Well, if you don’t like, don’t listen, but there was this miller see, and he would be sitting in his cottage, just across the lane from his watermill, and when it got to the edge o’night he would hear the wheel turning and the gears rumbling inside the mill. But he weren’t afeart, he’d known it all his life and same had happened in his father’s time and his grandfer’s afore that. He was wiser than to go inside the mill, mind, he knew it was the little folk who were about their milling during the night. And each morning all would be clean and tidy, they’d caused none trouble.
This one
evening the miller was sat at the corner table in the alehouse with
the blacksmith and a bagpiper and he chanced to tell about the little
folk in the mill. “Well now,” says the piper, “you shunner let
them grind their meal without paying as others mun do.” But the
smith and the miller insisted it was foolish to interfere with the
ways of the little folk. “Fairies be beggared!” says the piper,
“I’m not so tickle-stomached as you. I’ll bet you tha new
green weskit I can spend the night playing my pipes to them, I’ll
get them dancing to my tune, I will, thump!”
Now the
miller and smith were about telling the piper not to be such a
maggot-pate, that he never knew what would happen if he went in the
mill that night. But after another tankard of ale, their minds had
altered, see, and were for letting him get agate his piping. So,
here’s all three setting off down the pad-road across the field to
the mill. The wheel was turning and there was a dim light at the
window. And here’s the piper striking up his bagpipes and making
his way into the mill. Well, the miller and the smith, they listened
a while, then off they went back to the alehouse. After some more
beer they were thinking on how the piper had been away a pretty tidy
time and was most likely he’d returned home.
The next
morning the miller made his way into the watermill. It was the same
as ever, not a thing out of place, but no sign of the piper. He set
off to the piper’s tumbledown cot, but he wasn’t there, and the
hearth was cold. And the smith and the miller never did see the
piper again, but if they ever walked past the tump at the end of the
lane as it was fetching dark, both of them reckoned on how they could
hear the sound of pipes under the ground.
So it’s
a queer thing isn’t it, but that’s as I heard it, so take from it
what you wish and give the rest back to me.