| |
| HE is said to have been the last Red Man | |
| In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed— | |
| If you like to call such a sound a laugh. | |
| But he gave no one else a laugher’s license. | |
| For he turned suddenly grave as if to say, | 5 |
| “Whose business,—if I take it on myself, | |
| Whose business—but why talk round the barn?— | |
| When it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.” | |
| You can’t get back and see it as he saw it. | |
| It’s too long a story to go into now. | 10 |
| You’d have to have been there and lived it. | |
| Then you wouldn’t have looked on it as just a matter | |
| Of who began it between the two races. | |
| |
| Some guttural exclamation of surprise | |
| The Red Man gave in poking about the mill | 15 |
| Over the great big thumping shuffling mill-stone | |
| Disgusted the Miller physically as coming | |
| From one who had no right to be heard from. | |
| “Come, John,” he said, “you want to see the wheel pit?” | |
| |
| He took him down below a cramping rafter, | 20 |
| And showed him, through a manhole in the floor, | |
| The water in desperate straits like frantic fish, | |
| Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails. | |
| Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it | |
| That jangled even above the general noise, | 25 |
| And came up stairs alone—and gave that laugh, | |
| And said something to a man with a meal-sack | |
| That the man with the meal-sack didn’t catch—then. | |
| Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right. | |
| |
