Page:The Swiss Family Robinson - 1851.djvu/287

268 to form it into little round grains. This is my only difficulty; but I will consider it over; and I have my miil to think on first. I have a confused recollection of a powder manufactory at Berne: there was some raachinery which went by water; this machinery moved some hammers, which pounded and mixed the ingrcdients&mdash;was not this the case, father?"

"Something like it," said I; "but we have many things to do before making powder. First, we must go to sleep; we must set out before daybreak, if we intend to return to-morrow evening." We did indeed rise before the sun, which would not rise for us. The sky as very cloudy, and shortly we had an abundant and incessant rain, which obliged us to defer our journey, and put us all in bad humour, but my wife, who was not sorry to keep us with her, and who declared this gracious rain would water her garden, and bring it forward. Fritz was the first who consoled himself; he thought on nothing but building mills, and manufacturing gunpowder. He begged me to draw him a mill; this was very easy, so far as regards the exterior,&mdash;that is, the wheel, and the waterfall that set it in motion; but the interior,&mdash;the disposition of the wheels, the stones to bruise the grain, the sieve, or bolter, to separate the flour from the bran; all this complicated machinery was difficult to explain; but he comprehended all, adding his usual expressqon,&mdash;"I will try, and I shall succeed." Not to lose any time, and to profit by this rainy day, he began by making sieves of different materi}ds, which he fastened to a circle of pliant wood, and tried by passing through them the flour of the cassava; he made some with