early in the morning went to examine the ground where the fight had
been. It was only too easily found; the sod was trampled down and
branches broken as though a score of men had been engaged. Then he found
his eldest son's cap, and a little farther away a sleeve of his coat;
shreds and rags were numerous on the bramble bushes, and by and by he
came on a pool of blood. "They've kill 'n!" he cried in despair,
"they've killed my poor boy!" and straight to Rollston House he went to
inquire, and was met by Harbutt himself, who came out limping, one boot
on, the other foot bound up with rags, one arm in a sling and a cloth
tied round his head. He was told that his son was alive and safe indoors
and that he would be taken to Salisbury later in the day. "His clothes
be all torn to pieces," added the keeper. "You can just go home at once
and git him others before the constable comes to take him."

"You've tored them to pieces yourself and you can git him others,"
retorted the old man in a rage.

"Very well," said the keeper. "But bide a moment--I've something more
to say to you. When your son comes out of jail in a year or so you tell
him from me that if he'll just step up this way I'll give him five
shillings and as much beer as he likes to drink. I never see'd a better
fighter!"

It was a great compliment to his son, but the old men was troubled in
his mind. "What dost mean, keeper, by a year or so?" he asked.

"When I said that," returned the other, with a grin, "I was just
thinking what 'twould be he deserves to git."

"And you'd agot your deserts, by God," cried the angry father, "if that
boy of mine hadn't a-been left alone to fight ye!"

Harbutt regarded him with a smile of gratified malice.

"You can go home now," he said. "If you'd see your son you'll find'n in
Salisbury jail. Maybe you'll be wanting new locks on your doors; you can
git they in Salisbury too--you've no blacksmith in your village now. No,
your boy weren't alone and you know that damned well."

"I know naught about that," he returned, and started to walk home with a
heavy heart. Until now he had been clinging to the hope that the other
son had not been identified in the dark wood. And now what could he do
to save one of the two from hateful imprisonment? The boy was not in a
fit condition to make his escape; he could hardly get across the room
and could not sit or lie down without groaning. He could only try to
hide him in the cottage and pray that they would not discover him. The
cottage was in the middle of the village and had but little ground to
it, but there was a small, boarded-up cavity or cell at one end of an
attic, and it might be possible to save him by putting him in there.
Here, then, in a bed placed for him on the floor, his bruised son was
obliged to lie, in the close, dark hole, for some days.

One day, about a week later, when he was recovering from his hurts, he
crawled out of his box and climbed down the narrow stairs to the ground
floor to see the light and breathe a better air for a short time, and
while down he was tempted to take a peep at the street through the
small, latticed window. But he quickly withdrew his head and by and by
said to his father, "I'm feared Moses has seen me. Just now when I was
at the window he came by and looked up and see'd me with my head all
tied up, and I'm feared he knew 'twas I."

After that they could only wait in fear and trembling, and on the next
day quite early there came a loud rap at the door, and on its being
opened by the old man the constable and two keepers appeared standing
before him.

"I've come to take your son," said the constable.

The old man stepped back without a word and took down his gun from its
place on the wall, then spoke: "It you've got a search-warrant you may
come in; if you haven't got 'n I'll blow the brains out of the first man
that puts a foot inside my door."

They hesitated a few moments then silently withdrew. After consulting
together the constable went off to the nearest magistrate, leaving the
two keepers to keep watch on the house: Moses Found was one of them.
Later in the day the constable returned armed with a warrant and was
thereupon admitted, with the result that the poor youth was soon
discovered in his hiding-place and carried off. And that was the last he
saw of his home, his young sister crying bitterly and his old father
white and trembling with grief and impotent rage.

A month or two later the two brothers were tried and sentenced each to
six months' imprisonment. They never came home. On their release they
went to Woolwich, where men were wanted and the pay was good. And by and
by the accounts they sent home induced first one then the other brother
to go and join them, and the poor old father, who had been very proud of
his five sons, was left alone with his young daughter--Isaac's destined
wife.

CHAPTER VIII

SHEPHERDS AND POACHING

  General remarks on poaching--Farmer, shepherd, and dog--A sheep-dog
  that would not hunt--Taking a partridge from a hawk--Old Gaarge and
  Young Gaarge--Partridge-poaching--The shepherd robbed of his
  rabbits--Wisdom of Shepherd Gathergood--Hare-trapping on the
  down--Hare-taking with a crook

When Caleb was at length free from his father's tutelage, and as an
under-shepherd practically independent, he did not follow Isaac's strict
example with regard to wild animals, good for the pot, which came by
chance in his way; he even allowed himself to go a little out of his way
on occasion to get them.

We know that about this matter the law of the land does not square with
the moral law as it is written in the heart of the peasant. A wounded
partridge or other bird which he finds in his walks abroad or which
comes by chance to him is his by a natural right, and he will take and
eat or dispose of it without scruple. With rabbits he is very free--he
doesn't wait to find a distressed one with a stoat on its track--stoats
are not sufficiently abundant; and a hare, too, may be picked up at any
moment; only in this case he must be very sure that no one is looking.
Knowing the law, and being perhaps a respectable, religious person, he
is anxious to abstain from all appearance of evil. This taking a hare or
rabbit or wounded partridge is in his mind a very different thing from
systematic poaching; but he is aware that to the classes above him it is
not so--the law has made them one. It is a hard, arbitrary, unnatural
law, made by and for them, his betters, and outwardly he must conform to
it. Thus you will find the best of men among the shepherds and labourers
freely helping themselves to any wild creature that falls in their way,
yet sharing the game-preserver's hatred of the real poacher. The village
poacher as a rule is an idle, dissolute fellow, and the sober,
industrious, righteous shepherd or ploughman or carter does not like to
be put on a level with such a person. But there is no escape from the
hard and fast rule in such things, and however open and truthful he may
be in everything else, in this one matter he is obliged to practise a
certain amount of deception. Here is a case to serve as an illustration;
I have only just heard it, after putting together the material I had
collected for this chapter, in conversation with an old shepherd friend
of mine.

He is a fine old man who has followed a flock these fifty years, and
will, I have no doubt, carry his crook for yet another ten. Not only is
he a "good shepherd," in the sense in which Caleb uses that phrase, with
a more intimate knowledge of sheep and all the ailments they are subject
to than I have found in any other, but he is also a truly religious man,
one that "walks with God." He told me this story of a sheep-dog he owned
when head-shepherd on a large farm on the Dorsetshire border with a
master whose chief delight in life was in coursing hares. They abounded
on his land, and he naturally wanted the men employed on the farm to
regard them as sacred animals. One day he came out to the shepherd to
complain that some one had seen his dog hunting a hare.

The shepherd indignantly asked who had said such a thing.

"Never mind about that," said the farmer. "Is it true?"

"It is a lie," said the shepherd. "My dog never hunts a hare or anything
else. 'Tis my belief the one that said that has got a dog himself that
hunts the hares and he wants to put the blame on some one else."

"May be so," said the farmer, unconvinced.

Just then a hare made its appearance, coming across the field directly
towards them, and either because they never moved or it did not smell
them it came on and on, stopping at intervals to sit for a minute or so
on its haunches, then on again until it was within forty yards of where
they were standing. The farmer watched it approach and at the same time
kept an eye on the dog sitting at their feet and watching the hare too,
very steadily. "Now, shepherd," said the farmer, "don't you say one word
to the dog and I'll see for myself." Not a word did he say, and the hare
came and sat for some seconds near them, then limped away out of sight,
and the dog made not the slightest movement. "That's all right," said
the farmer, well pleased. "I know now 'twas a lie I heard about your
dog. I've seen for myself and I'll just keep a sharp eye on the man that
told me."

My comment on this story was that the farmer had displayed an almost
incredible ignorance of a sheepdog--and a shepherd. "How would it have
been if you had said, 'Catch him, Bob,' or whatever his name was?" I
asked.

He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and replied, "I do b'lieve
he'd ha' got 'n, but he'd never move till I told 'n."

It comes to this: the shepherd refuses to believe that by taking a hare
he is robbing any man of his property, and if he is obliged to tell a
lie to save himself from the consequences he does not consider that it
is a lie.

When he understood that I was on his side in this question, he told me
about a good sheep-dog he once possessed which he had to get rid of
because he would not take a hare!

A dog when broken is made to distinguish between the things he must and
must not do. He is "feelingly persuaded" by kind words and caresses in
one case and hard words and hard blows in the other. He learns that if
he hunts hares and rabbits it will be very bad for him, and in due time,
after some suffering, he is able to overcome this strongest instinct of
a dog. He acquires an artificial conscience. Then, when his education is
finished, he must be made to understand that it is not quite finished
after all--that he must partially unlearn one of the saddest of the
lessons instilled in him. He must hunt a hare or rabbit when told by his
master to do so. It is a compact between man and dog. Thus, they have
got a law which the dog has sworn to obey; but the man who made it is
above the law and can when he thinks proper command his servant to break
it. The dog, as a rule, takes it all in very readily and often allows
himself more liberty than his master gives him; the most highly
accomplished animal is one that, like my shepherd's dog in the former
instance, will not stir till he is told. In the other case the poor
brute could not rise to the position; it was too complex for him, and
when ordered to catch a rabbit he could only put his tail between his
legs and look in a puzzled way at his master. "Why do you tell me to do
a thing for which I shall be thrashed?"

It was only after Caleb had known me some time, when we were fast
friends, that he talked with perfect freedom of these things and told me
of his own small, illicit takings without excuse or explanation.

One day he saw a sparrowhawk dash down upon a running partridge and
struggle with it on the ground. It was in a grass field, divided from
the one he was walking in by a large, unkept hedge without a gap in it
to let him through. Presently the hawk rose up with the partridge still
violently struggling in its talons, and flew over the hedge to Caleb's
side, but was no sooner over than it came down again and the struggle
went on once more on the ground. On Caleb running to the spot the hawk
flew off, leaving his prey behind. He had grasped it in its sides,
driving his sharp claws well in, and the partridge, though unable to
fly, was still alive. The shepherd killed it and put it in his pocket,
and enjoyed it very much when he came to eat it.

