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 was 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,--that is, the wheel, and the waterfall that
sets it in motion; but the interior,--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 expression,--"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 materials, which he fastened to a
circle of pliant wood, and tried by passing through them the flour of
the cassava; he made some with sailcloth, others with the hair of the
onagra, which is very long and strong, and some of the fibres of bark.
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