Thomas Hardy

The Trumpet-Major Thomas Hardy

Miller Loveday was the representative of an ancient family of corn-grinders whose history is lost inthe mists of antiquity. His ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, andDe La Zouche; but, owing to some trifling deficiency in the possessions of the house of Loveday, the individual names and intermarriages of its members were not recorded during the Middle Ages, and thus their private lives in any given century were uncertain. But it was known that the family hadformed matrimonial alliances with farmers not so very small, and once with a gentleman-tanner, whohad for many years purchased after their death the horses of the most aristocratic persons in thecounty-fiery steeds that earlier in their career had been valued at many hundred guineas. It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday's great-grandparents had been eight in number, and hisgreat-great-grandparents sixteen, every one of whom reached to years of discretion: at every stagebackwards his sires and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they became a vast body of Gothicladies and gentlemen of the rank known as ceorls or villeins, full of importance to the country atlarge, and ramifying throughout the unwritten history of England. His immediate father had greatlyimproved the value of their residence by building a new chimney, and setting up an additional pairof millstones. Overcombe Mill presented at one end the appearance of a hard-worked house slipping into theriver, and at the other of an idle, genteel place, half-cloaked with creepers at this time of the year, and having no visible connexion with flour. It had hips instead of gables, giving it a roundshouldered look, four chimneys with no smoke coming out of them, two zigzag cracks in the wall, several open windows, with a looking-glass here and there inside, showing its warped back to thepasser-by; snowy dimity curtains waving in the draught; two mill doors, one above the other, theupper enabling a person to step out upon nothing at a height of ten feet from the ground; a gapingarch vomiting the river, and a lean, long-nosed fellow looking out from the mill doorway, who wasthe hired grinder, except when a bulging fifteen stone man occupied the same place, namely, themiller hims