From this case, a most innocent form of poaching, he went on to relate
how he had once been able to deprive a cunning poacher and bad man, a
human sparrowhawk, of his quarry.

There were two persons in the village, father and son, he very heartily
detested, known respectively as Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge, inveterate
poachers both. They were worse than the real reprobate who haunted the
public-house and did no work and was not ashamed of his evil ways, for
these two were hypocrites and were outwardly sober, righteous men, who
kept themselves a little apart from their neighbours and were very
severe in their condemnation of other people's faults.

One Sunday morning Caleb was on his way to his ewes folded at a distance
from the village, walking by a hedgerow at the foot of the down, when he
heard a shot fired some way ahead, and after a minute or two a second
shot. This greatly excited his curiosity and caused him to keep a sharp
look-out in the direction the sounds had come from, and by and by he
caught sight of a man walking towards him. It was Old Gaarge in his long
smock-frock, proceeding in a leisurely way towards the village, but
catching sight of the shepherd he turned aside through a gap in the
hedge and went off in another direction to avoid meeting him. No doubt,
thought Caleb, he has got his gun in two pieces hidden under his smock.
He went on until he came to a small field of oats which had grown badly
and had only been half reaped, and here he discovered that Old Gaarge
had been lying in hiding to shoot at the partridges that came to feed.
He had been screened from the sight of the birds by a couple of hurdles
and some straw, and there were feathers of the birds he had shot
scattered about. He had finished his Sunday morning's sport and was
going back, a little too late on this occasion as it turned out.

Caleb went on to his flock, but before getting to it his dog discovered
a dead partridge in the hedge; it had flown that far and then dropped,
and there was fresh blood on its feathers. He put it in his pocket and
carried it about most of the day while with his sheep on the down. Late
in the afternoon he spied two magpies pecking at something out in the
middle of a field and went to see what they had found. It was a second
partridge which Old Gaarge had shot in the morning and had lost, the
bird having flown to some distance before dropping. The magpies had
probably found it already dead, as it was cold; they had begun tearing
the skin at the neck and had opened it down to the breast-bone. Caleb
took this bird, too, and by and by, sitting down to examine it, he
thought he would try to mend the torn skin with the needle and thread he
always carried inside his cap. He succeeded in stitching it neatly up,
and putting back the feathers in their place the rent was quite
concealed. That evening he took the two birds to a man in the village
who made a livelihood by collecting bones, rags, and things of that
kind; the man took the birds in his hand, held them up, felt their
weight, examined them carefully, and pronounced them to be two good, fat
birds, and agreed to pay two shillings for them.

Such a man may be found in most villages; he calls himself a "general
dealer," and keeps a trap and pony--in some cases he keeps the
ale-house--and is a useful member of the small, rural community--a sort
of human carrion-crow.

The two shillings were very welcome, but more than the money was the
pleasing thought that he had got the bird shot by the hypocritical old
poacher for his own profit. Caleb had good cause to hate him. He, Caleb,
was one of the shepherds who had his master's permission to take rabbits
on the land, and having found his snares broken on many occasions he
came to the conclusion that they were visited in the night time by some
very cunning person who kept a watch on his movements. One evening he
set five snares in a turnip field and went just before daylight next
morning in a dense fog to visit them. Every one was broken! He had just
started on his way back, feeling angry and much puzzled at such a thing,
when the fog all at once passed away and revealed the figures of two men
walking hurriedly off over the down. They were at a considerable
distance, but the light was now strong enough to enable him to identify
Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge. In a few moments they vanished over the
brow. Caleb was mad at being deprived of his rabbits in this mean way,
but pleased at the same time in having discovered who the culprits were;
but what to do about it he did not know.

On the following day he was with his flock on the down and found himself
near another shepherd, also with his sheep, one he knew very well, a
quiet but knowing old man named Joseph Gathergood. He was known to be a
skilful rabbit-catcher, and Caleb thought he would go over to him and
tell him about how he was being tricked by the two Gaarges and ask him
what to do in the matter.

The old man was very friendly and at once told him what to do. "Don't
you set no more snares by the hedges and in the turmots," he said. "Set
them out on the open down where no one would go after rabbits and
they'll not find the snares." And this was how it had to be done. First
he was to scrape the ground with the heel of his boot until the fresh
earth could be seen through the broken turf; then he was to sprinkle a
little rabbit scent on the scraped spot, and plant his snare. The scent
and smell of the fresh earth combined would draw the rabbits to the
spot; they would go there to scratch and would inevitably get caught if
the snare was properly placed.

Caleb tried this plan with one snare, and on the following morning found
that he had a rabbit. He set it again that evening, then again, until he
had caught five rabbits on five consecutive nights, all with the same
snare. That convinced him that he had been taught a valuable lesson and
that old Gathergood was a very wise man about rabbits; and he was very
happy to think that he had got the better of his two sneaking enemies.

But Shepherd Gathergood was just as wise about hares, and, as in the
other case, he took them out on the down in the most open places. His
success was due to his knowledge of the hare's taste for blackthorn
twigs. He would take a good, strong blackthorn stem or shoot with twigs
on it, and stick it firmly down in the middle of a large grass field or
on the open down, and place the steel trap tied to the stick at a
distance of a foot or so from it, the trap concealed under grass or moss
and dead leaves. The smell of the blackthorn would draw the hare to the
spot, and he would move round and round nibbling the twigs until caught.

Caleb never tried this plan, but was convinced that Gathergood was right
about it.

He told me of another shepherd who was clever at taking hares in another
way, and who was often chaffed by his acquaintances on account of the
extraordinary length of his shepherd's crook. It was like a lance or
pole, being twice the usual length. But he had a use for it. This
shepherd used to make hares' forms on the downs in all suitable places,
forming them so cunningly that no one seeing them by chance would have
believed they were the work of human hands. The hares certainly made use
of them. When out with his flock he would visit these forms, walking
quietly past them at a distance of twenty to thirty feet, his dog
following at his heels. On catching sight of a hare crouching in a form
he would drop a word, and the dog would instantly stand still and remain
fixed and motionless, while the shepherd went on but in a circle so as
gradually to approach the form. Meanwhile the hare would keep his eyes
fixed on the dog, paying no attention to the man, until by and by the
long staff would be swung round and a blow descend on the poor, silly
head from the opposite side, and if the blow was not powerful enough to
stun or disable the hare, the dog would have it before it got many yards
from the cosy nest prepared for its destruction.

CHAPTER IX

THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES

  A fox-trapping shepherd--Gamekeepers and foxes--Fox and stoat--A
  gamekeeper off his guard--Pheasants and foxes--Caleb kills a fox--A
  fox-hunting sheep-dog--Two varieties of foxes--Rabbits playing with
  little foxes--How to expel foxes--A playful spirit in the
  fox--Fox-hunting a danger to sheep

Caleb related that his friend Shepherd Gathergood was a great fox-killer
and, as with hares, he took them in a way of his own. He said that the
fox will always go to a heap of ashes in any open place, and his plan
was to place a steel trap concealed among the ashes, made fast to a
stick about three feet high, firmly planted in the middle of the heap,
with a piece of strong-smelling cheese tied to the top. The two
attractions of an ash-heap and the smell of strong cheese was more than
any fox could resist. When he caught a fox he killed and buried it on
the down and said "nothing to nobody" about it. He killed them to
protect himself from their depredations; foxes, like Old Gaarge and his
son in Caleb's case, went round at night to rob him of the rabbits he
took in his snares.

Caleb never blamed him for this; on the contrary, he greatly admired him
for his courage, seeing that if it had been found out he would have been
a marked man. It was perhaps intelligence or cunning rather than
courage; he did not believe that he would be found out, and he never
was; he told Caleb of these things because he was sure of his man. Those
who were interested in the hunt never suspected him, and as to
gamekeepers, they hardly counted. He was helping them; no one hates a
fox more than they do. The farmer gets compensation for damage, and the
hen-wife is paid for her stolen chickens by the hunt, The keeper is
required to look after the game, and at the same time to spare his chief
enemy, the fox. Indeed, the keeper's state of mind with regard to foxes
has always been a source of amusement to me, and by long practice I am
able to talk to him on that delicate subject in a way to make him
uncomfortable and self-contradictory. There are various, quite innocent
questions which the student of wild life may put to a keeper about foxes
which have a disturbing effect on his brain. How to expel foxes from a
covert, for example; and here is another: Is it true that the fox
listens for the distressed cries of a rabbit pursued by a stoat and that
he will deprive the stoat of his captive? Perhaps; Yes; No, I don't
think so, because one hunts by night, the other by day, he will answer,
but you see that the question troubles him. One keeper, off his guard,
promptly answered, "I've no doubt of it; I can always bring a fox to me
by imitating the cry of a rabbit hunted by a stoat." But he did not say
what his object was in attracting the fox.

I say that the keeper was off his guard in this instance, because the
fiction that foxes were preserved on the estate was kept up, though as a
fact they were systematically destroyed by the keepers. As the
pheasant-breeding craze appears to increase rather than diminish,
notwithstanding the disastrous effect it has had in alienating the
people from their lords and masters, the conflict of interest between
fox-hunter and pheasant-breeder will tend to become more and more acute,
and the probable end will be that fox-hunting will have to go. A
melancholy outlook to those who love the country and old country sports,
and who do not regard pheasant-shooting as now followed as sport at all.
It is a delusion of the landlords that the country people think most
highly of the great pheasant-preserver who has two or three big shoots
in a season, during which vast numbers of birds are slaughtered--every
bird "costing a guinea," as the saying is. It brings money into the
country, he or his apologist tells you, and provides employment for the
village poor in October and November, when there is little doing. He
does not know the truth of the matter. A certain number of the poorer
people of the village are employed as beaters for the big shoots at a
shilling a day or so, and occasionally a labourer, going to or from his
work, finds a pheasant's nest and informs the keeper and receives some
slight reward. If he "keeps his eyes open" and shows himself anxious at
all times to serve the keeper he will sometimes get a rabbit for his
Sunday dinner.

