"'Oh! the miller, how he will laugh When he sees the mill-dam rise!

In the late twilight you may sometimes catch sight of a flock speeding in, silent and swift, over the Mill-dam, or hear their sonorous quacking from their feeding-ground.

The primary meaning seems rather the hollow than the bank, though this would matter little, as the same transference of meaning may have taken place as in dyke and ditch, But when Mr. Wedgwood gives mill-dam as the first meaning of the word doccia, his wish seems to have stood godfather.

The trespasses arise from the construction of mill-dams, by which their grounds are overflowed.

A Wyandot, of Michigan, named Thomas Short, complains that his lands, at Flat Rock, are overflowed by raising a mill-dam.

Perhaps "he," too, would have preferred a journey to Europe, and a house on the Mill-Dam. Things gradually settled themselves.

Singularly enough, mill-dams are always found below mill-ponds.

Late in the afternoon of our eighth day from Greenville, Moosehead Lake, we reached the end of birch-navigation, the great mill-dams of Indian Oldtown, near Bangor.

In sullen silence Hagar withdrew, and for several days worked half reluctantly in the "north rooms," as Madam Conway termed a comparatively pleasant, airy suite of apartments, with a balcony above, which looked out upon the old mill-dam and the brook pouring over it.

March 5, 1830, we find John Overstreet appearing before the County Commissioners' Court at Springfield and averring upon oath "that he is informed and believes that John Cameron and James Rutledge have erected a mill-dam on the Sangamon River which obstructs the navigation of said river;" and the Commissioners issued a notice to Cameron and Rutledge to alter the dam so as to restore the "safe navigation" of the river.

At the village of New Salem there was a mill-dam.

He stood on the bank of the Sangamon River on the 19th of April, 1831, and watched Lincoln bore a hole in the bottom of the flatboat, which had lodged on the mill-dam, so that the water might run out.

His first sight of the town had been in April, 1831, when the flatboat he had built and its little crew were detained in getting their boat over the Rutledge and Cameron mill-dam, on which it lodged.

"Onetwothree, and away!" sung out in unison, was the special form for the occasion, accompanied by Beauty's farewell blessing as we "awayed" him into the silent depths of the mill-dam.

The stream between these islands and holms is sometimes rapid, deep, and clear; sometimes like a broad rivulet with silky-green rushes, water-lilies, and brown-feathered reeds; sometimes it is a brook with a stony ground, and now it spreads itself out in a large, still mill-dam.

For a long time he sat on the fence absorbing the night soundsthe claque of the frogs, the burring of the crickets, the hum of the water on the mill-dam far down the valley, and the occasional call of some human voice, ringing like a golden bell in the hush of the night.

We told him they were pictures of the Concord Court and Town Houses, the Common and the Mill-dam; on hearing which he expressed some surprise and interest, but evidently was as unfamiliar with the centre of the village where he had lived for years as a deer or a wood-thrush would be.

You might as well attempt to turn back a mill-dam that has burst its bounds, as the headstrong London 'prentices when they have taken up their cudgels.

I was now going at what seemed like a speed of ninety or a hundred miles an hour, with the wind rushing in between my teeth like water over a mill-dam, and I felt sure that if I kept on going down that hill I should soon be whirling through space like a comet.