then turned into Robert, another of them. This / revolving piece of statuary could not, however, be relied on as a vane, / owing to the neighbouring hill, which formed variable currents in the / wind.

The leafy and quieter wing of the mill-house was the part occupied by / Mrs. Garland and her daughter, who made up in summer-time for the / narrowness of their quarters by overflowing into the garden on stools and / chairs. The parlour or dining-room had a stone floor -- a fact which the / widow sought to disguise by double carpeting, lest the standing of Anne / and herself should be lowered in the public eye. Here now the mid-day / meal went lightly and mincingly on, as it does where there is no greedy / carnivorous man to keep the dishes about, and was hanging on the close / when somebody entered the passage as far as the chink of the parlour / door, and tapped. This proceeding was probably adopted to kindly avoid / giving trouble to Susan, the neighbour's pink daughter, who helped at / Mrs. Garland's in the mornings, but was at that moment particularly / occupied in standing on the water-butt and gazing at the soldiers, with / an inhaling position of the mouth and circular eyes.

There was a flutter in the little dining-room -- the sensitiveness of / habitual solitude makes hearts beat for preternaturally small reasons -- and / a guessing as to who the visitor might be. It was some military / gentleman from the camp perhaps? No; that was impossible. It was the / parson? No; he would not come at dinner-time. It was the well-informed / man who travelled with drapery and the best Birmingham earrings? Not at / all; his time was not till Thursday at three. Before they could think / further the visitor moved forward another step, and the diners got a / glimpse of him through the same friendly chink that had afforded him a / view of the Garland dinner-table.

'O! It is only Loveday.'