This is not a sufficient return for the freedom to walk on the land and
in woods, which the villager possessed formerly, even in his worst days
of his oppression, a liberty which has now been taken from him. The
keeper is there now to prevent him; he was there before, and from of
old, but the pheasant was not yet a sacred bird, and it didn't matter
that a man walked on the turf or picked up a few fallen sticks in a
wood. The keeper is there to tell him to keep to the road and sometimes
to ask him, even when he is on the road, what is he looking over the
hedge for. He slinks obediently away; he is only a poor labourer with
his living to get, and he cannot afford to offend the man who stands
between him and the lord and the lord's tenant. And he is inarticulate;
but the insolence and injustice rankle in his heart, for he is not
altogether a helot in soul; and the result is that the sedition-mongers,
the Socialists, the furious denouncers of all landlords, who are now
quartering the country, and whose vans I meet in the remotest villages,
are listened to, and their words--wild and whirling words they may
be--are sinking into the hearts of the agricultural labourers of the new
generation.

To return to foxes and gamekeepers. There are other estates where the
fiction of fox-preserving is kept up no longer, where it is notorious
that the landlord is devoted exclusively to the gun and to
pheasant-breeding. On one of the big estates I am familiar with in
Wiltshire the keepers openly say they will not suffer a fox, and every
villager knows it and will give information of a fox to the keepers, and
looks to be rewarded with a rabbit. All this is undoubtedly known to the
lord of the manor; his servants are only carrying out his own wishes,
although he still subscribes to the hunt and occasionally attends the
meet. The entire hunt may unite in cursing him, but they must do so
below their breath; it would have a disastrous effect to spread it
abroad that he is a persecutor of foxes.

Caleb disliked foxes, too, but not to the extent of killing them. He did
once actually kill one, when a young under-shepherd, but it was accident
rather than intention.

One day he found a small gap in a hedge, which had been made or was
being used by a hare, and, thinking to take it, he set a trap at the
spot, tying it securely to a root and covering it over with dead leaves.
On going to the place the next morning he could see nothing until his
feet were on the very edge of the ditch, when with startling suddenness
a big dog fox sprang up at him with a savage snarl. It was caught by a
hind-leg, and had been lying concealed among the dead leaves close under
the bank. Caleb, angered at finding a fox when he had looked for a hare,
and at the attack the creature had made on him, dealt it a blow on the
head with his heavy stick--just one blow given on the impulse of the
moment, but it killed the fox! He felt very bad at what he had done and
began to think of consequences. He took it from the trap and hid it away
under the dead leaves beneath the hedge some yards from the gap, and
then went to his work. During the day one of the farm hands went out to
speak to him. He was a small, quiet old man, a discreet friend, and
Caleb confided to him what he had done. "Leave it to me," said his old
friend, and went back to the farm. In the afternoon Caleb was standing
on the top of the down looking towards the village, when he spied at a
great distance the old man coming out to the hills, and by and by he
could make out that he had a sack on his back and a spade in his hand.
When half-way up the side of the hill he put his burden down and set to
work digging a deep pit. Into this he put the dead fox, and threw in and
trod down the earth, then carefully put back the turf in its place,
then, his task done, shouldered the spade and departed. Caleb felt
greatly relieved, for now the fox was buried out on the downs, and no
one would ever know that he had wickedly killed it.

Subsequently he had other foxes caught in traps set for hares, but was
always able to release them. About one he had the following story. The
dog he had at that time, named Monk, hated foxes as Jack hated adders,
and would hunt them savagely whenever he got a chance. One morning Caleb
visited a trap he had set in a gap in a hedge and found a fox in it. The
fox jumped up, snarling and displaying his teeth, ready to fight for
dear life, and it was hard to restrain Monk from flying at him. So
excited was he that only when his master threatened him with his crook
did he draw back and, sitting on his haunches, left him to deal with the
difficult business in his own way. The difficulty was to open the steel
trap without putting himself in the way of a bite from those "tarrable
sharp teeth." After a good deal of manoeuvring he managed to set the
butt end of his crook on the handle of the gin, and forcing it down
until the iron teeth relaxed their grip, the fox pulled his foot out,
and darting away along the hedge side vanished into the adjoining copse.
Away went Monk after him, in spite of his master's angry commands to him
to come back, and fox and dog disappeared almost together among the
trees. Sounds of yelping and of crashing through the undergrowth came
back fainter and fainter, and then there was silence. Caleb waited at
the spot full twenty minutes before the disobedient dog came back,
looking very pleased. He had probably succeeded in overtaking and
killing his enemy.

About that same Monk a sad story will have to be told in another
chapter.

When speaking of foxes Caleb always maintained that in his part of the
country there were two sorts: one small and very red, the larger one of
a lighter colour with some grey in it. And it is possible that the hill
foxes differed somewhat in size and colour from those of the lower
country. He related that one year two vixens littered at one spot, a
deep bottom among the downs, so near together that when the cubs were
big enough to come out they mixed and played in company; the vixens
happened to be of the different sorts, and the difference in colour
appeared in the little ones as well.

Caleb was so taken with the pretty sight of all these little foxes,
neighbours and playmates, that he went evening after evening to sit for
an hour or longer watching them. One thing he witnessed which will
perhaps be disbelieved by those who have not closely observed animals
for themselves, and who still hold to the fable that all wild creatures
are born with an inherited and instinctive knowledge and dread of their
enemies. Rabbits swarmed at that spot, and he observed that when the old
foxes were not about the young, half-grown rabbits would freely mix and
play with the little foxes. He was so surprised at this, never having
heard of such a thing, that he told his master of it, and the farmer
went with him on a moonlight night and the two sat for a long time
together, and saw rabbits and foxes playing, pursuing one another round
and round, the rabbits when pursued often turning very suddenly and
jumping clean over their pursuer.

The rabbits at this place belonged to the tenant, and the farmer, after
enjoying the sight of the little ones playing together, determined to
get rid of the foxes in the usual way by exploding a small quantity of
gunpowder in the burrows. Four old foxes with nine cubs were too many
for him to have. The powder was duly burned, and the very next day the
foxes had vanished.

In Berkshire I once met with that rare being, an intelligent gamekeeper
who took an interest in wild animals and knew from observation a great
deal about their habits. During an after-supper talk, kept up till past
midnight, we discussed the subject of strange, erratic actions in
animals, which in some cases appear contrary to their own natures. He
gave an instance of such behaviour in a fox that had its earth at a spot
on the border of a wood where rabbits were abundant. One evening he was
at this spot, standing among the trees and watching a number of rabbits
feeding and gambolling on the green turf, when the fox came trotting by
and the rabbits paid no attention. Suddenly he stopped and made a dart
at a rabbit; the rabbit ran from him a distance of twenty to thirty
yards, then suddenly turning round went for the fox and chased it back
some distance, after which the fox again chased the rabbit, and so they
went on, turn and turn about, half a dozen times. It was evident, he
said, that the fox had no wish to catch and kill a rabbit, that it was
nothing but play on his part, and that the rabbits responded in the same
spirit, knowing that there was nothing to fear.

Another instance of this playful spirit of the fox with an enemy, which
I heard recently, is of a gentleman who was out with his dog, a
fox-terrier, for an evening walk in some woods near his house. On his
way back he discovered on coming out of the woods that a fox was
following him, at a distance of about forty yards. When he stood still
the fox sat down and watched the dog. The dog appeared indifferent to
its presence until his master ordered him to go for the fox, whereupon
he charged him and drove him back to the edge of the wood, but at that
point the fox turned and chased the dog right back to its master, then
once more sat down and appeared very much at his ease. Again the dog was
encouraged to go for him and hunted him again back to the wood, and was
then in turn chased back to its master, After several repetitions of
this performance, the gentleman went home, the fox still following, and
on going in closed the gate behind him, leaving the fox outside, sitting
in the road as if waiting for him to come out again to have some more
fun.

This incident serves to remind me of an experience I had one evening in
King's Copse, an immense wood of oak and pine in the New Forest near
Exbury. It was growing dark when I heard on or close to the ground, some
twenty to thirty yards before me, a low, wailing cry, resembling the
hunger-cry of the young, long-eared owl. I began cautiously advancing,
trying to see it, but as I advanced the cry receded, as if the bird was
flitting from me. Now, just after I had begun following the sound, a fox
uttered his sudden, startlingly loud scream about forty yards away on my
right hand, and the next moment a second fox screamed on my left, and
from that time I was accompanied, or shadowed, by the two foxes, always
keeping abreast of me, always at the same distance, one screaming and
the other replying about every half-minute. The distressful bird-sound
ceased, and I turned and went off in another direction, to get out of
the wood on the side nearest the place where I was staying, the foxes
keeping with me until I was out.

What moved them to act in such a way is a mystery, but it was perhaps
play to them.

Another curious instance of foxes playing was related to me by a
gentleman at the little village of Inkpen, near the Beacon, in
Berkshire. He told me that when it happened, a good many years ago, he
sent an account of it to the "Field." His gamekeeper took him one day
"to see a strange thing," to a spot in the woods where a fox had a
litter of four cubs, near a long, smooth, green slope. A little distance
from the edge of the slope three round swedes were lying on the turf.
"How do you think these swedes came here?" said the keeper, and then
proceeded to say that the old fox must have brought them there from the
field a long distance away, for her cubs to play with. He had watched
them of an evening, and wanted his master to come and see too.
Accordingly they went in the evening, and hiding themselves among the
bushes near waited till the young foxes came out and began rolling the
swedes about and jumping at and tumbling over them. By and by one rolled
down the slope, and the young foxes went after it all the way down, and
then, when they had worried it sufficiently, they returned to the top
and played with another swede until that was rolled down, then with the
third one in the same way. Every morning, the keeper said, the swedes
were found back on top of the ground, and he had no doubt that they were
taken up by the old fox again and left there for her cubs to play with.

