All this holds good of ordinary winter Colza,
or, as it is called sometimes, Colza froid,
or cold Colza. There is, however, a variety
of Colza which may be sown in spring, and
harvested the same year, and which is
distinguished by the title of Colza chaud, or de
Mars; in other words, as warm, or March
Colza. It is less productive than the former
kind, but is useful for land which there has
been no opportunity of planting in autumn,
as well as to replace the winter Colza when
it has been irreparably injured by frost.

We have grown and housed our Colza seed.
What remains is a simple affair, offering
fewer impediments to the practitioner than
either of those highly popular difficulties of
skinning a flint, or drawing blood from a
gatepost. All that is required is simply brute
force. It is true there are here and there
grand establishments, with their cylinders,
to play with the seed a little while before
pounding it; with their steam chauffoirs,
or warming-pans; their magnified copies
of vertical coffee-mills, their miniature
imitations of flour and wheat-mills, little iron
grindstones, and other what-nots. In short,
there are fancy oil-mills in France. But
we will be content to-day with the general
and popular method of seed-squeezing,
by which oil is extracted, by and for the
million, in innumerable wind and water-mills
to the south of the English Channel.

The other bright sunshiny morning (and we
have not had too many such of late), I found
myself in the midst of a constellation of mills
that were whirling their arms round, and
twinkling their cloth and wooden beams, as
much unlike celestial stars as possible, and
emitting anything but the music of the
spheres, "Bang, bing, bong, bung!" "Thamp,
thimp, thomp, thump!" I tried hard to
recognise in it something like the measured
rhythm of our dear old melody, "The
Harmonious Blacksmith," but utterly failed to
catch a single phrase. The noise was exactly
that which the giant made when he "wopped"
about with his great thick club, trying to hit
poor little mischievous Hop-o'-my-Thumb as
he lay asleep, and knocking his own monstrous
children's brains out instead. The succession
of sounds from the whole of this grand mill
orchestra, were similar in kind, but not exactly
the same in pitch. Some, too, vibrated more
clear and gong-like than the muffled beats
which were sent forth by the others. Just
before me was a very fine-toned mill; so,
deciding to make my invasion upon that,
I drove slap past the miller's cottage, and drew
up at the very foot of his temple of—
Macassar? Out came the lubricated man
of Colza, in blue clothes and with a smiling
countenance. "Bon-jour!" and "Bon-jour!"
Why shouldn't he let me poke about his
mill, if that gave me the least of pleasure?
So I mount the ricketty wooden steps, bounding
at every blow of the internal machinery,
like a fly caught napping on the parchment
of a kettle-drum. Luckily, it is a windy
day, or I should not have seen one quarter of
the fun.

The whole thing is a question of pestle and
mortar power. On entering, you behold to the
left a goodly range of half-a-dozen mortars, cut
out of strong solid timber, and lined at bottom
with thick copper. In each of these is pounding,
a pestle—a long beam of stout oak—
twenty feet high, or a trifle more, perhaps;
for it reaches almost to the very top of the
mill. The end of the pestle is shod with an
ugly-looking piece of iron, channelled and cut
in the way to make it do most mischief. It
is not unlike a frightful molar tooth, with a
single ugly, endless fang. Motion is communicated
to the entire set in the most unsophisticated
way possible, and each tooth can chew
independently according to its own devices.
A catch on the axle of the mill-sails just
lifts them up and lets them drop again. Of
course there is a contrivance by which the
progress of the labour of every individual
pestle can be stopped, or re-continued at
pleasure. Suppose the miller has given a feed
of Colza seed to one of these devouring
monsters. Thump! thump! pestle and mortar,
till the meal is reduced to a pasty mass,
called marc. That one grinder is stopped for
a while. He takes the masticated quid away,
carries it to another snuggery beyond the
apartment into which we first entered, and
with it fills some small woollen sacks, or
bags, made of a coarse stuff, which is known
as morfil. If you have ever seen a sample of
foreign oil-cake, it will give you an idea of
the actual size of the morfil sack. The sack
thus filled is wrapped in a leather case, which
covers both the sides, but is open at the
edges. So that the sack exactly occupies the
place which would be filled by a slice of
tongue in a sandwich. Again, to the left you
observe two other pestles, somewhat slenderer,
but of equal length with those that pound.
Beneath them is a box, or oblong hole. This
hole is filled with marc-and-morfil sandwiches,
set upright, like books on a book-shelf. The
miller has at hand a variety of wedges, of long
rather than stout proportions. He inserts
the point of one of these into the midst of his
packet of sandwiches, and then sets the pestle
overhead in motion. Thump! thump! thump!
again, exactly like a pile-driving machine.
The wedge is driven home; and then,
another; till he thinks he has squeezed his
subjects enough. The oil thus expressed runs
out at a hole in the bottom, the bags are
taken out of their den of oppression, and from
each of them is removed a cake.

But whatever may be the mode of milling,
it takes at least two acts of pressure to obtain
a respectable yield of oil. The cakes are
again put into the mortar, and are once more
pounded as fme as may be. They are
again carried into the little back chamber.
But before a second entrance into the bags,
they have first to take a turn over a slow