The dried meal was delivered at Havana perfectly fresh, and
pay received, in those good old days of barter, in Jamaica rum, sugar
and coffees. In the old times flour was heaped in the barrels and
patted down with wooden shovels: then, when full, a cloth was laid
over the top, and the fattest journeyman on the premises clambered up
to a seat on the heap, to "cheese it down" and imprint his callipyge
upon it. Flour thus made and branded was always safe to bring a high
price, but never so high as in the short epoch of the Continental
currency, when the old entries of the Brandywine Mill books show
(1780) wheat bought at twenty-four pounds a bushel, a pair of the
miller's leather small-clothes at eighty pounds, and some three or
four hundred barrels of his flour charged at a gross sum of twenty-one
thousand pounds.
The fine old mills are still in lively operation, manufacturing into
meal about a million bushels of wheat and Indian corn every year. The
principal proprietor receives us in his domain, the living image of
easy, old-fashioned prosperity, and narrates the long history of the
structures, showing his little museum of curiosities--now a whale's
jaw bequeathed from the old fishing days, now a Revolutionary
cannon-ball--and helps us to realize the ancient times by means of the
music of the mill, which is loquacious now as it was under George III.
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