Caleb was not so eager after rabbits as Shepherd Gathergood, but he
disliked the fox for another reason. He considered that the hunted fox
was a great danger to sheep when the ewes were heavy with lambs and when
the chase brought the animal near if not right into the flock. He had
one dreadful memory of a hunted fox trying to lose itself in his flock
of heavy-sided ewes and the hounds following it and driving the poor
sheep mad with terror. The result was that a large number of lambs were
cast before their time and many others were poor, sickly things; many of
the sheep also suffered in health. He had no extra money from the lambs
that year. He received but a shilling (half a crown is often paid now)
for every lamb above the number of ewes, and as a rule received from
three to six pounds a year from this source.

CHAPTER X

BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS

  Great bustard--Stone curlew--Big hawks--Former abundance of the
  raven--Dogs fed on carrion--Ravens fighting--Ravens' breeding-places
  in Wilts--Great Ridge Wood ravens--Field-fare breeding in
  Wilts--Pewit--Mistle-thrush--Magpie and turtledove--Gamekeepers and
  magpies--Rooks and farmers--Starling, the shepherd's favourite
  bird--Sparrowhawk and "brown thrush"

Wiltshire, like other places in England, has long been deprived of its
most interesting birds--the species that were best worth preserving. Its
great bustard, once our greatest bird--even greater than the golden and
sea eagles and the "giant crane" with its "trumpet sound" once heard in
the land--is now but a memory. Or a place name: Bustard Inn, no longer
an inn, is well known to the many thousands who now go to the mimic wars
on Salisbury Plain; and there is a Trappist monastery in a village on
the southernmost border of the county, which was once called, and is
still known to old men as, "Bustard Farm." All that Caleb Bawcombe knew
of this grandest bird is what his father had told him; and Isaac knew of
it only from hearsay, although it was still met with in South Wilts when
he was a young man.

The stone curlew, our little bustard with the long wings, big, yellow
eyes, and wild voice, still frequents the uncultivated downs, unhappily
in diminishing numbers. For the private collector's desire to possess
British-taken birds' eggs does not diminish; I doubt if more than one
clutch in ten escapes the searching eyes of the poor shepherds and
labourers who are hired to supply the cabinets. One pair haunted a
flinty spot at Winterbourne Bishop until a year or two ago; at other
points a few miles away I watched other pairs during the summer of 1909,
but in every instance their eggs were taken.

The larger hawks and the raven, which bred in all the woods and forests
of Wiltshire, have, of course, been extirpated by the gamekeepers. The
biggest forest in the county now affords no refuge to any hawk above the
size of a kestrel. Savernake is extensive enough, one would imagine, for
condors to hide in, but it is not so. A few years ago a buzzard made its
appearance there--just a common buzzard, and the entire surrounding
population went mad with excitement about it, and every man who
possessed a gun flew to the forest to join in the hunt until the
wretched bird, after being blazed at for two or three days, was brought
down. I heard of another case at Fonthill Abbey. Nobody could say what
this wandering hawk was--it was very big, blue above with a white breast
barred with black--a "tarrable" fierce-looking bird with fierce, yellow
eyes. All the gamekeepers and several other men with guns were in hot
pursuit of it for several days, until some one fatally wounded it, but
it could not be found where it was supposed to have fallen. A fortnight
later its carcass was discovered by an old shepherd, who told me the
story. It was not in a fit state to be preserved, but he described it to
me, and I have no doubt that it was a goshawk.

The raven survived longer, and the Shepherd Bawcombe talks about its
abundance when he was a boy, seventy or more years ago. His way of
accounting for its numbers at that time and its subsequent, somewhat
rapid disappearance greatly interested me.

We have seen his account of deer-stealing, by the villagers in those
brave, old, starvation days when Lord Rivers owned the deer and hunting
rights over a large part of Wiltshire, extending from Cranborne Chase to
Salisbury, and when even so righteous a man as Isaac Bawcombe was
tempted by hunger to take an occasional deer, discovered out of bounds.
At that time, Caleb said, a good many dogs used for hunting the deer
were kept a few miles from Winterbourne Bishop and were fed by the
keepers in a very primitive manner. Old, worn-out horses were bought and
slaughtered for the dogs. A horse would be killed and stripped of his
hide somewhere away in the woods, and left for the hounds to batten on
its flesh, tearing at and fighting over it like so many jackals. When
only partially consumed the carcass would become putrid; then another
horse would be killed and skinned at another spot perhaps a mile away,
and the pack would start feeding afresh there. The result of so much
carrion lying about was that ravens were attracted in numbers to the
place and were so numerous as to be seen in scores together. Later, when
the deer-hunting sport declined in the neighbourhood, and dogs were no
longer fed on carrion, the birds decreased year by year, and when Caleb
was a boy of nine or ten their former great abundance was but a memory.
But he remembers that they were still fairly common, and he had much to
say about the old belief that the raven "smells death," and when seen
hovering over a flock, uttering its croak, it is a sure sign that a
sheep is in a bad way and will shortly die.

One of his recollections of the bird may be given here. It was one of
those things seen in boyhood which had very deeply impressed him. One
fine day he was on the down with an elder brother, when they heard the
familiar croak and spied three birds at a distance engaged in a fight in
the air. Two of the birds were in pursuit of the third, and rose
alternately to rush upon and strike at their victim from above. They
were coming down from a considerable height, and at last were directly
over the boys, not more than forty or fifty feet from the ground; and
the youngsters were amazed at their fury, the loud, rushing sound of
their wings, as of a torrent, and of their deep, hoarse croaks and
savage, barking cries. Then they began to rise again, the hunted bird
trying to keep above his enemies, they in their turn striving to rise
higher still so as to rush down upon him from overhead; and in this way
they towered higher and higher, their barking cries coming fainter and
fainter back to earth, until the boys, not to lose sight of them, cast
themselves down flat on their backs, and, continuing to gaze up, saw
them at last no bigger than three "leetle blackbirds." Then they
vanished; but the boys, still lying on their backs, kept their eyes
fixed on the same spot, and by and by first one black speck reappeared,
then a second, and they soon saw that two birds were swiftly coming down
to earth. They fell swiftly and silently, and finally pitched upon the
down not more than a couple of hundred yards from the boys. The hunted
bird had evidently succeeded in throwing them off and escaping. Probably
it was one of their own young, for the ravens' habit is when their young
are fully grown to hunt them out of the neighbourhood, or, when they
cannot drive them off, to kill them.

There is no doubt that the carrion did attract ravens in numbers to this
part of Wiltshire, but it is a fact that up to that date--about
1830--the bird had many well-known, old breeding-places in the county.
The Rev. A. C. Smith, in his "Birds of Wiltshire," names twenty-three
breeding-places, no fewer than nine of them on Salisbury Plain; but at
the date of the publication of his work, 1887, only three of all these
nesting-places were still in use: South Tidworth, Wilton Park, and
Compton Park, Compton Chamberlain. Doubtless there were other ancient
breeding-places which the author had not heard of: one was at the Great
Ridge Wood, overlooking the Wylye valley, where ravens bred down to
about thirty-five or forty years ago. I have found many old men in that
neighbourhood who remember the birds, and they tell that the raven tree
was a great oak which was cut down about sixty years ago, after which
the birds built their nest in another tree not far away. A London friend
of mine, who was born in the neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood,
remembers the ravens as one of the common sights of the place when he
was a boy. He tells of an unlucky farmer in those parts whose sheep fell
sick and died in numbers, year after year, bringing him down to the
brink of ruin, and how his old head-shepherd would say, solemnly shaking
his head, "'Tis not strange--master, he shot a raven."

There was no ravens' breeding-place very near Winterbourne Bishop. Caleb
had "never heared tell of a nestie"; but he had once seen the nest of
another species which is supposed never to breed in this country. He was
a small boy at the time, when one day an old shepherd of the place going
out from the village saw Caleb, and calling to him said, "You're the boy
that likes birds; if you'll come with me, I'll show 'ee what no man ever
seed afore"; and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a
distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods and to a place
where he had never been, where there were bracken and heath with birch
and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of
birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about
ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was
joined by its mate. The old man pointed out that it was a felt or
fieldfare, a thrush nearly as big as the mistle-thrush but different in
colour, and he said that it was a bird that came to England in flocks in
winter from no man knows where, far off in the north, and always went
away before breeding-time. This was the only felt he had ever seen
breeding in this country, and he "didn't believe that no man had ever
seed such a thing before." He would not climb the tree to see the eggs,
or even go very near it, for fear of disturbing the birds.

This man, Caleb said, was a great one for birds: he knew them all, but
seldom said anything about them; he watched and found out a good deal
about them just for his private pleasure.

The characteristic species of this part of the down country, comprising
the parish of Winterbourne Bishop, are the pewit, magpie, turtledove,
mistle-thrush, and starling. The pewit is universal on the hills, but
will inevitably be driven away from all that portion of Salisbury Plain
used for military purposes. The mistle-thrush becomes common in summer
after its early breeding season is ended, when the birds in small flocks
resort to the downs, where they continue until cold weather drives them
away to the shelter of the wooded, low country.

