In it were a
table, a chair, a bed, and a cupboard. There was also a hanging
bookshelf, with a row of books on it, which Tom never opened now.
Through the ceiling of this room descended a ladder white with flour.
If you climbed this ladder you found yourself in a room smothered with
flour-dust, and your ears were almost deafened by the sound of the
machinery overhead which the wind-impelled mill-wheel kept in motion,
while the descending stream of ground flour travelled unceasingly down
from the grinding-wheel to the bin below. There was a ladder from this
room to the one above where the machinery was. There was also a room
over this from which you could get outside and regulate the small
spiny-looking wheel at the top so as to gain all the force of the wind.
All these rooms were festooned with cobwebs quite white with flour.
The spiders were white, too, which made them look larger. Even the
mice caught in the traps were white with flour.
Now at eight o'clock every evening Tom sat down at the round wooden
table, and ate his bread and cheese by the light of a tallow candle
inserted in the neck of a bottle. And every night at this time there
crept out from a crevice near the cupboard a tiny brown mouse, covered
with flour-dust. This little mouse seemed eager and hungry, but it
never ventured near the traps where the alluring cheese smelt so
deliciously. It would wait for Tom to drop a crumb, and then would
dart after it and frisk away into its hole, to return and watch again
for another crumb.
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