Below the Mill Dam

"Book — Book — Domesday Book!" They were letting in the water for the evening stint at Robert's Mill, and the wooden Wheel where lived the Spirit of the Mill settled to its nine hundred year old song: "Here Azor, a freeman, held one rod, but it never paid geld. _Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit_. Here Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough — and wood for six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings — _unum molinum_ — one mill. Reinbert's mill — Robert's Mill. Then and afterwards and now — _tunc et post et modo_ — Robert's Mill. Book — Book — Domesday Book!"

"I confess," said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his whiskers — "I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it means." He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

"Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy," said the Grey Cat, coiled up on a piece of sacking.

"But I know what you mean," she added. "To sit by right at the heart of things — eh?"

"Yes," said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones thuttered on the grist. "To possess — er — all this environment as an integral part of one's daily life must insensibly of course ... You see?"

"I feel," said the Grey Cat. "Indeed, if _we_ are not saturated with the spirit of the Mill, who should be?"

"Book — Book — Domesday Book!" the Wheel, set to his work, was running off the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and forwards: "_In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit_. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin' fellow — friend of mine. He married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the Normans as upstarts. An' Agemond's dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten Fifty-Nine.... _Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit_. Book! Book! Domesday Book!"

"After all," the Grey Cat continued, "atmospere is life. It is the influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside" — she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door — "there is an absurd convention that rats and cats are, I won't go so far as to say natural enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective — I don't for a minute presume to set up my standards as final — among the ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why, because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the ultimate destination of a sack of — er — middlings don't they call them — — "