In this neighbourhood there are thickets of thorn, holly, bramble, and
birch growing over hundreds of acres of down, and here the hill-magpie,
as it is called, has its chief breeding-ground, and is so common that
you can always get a sight of at least twenty birds in an afternoon's
walk. Here, too, is the metropolis of the turtledove, and the low sound
of its crooning is heard all day in summer, the other most common sound
being that of magpies--their subdued, conversational chatter and their
solo-singing, the chant or call which a bird will go on repeating for a
hundred times. The wonder is how the doves succeed in such a place in
hatching any couple of chalk-white eggs, placed on a small platform of
sticks, or of rearing any pair of young, conspicuous in their blue skins
and bright yellow down!

The keepers tell me they get even with these kill-birds later in the
year, when they take to roosting in the woods, a mile away in the
valley. The birds are waited for at some point where they are accustomed
to slip in at dark, and one keeper told me that on one evening alone
assisted by a friend he had succeeded in shooting thirty birds.

On Winterbourne Bishop Down and round the village the magpies are not
persecuted, probably because the gamekeepers, the professional
bird-killers, have lost heart in this place. It is a curious and rather
pretty story. There is no squire, as we have seen; the farmers have the
rabbits, and for game the shooting is let, or to let, by some one who
claims to be lord of the manor, who lives at a distance or abroad. At
all events he is not known personally to the people, and all they know
about the overlordship is that, whereas in years gone by every villager
had certain rights in the down--to cut furze and keep a cow, or pony, or
donkey, or half a dozen sheep or goats--now they have none; but how and
why and when these rights were lost nobody knows. Naturally there is no
sympathy between the villagers and the keepers sent from a distance to
protect the game, so that the shooting may be let to some other
stranger. On the contrary, they religiously destroy every nest they can
find, with the result that there are too few birds for anyone to take
the shooting, and it remains year after year unlet.

This unsettled state of things is all to the advantage of the black and
white bird with the ornamental tail, and he flourishes accordingly and
builds his big, thorny nests in the roadside trees about the village.

The one big bird on these downs, as in so many other places in England,
is the rook, and let us humbly thank the gods who own this green earth
and all the creatures which inhabit it that they have in their goodness
left us this one. For it is something to have a rook, although he is not
a great bird compared with the great ones lost--bustard and kite and
raven and goshawk, and many others. His abundance on the cultivated
downs is rather strange when one remembers the outcry made against him
in some parts on account of his injurious habits; but here it appears
the sentiment in his favour is just as strong in the farmer, or in a
good many farmers, as in the great landlord. The biggest rookery I know
on Salisbury Plain is at a farm-house where the farmer owns the land
himself and cultivates about nine hundred acres. One would imagine that
he would keep his rooks down in these days when a boy cannot be hired to
scare the birds from the crops.

One day, near West Knoyle, I came upon a vast company of rooks busily
engaged on a ploughed field where everything short of placing a
bird-scarer on the ground had been done to keep the birds off. A score
of rooks had been shot and suspended to long sticks planted about the
field, and there were three formidable-looking men of straw and rags
with hats on their heads and wooden guns under their arms. But the rooks
were there all the same; I counted seven at one spot, prodding the earth
close to the feet of one of the scarecrows. I went into the field to see
what they were doing, and found that it was sown with vetches, just
beginning to come up, and the birds were digging the seed up.

Three months later, near the same spot, on Mere Down, I found these
birds feasting on the corn, when it had been long cut but could not be
carried on account of the wet weather. It was a large field of fifty to
sixty acres, and as I walked by it the birds came flying leisurely over
my head to settle with loud cawings on the stocks. It was a magnificent
sight--the great, blue-black bird-forms on the golden wheat, an animated
group of three or four to half a dozen on every stock, while others
walked about the ground to pick up the scattered grain, and others were
flying over them, for just then the sun was shining on the field and
beyond it the sky was blue. Never had I witnessed birds so manifestly
rejoicing at their good fortune, with happy, loud caw-caw. Or rather
haw-haw! what a harvest, what abundance! was there ever a more perfect
August and September! Rain, rain, by night and in the morning; then sun
and wind to dry our feathers and make us glad, but never enough to dry
the corn to enable them to carry it and build it up in stacks where it
would be so much harder to get at. Could anything be better!

But the commonest bird, the one which vastly outnumbers all the others I
have named together, is the starling. It was Caleb Bawcombe's favourite
bird, and I believe it is regarded with peculiar affection by all
shepherds on the downs on account of its constant association with sheep
in the pasture. The dog, the sheep, and the crowd of starlings--these
are the lonely man's companions during his long days on the hills from
April or May to November. And what a wise bird he is, and how well he
knows his friends and his enemies! There was nothing more beautiful to
see, Caleb would say, than the behaviour of a flock of starlings when a
hawk was about. If it was a kestrel they took little or no notice of it,
but if a sparrowhawk made its appearance, instantly the crowd of birds
could be seen flying at furious speed towards the nearest flock of
sheep, and down into the flock they would fall like a shower of stones
and instantly disappear from sight. There they would remain on the
ground, among the legs of the grazing sheep, until the hawk had gone on
his way and passed out of sight.

The sparrowhawk's victims are mostly made among the young birds that
flock together in summer and live apart from the adults during the
summer months after the breeding season is over.

When I find a dead starling on the downs ranged over by sparrowhawks, it
is almost always a young bird--a "brown thrush" as it used to be called
by the old naturalists. You may know that the slayer was a sparrowhawk
by the appearance of the bird, its body untouched, but the flesh picked
neatly from the neck and the head gone. That was swallowed whole, after
the beak had been cut off. You will find the beak lying by the side of
the body. In summertime, when birds are most abundant, after the
breeding season, the sparrowhawk is a fastidious feeder.

CHAPTER XI

STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS

  Starlings' singing--Native and borrowed sounds--Imitations of
  sheep-bells--The shepherd on sheep-bells--The bells for pleasure,
  not use--A dog in charge of the flock--Shepherd calling his
  sheep--Richard Warner of Bath--Ploughmen singing to their oxen
  in Cornwall--A shepherd's loud singing

The subject of starlings associating with sheep has served to remind me
of something I have often thought when listening to their music. It
happens that I am writing this chapter in a small village on Salisbury
Plain, the time being mid-September 1909, and that just outside my door
there is a group of old elder-bushes laden just now with clusters of
ripe berries on which the starlings come to feed, filling the room all
day with that never-ending medley of sounds which is their song. They
sing in this way not only when they sing--that is to say, when they make
a serious business of it, standing motionless and a-shiver on the tiles,
wings drooping and open beak pointing upwards, but also when they are
feasting on fruit--singing and talking and swallowing elderberries
between whiles to wet their whistles. If the weather is not too cold you
will hear this music daily, wet or dry, all the year round. We may say
that of all singing birds they are most vocal, yet have no set song. I
doubt if they have more than half a dozen to a dozen sounds or notes
which are the same in every individual and their very own. One of them
is a clear, soft, musical whistle, slightly inflected; another a kissing
sound, usually repeated two or three times or oftener, a somewhat
percussive smack; still another, a sharp, prolonged hissing or sibilant
but at the same time metallic note, compared by some one to the sound
produced by milking a cow into a tin pail--a very good description.
There are other lesser notes: a musical, thrush-like chirp, repeated
slowly, and sometimes rapidly till it runs to a bubbling sound; also
there is a horny sound, which is perhaps produced by striking upon the
edges of the lower mandible with those of the upper. But it is quite
unlike the loud, hard noise made by the stork; the poor stork being a
dumb bird has made a sort of policeman's rattle of his huge beak. These
sounds do not follow each other; they come from time to time, the
intervals being filled up with others in such endless variety, each bird
producing its own notes, that one can but suppose that they are
imitations. We know, in fact, that the starling is our greatest mimic,
and that he often succeeds in recognizable reproductions of single
notes, of phrases, and occasionally of entire songs, as, for instance,
that of the blackbird. But in listening to him we are conscious of his
imitations; even when at his best he amuses rather than delights--he is
not like the mocking-bird. His common starling pipe cannot produce
sounds of pure and beautiful quality, like the blackbird's "oboe-voice,"
to quote Davidson's apt phrase: he emits this song in a strangely
subdued tone, producing the effect of a blackbird heard singing at a
considerable distance. And so with innumerable other notes, calls, and
songs--they are often to their originals what a man's voice heard on a
telephone is to his natural voice. He succeeds best, as a rule, in
imitations of the coarser, metallic sounds, and as his medley abounds in
a variety of little, measured, tinkling, and clinking notes, as of
tappings on a metal plate, it has struck me at times that these are
probably borrowed from the sheep-bells of which the bird hears so much
in his feeding-grounds. It is, however, not necessary to suppose that
every starling gets these sounds directly from the bells; the birds
undoubtedly mimic one another, as is the case with mocking-birds, and
the young might easily acquire this part of their song language from the
old birds without visiting the flocks in the pastures.

The sheep-bell, in its half-muffled strokes, as of a small hammer
tapping on an iron or copper plate, is, one would imagine, a sound well
within the starling's range, easily imitated, therefore specially
attractive to him.

But--to pass to another subject--what does the shepherd himself think or
feel about it; and why does he have bells on his sheep?

He thinks a great deal of his bells. He pipes not like the shepherd of
fable or of the pastoral poets, nor plays upon any musical instrument,
and seldom sings, or even whistles--that sorry substitute for song; he
loves music nevertheless, and gets it in his sheep-bells; and he likes
it in quantity. "How many bells have you got on your sheep--it sounds as
if you had a great many?" I asked of a shepherd the other day, feeding
his flock near Old Sarum, and he replied, "Just forty, and I wish there
were eighty." Twenty-five or thirty is a more usual number, but only
because of their cost, for the shepherd has very little money for bells
or anything else. Another told me that he had "only thirty," but he
intended getting more. The sound cheers him; it is not exactly
monotonous, owing to the bells being of various sizes and also greatly
varying in thickness, so that they produce different tones, from the
sharp tinkle-tinkle of the smallest to the sonorous klonk-klonk of the
big, copper bell. Then, too, they are differently agitated, some quietly
when the sheep are grazing with heads down, others rapidly as the animal
walks or trots on; and there are little bursts or peals when a sheep
shakes its head, all together producing a kind of rude harmony--a music
which, like that of bagpipes or of chiming church-bells, heard from a
distance, is akin to natural music and accords with rural scenes.

