Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/234

220 a hopper, whence it goes down through successive kneading-troughs, and is at last forced out of an iron cylinder by a piston all ready to be made into loaves for the oven. While the engine is doing all this multifarious work with one hand for the clay ovens, it is doing a similar work with the other for those of the common household. Behind a thin partition it is grinding grists of wheat and other grain for the farmers around, and for the proprietor of the works, who purchases enough to keep the mill running when local wants cannot do it. The partition wall is dust-tight, so that there is no possible transfusion of the clay on one side into the flour on the other; and "Mal y soit qui mal y pense" may be truly said of him who suspects a gritty association of these two elements incompatible with well-leavened bread. The ovens or kilns are of prodigious capacity, and the heat necessary to produce bricks almost as hard as cast-iron, is equal to that of the furnaces in which that metal is fused from the ore. One of these is a smaller oven, in which a little batch of two or three thousand of any pattern may be baked at the shortest notice to supply a special order. The long kneading sheds and the operations within them attracted our particular and almost painful attention. The domestic simile I have carried through this notice was justified by what we saw