Explore "The Mill of Silence" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If it had many a time occurred to me, since first I heard of the jar of coins, that the secret of their concealment was connected somehow within the room of silence, it must have done so from that old association of my father with a place that the rest of us so dreaded and avoided. The scorn of superstitious terror that he showed in his choice; the certainty that none would dream of looking there; the encouragement his own mysterious actions gave to the sense of a haunting atmosphere that seemed ever to hang about the neighborhood of the room -- these were all so many justifications of the wisdom of his choice.
Now I understood the secret of that everlasting lubrication; for had anything happened, when he might chance to be absent, to choke or damage the structure of the ancient wheel, the stoppage or ruin ensuing might have laid bare the hiding-place to any curious eye; for, as part of his general policy, I conclude, no veto except the natural one of dread was ever laid on our entering the room itself if we wished to.