As to use, there is little or none. A shepherd will sometimes say, when
questioned on the subject, that the bells tell him just where the flock
is or in which direction they are travelling; but he knows better. The
one who is not afraid to confess the simple truth of the matter to a
stranger will tell you that he does not need the bells to tell him where
the sheep are or in which direction they are grazing. His eyes are good
enough for that. The bells are for his solace or pleasure alone. It may
be that the sheep like the tinkling too--it is his belief that they do
like it. A shepherd said to me a few days ago: "It is lonesome with the
flock on the downs; more so in cold, wet weather, when you perhaps don't
see a person all day--on some days not even at a distance, much less to
speak to. The bells keep us from feeling it too much. We know what we
have them for, and the more we have the better we like it. They are
company to us."

Even in fair weather he seldom has anyone to speak to. A visit from an
idle man who will sit down and have a pipe and talk with him is a day to
be long remembered and even to date events from. "'Twas the month--May,
June, or October--when the stranger came out to the down and talked to I."

One day, in September, when sauntering over Mere Down, one of the most
extensive and loneliest-looking sheep-walks in South Wilts--a vast,
elevated plain or table-land, a portion of which is known as White Sheet
Hill--I passed three flocks of sheep, all with many bells, and noticed
that each flock produced a distinctly different sound or effect, owing
doubtless to a different number of big and little bells in each; and it
struck me that any shepherd on a dark night, or if taken blindfolded
over the downs, would be able to identify his own flock by the sound. At
the last of the three flocks a curious thing occurred. There was no
shepherd with it or anywhere in sight, but a dog was in charge; I found
him lying apparently asleep in a hollow, by the side of a stick and an
old sack. I called to him, but instead of jumping up and coming to me,
as he would have done if his master had been there, he only raised his
head, looked at me, then put his nose down on his paws again. I am on
duty--in sole charge--and you must not speak to me, was what he said.
After walking a little distance on, I spied the shepherd with a second
dog at his heels, coming over the down straight to the flock, and I
stayed to watch. When still over a hundred yards from the hollow the dog
flew ahead, and the other jumping up ran to meet him, and they stood
together, wagging their tails as if conversing. When the shepherd had
got up to them he stood and began uttering a curious call, a somewhat
musical cry in two notes, and instantly the sheep, now at a considerable
distance, stopped feeding and turned, then all together began running
towards him, and when within thirty yards stood still, massed together,
and all gazing at him. He then uttered a different call, and turning
walked away, the dogs keeping with him and the sheep closely following.
It was late in the day, and he was going to fold them down at the foot
of the slope in some fields half a mile away.

As the scene I had witnessed appeared unusual I related it to the very
next shepherd I talked with.

"Oh, there was nothing in that," he said. "Of course the dog was behind
the flock."

I said, "No, the peculiar thing was that both dogs were with their
master, and the flock followed."

"Well, my sheep would do the same," he returned. "That is, they'll do it
if they know there's something good for them--something they like in the
fold. They are very knowing." And other shepherds to whom I related the
incident said pretty much the same, but they apparently did not quite
like to hear that any shepherd could control his sheep with his voice
alone; their way of receiving the story confirmed me in the belief that
I had witnessed something unusual.

Before concluding this short chapter I will leave the subject of the
Wiltshire shepherd and his sheep to quote a remarkable passage about men
singing to their cattle in Cornwall, from a work on that county by
Richard Warner of Bath, once a well-known and prolific writer of
topographical and other books. They are little known now, I fancy, but
he was great in his day, which lasted from about the middle of the
eighteenth to about the middle of the nineteenth century--at all events,
he died in 1857, aged ninety-four. But he was not great at first, and
finding when nearing middle age that he was not prospering, he took to
the Church and had several livings, some of them running concurrently,
as was the fashion in those dark days. His topographical work included
Walks in Wales, in Somerset, in Devon, Walks in many places, usually
taken in a stage-coach or on horseback, containing nothing worth
remembering except perhaps the one passage I have mentioned, which is as
follows:--

"We had scarcely entered Cornwall before our attention was agreeably
arrested by a practice connected with the agriculture of the people,
which to us was entirely novel. The farmers judiciously employ the fine
oxen of the country in ploughing, and other processes of husbandry, to
which the strength of this useful animal can be employed"--the Rev.
Richard Warner is tedious, but let us be patient and see what
follows--"to which the strength of this useful animal can be employed;
and while the hinds are thus driving their patient slaves along the
furrows, they continually cheer them with conversation, denoting
approbation and pleasure. This encouragement is conveyed to them in a
sort of chaunt, of very agreeable modulation, which, floating through
the air from different distances, produces a striking effect both on the
ear and imagination. The notes are few and simple, and when delivered by
a clear, melodious voice, have something expressive of that tenderness
and affection which man naturally entertains for the companions of his
labours, in a _pastoral state_ of society, when, feeling more
forcibly his dependence upon domesticated animals for support, he gladly
reciprocates with them kindness and protection for comfort and
subsistence. This wild melody was to me, I confess, peculiarly
affecting. It seemed to draw more closely the link of friendship between
man and the humbler tribes of _fellow mortals_. It solaced my heart
with the appearance of humanity, in a world of violence and in times of
universal hostile rage; and it gladdened my fancy with the contemplation
of those days of heavenly harmony, promised in the predictions of
eternal truth, when man, freed at length from prejudice and passion,
shall seek his happiness in cultivating the mild, the benevolent, and
the merciful sensibilities of his nature; and when the animal world,
catching the virtues of its lord and master, shall soften into
gentleness and love; when the wolf"....

And so on, clause after clause, with others to be added, until the whole
sentence becomes as long as a fishing-rod. But apart from the
fiddlededee, is the thing he states believable? It is a charming
picture, and one would like to know more about that "chaunt," that "wild
melody." The passage aroused my curiosity when in Cornwall, as it had
appeared to me that in no part of England are the domestic animals so
little considered by their masters. The R.S.P.C.A. is practically
unknown there, and when watching the doings of shepherds or drovers with
their sheep the question has occurred to me, What would my Wiltshire
shepherd friends say of such a scene if they had witnessed it? There is
nothing in print which I can find to confirm Warner's observations, and
if you inquire of very old men who have been all their lives on the soil
they will tell you that there has never been such a custom in their
time, nor have they ever heard of it as existing formerly. Warner's Tour
through Cornwall is dated 1808.

I take it that he described a scene he actually witnessed, and that he
jumped to the conclusion that it was a common custom for the ploughman
to sing to his oxen. It is not unusual to find a man anywhere singing to
his oxen, or horses, or sheep, if he has a voice and is fond of
exercising it. I remember that in a former book--"Nature in Downland"--I
described the sweet singing of a cow-boy when tending his cows on a
heath near Trotton, in West Sussex; and here in Wiltshire it amused me
to listen, at a vast distance, to the robust singing of a shepherd while
following his flock on the great lonely downs above Chitterne. He was a
sort of Tamagno of the downs, with a tremendous voice audible a mile
away.

CHAPTER XII

THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLE

  Dan'l Burdon, the treasure-seeker--The shepherd's feeling for the
  Bible--Effect of the pastoral life--The shepherd's story of Isaac's
  boyhood--The village on the Wylye

One of the shepherd's early memories was of Dan'l Burdon, a labourer on
the farm where Isaac Bawcombe was head-shepherd. He retained a vivid
recollection of this person, who had a profound gravity and was the most
silent man in the parish. He was always thinking about hidden treasure,
and all his spare time was spent in seeking for it. On a Sunday morning,
or in the evening after working hours, he would take a spade or pick and
go away over the hills on his endless search after "something he could
not find." He opened some of the largest barrows, making trenches six to
ten feet deep through them, but found nothing to reward him. One day he
took Caleb with him, and they went to a part of the down where there
were certain depressions in the turf of a circular form and six to seven
feet in circumference. Burdon had observed these basin-like depressions
and had thought it possible they marked the place where things of value
had been buried in long-past ages. To begin he cut the turf all round
and carefully removed it, then dug and found a thick layer of flints.
These removed, he came upon a deposit of ashes and charred wood. And
that was all. Burdon without a word set to work to put it all back in
its place again--ashes and wood, and earth and flints--and having trod
it firmly down he carefully replaced the turf, then leaning on his spade
gazed silently at the spot for a space of several minutes. At last he
spoke. "Maybe, Caleb, you've beared tell about what the Bible says of
burnt sacrifice. Well now, I be of opinion that it were here. They
people the Bible says about, they come up here to sacrifice on White
Bustard Down, and these be the places where they made their fires."

Then he shouldered his spade and started home, the boy following.
Caleb's comment was: "I didn't say nothing to un because I were only a
leetel boy and he were a old man; but I knowed better than that all the
time, because them people in the Bible they was never in England at all,
so how could they sacrifice on White Bustard Down in Wiltsheer?"

It was no idle boast on his part. Caleb and his brothers had been taught
their letters when small, and the Bible was their one book, which they
read not only in the evenings at home but out on the downs during the
day when they were with the flock. His extreme familiarity with the
whole Scripture narrative was a marvel to me; it was also strange,
considering how intelligent a man he was, that his lifelong reading of
that one book had made no change in his rude "Wiltsheer" speech.

Apart from the feeling which old, religious country people, who know
nothing about the Higher Criticism, have for the Bible, taken literally
as the Word of God, there is that in the old Scriptures which appeals in
a special way to the solitary man who feeds his flock on the downs. I
remember well in the days of my boyhood and youth, when living in a
purely pastoral country among a semi-civilized and very simple people,
how understandable and eloquent many of the ancient stories were to me.
The life, the outlook, the rude customs, and the vivid faith in the
Unseen, were much the same in that different race in a far-distant age,
in a remote region of the earth, and in the people I mixed with in my
own home. That country has been changed now; it has been improved and
civilized and brought up to the European standard; I remember it when it
was as it had existed for upwards of two centuries before it had caught
the contagion. The people I knew were the descendants of the Spanish
colonists of the seventeenth century, who had taken kindly to the life
of the plains, and had easily shed the traditions and ways of thought of
Europe and of towns. Their philosophy of life, their ideals, their
morality, were the result of the conditions they existed in, and wholly
unlike ours; and the conditions were like those of the ancient people of
which the Bible tells us. Their very phraseology was strongly
reminiscent of that of the sacred writings, and their character in the
best specimens was like that of the men of the far past who lived nearer
to God, as we say, and certainly nearer to nature than it is possible
for us in this artificial state. Among these sometimes grand old men who
were large landowners, rich in flocks and herds, these fine old,
dignified "natives," the substantial and leading men of the district who
could not spell their own names, there were those who reminded you of
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brethren, and
even of David the passionate psalmist, with perhaps a guitar for a harp.

No doubt the Scripture lessons read in the thousand churches on every
Sunday of the year are practically meaningless to the hearers. These old
men, with their sheep and goats and wives, and their talk about God, are
altogether out of our ways of thought, in fact as far from us--as
incredible or unimaginable, we may say--as the neolithic men or the
inhabitants of another planet. They are of the order of mythical heroes
and the giants of antiquity. To read about them is an ancient custom,
but we do not listen.

Even to myself the memories of my young days came to be regarded as very
little more than mere imaginations, and I almost ceased to believe in
them until, after years of mixing with modern men, mostly in towns, I
fell in with the downland shepherds, and discovered that even here, in
densely populated and ultra-civilized England, something of the ancient
spirit had survived. In Caleb, and a dozen old men more or less like
him, I seemed to find myself among the people of the past, and sometimes
they were so much like some of the remembered, old, sober, and
slow-minded herders of the plains that I could not help saying to
myself, Why, how this man reminds me of Tio Isidoro, or of Don Pascual
of the "Three Poplar Trees," or of Marcos who would always have three
black sheep in a flock. And just as they reminded me of these men I had
actually known, so did they bring back the older men of the Bible
history--Abraham and Jacob and the rest.

The point here is that these old Bible stories have a reality and
significance for the shepherd of the down country which they have lost
for modern minds; that they recognize their own spiritual lineaments in
these antique portraits, and that all these strange events might have
happened a few years ago and not far away.

One day I said to Caleb Bawcombe that his knowledge of the Bible,
especially of the old part, was greater than that of the other shepherds
I knew on the downs, and I would like to hear why it was so. This led to
the telling of a fresh story about his father's boyhood, which he had
heard in later years from his mother. Isaac was an only child and not
the son of a shepherd; his father was a rather worthless if not a wholly
bad man; he was idle and dissolute, and being remarkably dexterous with
his fists he was persuaded by certain sporting persons to make a
business of fighting--quite a common thing in those days. He wanted
nothing better, and spent the greater part of the time in wandering
about the country; the money he made was spent away from home, mostly in
drink, while his wife was left to keep herself and child in the best way
she could at home or in the fields. By and by a poor stranger came to
the village in search of work and was engaged for very little pay by a
small farmer, for the stranger confessed that he was without experience
of farm work of any description. The cheapest lodging he could find was
in the poor woman's cottage, and then Isaac's mother, who pitied him
because he was so poor and a stranger alone in the world, a very silent,
melancholy man, formed the opinion that he had belonged to another rank
in life. His speech and hands and personal habits betrayed it.
Undoubtedly he was a gentleman; and then from something in his manner,
his voice, and his words whenever he addressed her, and his attention to
religion, she further concluded that he had been in the Church; that,
owing to some trouble or disaster, he had abandoned his place in the
world to live away from all who had known him, as a labourer.

One day he spoke to her about Isaac; he said he had been observing him
and thought it a great pity that such a fine, intelligent boy should be
allowed to grow up without learning his letters. She agreed that it was,
but what could she do? The village school was kept by an old woman, and
though she taught the children very little it had to be paid for, and
she could not afford it. He then offered to teach Isaac himself and she
gladly consented, and from that day he taught Isaac for a couple of
hours every evening until the boy was able to read very well, after
which they read the Bible through together, the poor man explaining
everything, especially the historical parts, so clearly and beautifully,
with such an intimate knowledge of the countries and peoples and customs
of the remote East, that it was all more interesting than a fairy tale.
Finally he gave his copy of the Bible to Isaac, and told him to carry it
in his pocket every day when he went out on the downs, and when he sat
down to take it out and read in it. For by this time Isaac, who was now
ten years old, had been engaged as a shepherd-boy to his great
happiness, for to be a shepherd was his ambition.

Then one day the stranger rolled up his few belongings in a bundle and
put them on a stick which he placed on his shoulder, said good-bye, and
went away, never to return, taking his sad secret with him.

Isaac followed the stranger's counsel, and when he had sons of his own
made them do as he had done from early boyhood. Caleb had never gone
with his flock on the down without the book, and had never passed a day
without reading a portion.

The incidents and observations gathered in many talks with the old
shepherd, which I have woven into the foregoing chapters, relate mainly
to the earlier part of his life, up to the time when, a married man and
father of three small children, he migrated to Warminster. There he was
in, to him, a strange land, far away from friends and home and the old
familiar surroundings, amid new scenes and new people, But the few years
he spent at that place had furnished him with many interesting memories,
some of which will be narrated in the following chapters.

I have told in the account of Winterbourne Bishop how I first went to
that village just to see his native place, and later I visited Doveton
for no other reason than that he had lived there, to find it one of the
most charming of the numerous pretty villages in the vale. I looked for
the cottage in which he had lived and thought it as perfect a home as a
quiet, contemplative man who loved nature could have had: a small,
thatched cottage, very old looking, perhaps inconvenient to live in, but
situated in the prettiest spot, away from other houses, near and within
sight of the old church with old elms and beech-trees growing close to
it, and the land about it green meadow. The clear river, fringed with a
luxuriant growth of sedges, flag, and reeds, was less than a
stone's-throw away.

So much did I like the vale of the Wylye when I grew to know it well
that I wish to describe it fully in the chapter that follows.

CHAPTER XIII

VALE OF THE WYLYE

  Warminster--Vale of the Wylye--Counting the villages--A lost
  church--Character of the villages--Tytherington church--Story of the
  dog--Lord Lovell--Monuments in churches--Manor-houses--Knook--The
  cottages--Yellow stonecrop--Cottage gardens--Marigolds--Golden-rod--Wild
  flowers of the water-side--Seeking for the characteristic expression

The prettily-named Wylye is a little river not above twenty miles in
length from its rise to Salisbury, where, after mixing with the Nadder
at Wilton, it joins the Avon. At or near its source stands Warminster, a
small, unimportant town with a nobler-sounding name than any other in
Wiltshire. Trowbridge, Devizes, Marlborough, Salisbury, do not stir the
mind in the same degree; and as for Chippenham, Melksham, Mere, Calne,
and Corsham, these all are of no more account than so many villages in
comparison. Yet Warminster has no associations--no place in our mental
geography; at all events one remembers nothing about it. Its name, which
after all may mean nothing more than the monastery on the Were--one of
the three streamlets which flow into the Wylye at its source--is its
only glory. It is not surprising that Caleb Bawcombe invariably speaks
of his migration to, and of the time he passed at Warminster, when, as a
fact, he was not there at all, but at Doveton, a little village on the
Wylye a few miles below the town with the great name.

It is a green valley--the greenness strikes one sharply on account of
the pale colour of the smooth, high downs on either side--half a mile to
a mile in width, its crystal current showing like a bright serpent for a
brief space in the green, flat meadows, then vanishing again among the
trees. So many are the great shade trees, beeches and ashes and elms,
that from some points the valley has the appearance of a continuous
wood--a contiguity of shade. And the wood hides the villages, at some
points so effectually that looking down from the hills you may not catch
a glimpse of one and imagine it to be a valley where no man dwells. As a
rule you do see something of human occupancy--the red or yellow roofs of
two or three cottages, a half-hidden grey church tower, or column of
blue smoke, but to see the villages you must go down and look closely,
and even so you will find it difficult to count them all. I have tried,
going up and down the valley several times, walking or cycling, and have
never succeeded in getting the same number on two occasions. There are
certainly more then twenty, without counting the hamlets, and the right
number is probably something between twenty-five and thirty, but I do
not want to find out by studying books and maps. I prefer to let the
matter remain unsettled so as to have the pleasure of counting or trying
to count them again at some future time. But I doubt that I shall ever
succeed. On one occasion I caught sight of a quaint, pretty little
church standing by itself in the middle of a green meadow, where it
looked very solitary with no houses in sight and not even a cow grazing
near it. The river was between me and the church, so I went up-stream, a
mile and a half, to cross by the bridge, then doubled back to look for
the church, and couldn't find it! Yet it was no illusory church; I have
seen it again on two occasions, but again from the other side of the
river, and I must certainly go back some day in search of that lost
church, where there may be effigies, brasses, sad, eloquent
inscriptions, and other memorials of ancient tragedies and great
families now extinct in the land.

This is perhaps one of the principal charms of the Wylye--the sense of
beautiful human things hidden from sight among the masses of foliage.
Yet another lies in the character of the villages. Twenty-five or
twenty-eight of them in a space of twenty miles; yet the impression,
left on the mind is that these small centres of population are really
few and far between. For not only are they small, but of the old, quiet,
now almost obsolete type of village, so unobtrusive as to affect the
mind soothingly, like the sight of trees and flowery banks and grazing
cattle. The churches, too, as is fit, are mostly small and ancient and
beautiful, half-hidden in their tree-shaded churchyards, rich in
associations which go back to a time when history fades into myth and
legend. Not all, however, are of this description; a few are naked,
dreary little buildings, and of these I will mention one which, albeit
ancient, has no monuments and no burial-ground. This is the church of
Tytherington, a small, rustic village, which has for neighbours Codford
St. Peter one one side and Sutton Veny and Norton Bavant on the other.
To get into this church, where there was nothing but naked walls to look
at, I had to procure the key from the clerk, a nearly blind old man of
eighty. He told me that he was shoemaker but could no longer see to make
or mend shoes; that as a boy he was a weak, sickly creature, and his
father, a farm bailiff, made him learn shoemaking because he was unfit
to work out of doors. "I remember this church," he said, "when there was
only one service each quarter," but, strange to say, he forgot to tell
me the story of the dog! "What, didn't he tell you about the dog?"
exclaimed everybody. There was really nothing else to tell.

It happened about a hundred years ago that once, after the quarterly
service had been held, a dog was missed, a small terrier owned by the
young wife of a farmer of Tytherington named Case. She was fond of her
dog, and lamented its loss for a little while, then forgot all about it.
But after three months, when the key was once more put into the rusty
lock and the door thrown open, there was the dog, a living "skelington"
it was said, dazed by the light of day, but still able to walk! It was
supposed that he had kept himself alive by "licking the moisture from
the walls." The walls, they said, were dripping with wet and covered
with a thick growth of mould. I went back to interrogate the ancient
clerk, and he said that the dog died shortly after its deliverance; Mrs.
Case herself told him all about it. She was an old woman then, but was
always willing to relate the sad story of her pet.

That picture of the starving dog coming out, a living skeleton, from the
wet, mouldy church, reminds us sharply of the changed times we live in
and of the days when the Church was still sleeping very peacefully, not
yet turning uneasily in its bed before opening its eyes; and when a
comfortable rector of Codford thought it quite enough that the people of
Tytherington, a mile away, should have one service every three months.

As a fact, the Tytherington dog interested me as much as the story of
the last Lord Lovell's self-incarceration in his own house in the
neighbouring little village of Upton Lovell. He took refuge there from
his enemies who were seeking his life, and concealed himself so
effectually that he was never seen again. Centuries later, when
excavations were made on the site of the ruined mansion, a secret
chamber was discovered, containing a human skeleton seated in a chair at
a table, on which were books and papers crumbling into dust.

A volume might be filled with such strange and romantic happenings in
the little villages of the Wylye, and for the natural man they have a
lasting fascination; but they invariably relate to great people of their
day--warriors and statesmen and landowners of old and noble lineage,
the smallest and meanest you will find being clothiers, or merchants,
who amassed large fortunes and built mansions for themselves and
almshouses for the aged poor, and, when dead, had memorials placed to
them in the churches. But of the humble cottagers, the true people of
the vale who were rooted in the soil, and nourished and died like trees
in the same place--of these no memory exists. We only know that they
lived and laboured; that when they died, three or four a year, three or
four hundred in a century, they were buried in the little shady
churchyard, each with a green mound over him to mark the spot. But in
time these "mouldering heaps" subsided, the bodies turned to dust, and
another and yet other generations were laid in the same place among the
forgotten dead, to be themselves in turn forgotten. Yet I would rather
know the histories of these humble, unremembered lives than of the great
ones of the vale who have left us a memory.

It may be for this reason that I was little interested in the
manor-houses of the vale. They are plentiful enough, some gone to decay
or put to various uses; others still the homes of luxury, beauty,
culture: stately rooms, rich fabrics; pictures, books, and manuscripts,
gold and silver ware, china and glass, expensive curios, suits of
armour, ivory and antlers, tiger-skins, stuffed goshawks and peacocks'
feathers. Houses, in some cases built centuries ago, standing
half-hidden in beautiful wooded grounds, isolated from the village; and
even as they thus stand apart, sacred from intrusion, so the life that
is in them does not mix with or form part of the true native life. They
are to the cottagers of to-day what the Roman villas were to the native
population of some eighteen centuries ago. This will seem incredible to
some: to me, an untrammelled person, familiar in both hall and cottage,
the distance between them appears immense.

A reader well acquainted with the valley will probably laugh to be told
that the manor-house which most interested me was that of Knook, a poor
little village between Heytesbury and Upton Lovell. Its ancient and
towerless little church with rough, grey walls is, if possible, even
more desolate-looking than that of Tytherington. In my hunt for the
key to open it I disturbed a quaint old man, another octogenarian,
picturesque in a vast white beard, who told me he was a thatcher, or had
been one before the evil days came when he could work no more and was
compelled to seek parish relief. "You must go to the manor-house for the
key," he told me. A strange place in which to look for the key, and it
was stranger still to see the house, close to the church, and so like it
that but for the small cross on the roof of the latter one could not
have known which was the sacred building. First a monks' house, it fell
at the Reformation to some greedy gentleman who made it his dwelling,
and doubtless in later times it was used as a farm-house. Now a house
most desolate, dirty, and neglected, with cracks in the walls which
threaten ruin, standing in a wilderness of weeds, tenanted by a poor
working-man whose wages are twelve shillings a week, and his wife and
eight small children. The rent is eighteen-pence a week--probably the
lowest-rented manor-house in England, though it is not very rare to
find such places tenanted by labourers.

But let us look at the true cottages. There are, I imagine,
few places in England where the humble homes of the people
have so great a charm. Undoubtedly they are darker inside, and not so
convenient to live in as the modern box-shaped, red-brick, slate-roofed
cottages, which have spread a wave of ugliness over the country;
but they do not offend--they please the eye. They are smaller than
the modern-built habitations; they are weathered and coloured by
sun and wind and rain and many lowly vegetable forms to a harmony
with nature. They appear related to the trees amid which they
stand, to the river and meadows, to the sloping downs at the side,
and to the sky and clouds over all. And, most delightful feature,
they stand among, and are wrapped in, flowers as in a garment--rose
and vine and creeper and clematis. They are mostly thatched, but some
have tiled roofs, their deep, dark red clouded and stained with lichen
and moss; and these roofs, too, have their flowers in summer. They are
grown over with yellow stonecrop, that bright cheerful flower that
smiles down at you from the lowly roof above the door, with such an
inviting expression, so delighted to see you no matter how poor and
worthless a person you may be or what mischief you may have been at,
that  you begin to understand the significance of a strange vernacular
name of this plant--Welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk.

But its garden flowers, clustering and nestling round it, amid which its
feet are set--they are to me the best of all flowers. These are the
flowers we know and remember for ever. The old, homely, cottage-garden
blooms, so old that they have entered the soul. The big house garden, or
gardener's garden, with everything growing in it I hate, but these I
love--fragrant gillyflower and pink and clove-smelling carnation;
wallflower, abundant periwinkle, sweet-william, larkspur,
love-in-a-mist, and love-lies-bleeding, old-woman's-nightcap, and
kiss-me-John-at-the-garden-gate, some times called pansy. And best of
all and in greatest profusion, that flower of flowers, the marigold.

How the townsman, town born and bred, regards this flower, I do not
know. He is, in spite of all the time I have spent in his company, a
comparative stranger to me--the one living creature on the earth who
does not greatly interest me. Some over-populated planet in our system
discovered a way to relieve itself by discharging its superfluous
millions on our globe--a pale people with hurrying feet and eager,
restless minds, who live apart in monstrous, crowded camps, like wood
ants that go not out to forage for themselves--six millions of them
crowded together in one camp alone! I have lived in these colonies,
years and years, never losing the sense of captivity, of exile, ever
conscious of my burden, taking no interest in the doings of that
innumerable multitude, its manifold interests, its ideals and
philosophy, its arts and pleasures. What, then, does it matter how they
regard this common orange-coloured flower with a strong smell? For me it
has an atmosphere, a sense or suggestion of something immeasurably
remote and very beautiful--an event, a place, a dream perhaps, which has
left no distinct image, but only this feeling unlike all others,
imperishable, and not to be described except by the one word Marigold.

But when my sight wanders away from the flower to others blooming with
it--to all those which I have named and to the taller ones, so tall that
they reach half-way up, and some even quite up, to the eaves of the
lowly houses they stand against--hollyhocks and peonies and crystalline
white lilies with powdery gold inside, and the common sunflower--I begin
to perceive that they all possess something of that same magical
quality.

These taller blooms remind me that the evening primrose, long
naturalized in our hearts, is another common and very delightful
cottage-garden flower; also that here, on the Wylye, there is yet
another stranger from the same western world which is fast winning our
affections. This is the golden-rod, grandly beautiful in its great,
yellow, plume-like tufts. But it is not quite right to call the tufts
yellow: they are green, thickly powdered with the minute golden florets.
There is no flower in England like it, and it is a happiness to know
that it promises to establish itself with us as a wild flower.

Where the village lies low in the valley and the cottage is near the
water, there are wild blooms, too, which almost rival those of the
garden in beauty--water agrimony and comfrey with ivory-white and dim
purple blossoms, purple and yellow loosestrife and gem-like, water
forget-me-not; all these mixed with reeds and sedges and water-grasses,
forming a fringe or border to the potato or cabbage patch, dividing it
from the stream.

But now I have exhausted the subject of the flowers, and enumerated and
dwelt upon the various other components of the scene, it comes to me
that I have not yet said the right thing and given the Wylye its
characteristic expression. In considering the flowers we lose sight of
the downs, and so in occupying ourselves with the details we miss the
general effect. Let me then, once more, before concluding this chapter,
try to capture the secret of this little river.

There are other chalk streams in Wiltshire and Hampshire and
Dorset--swift crystal currents that play all summer long with the
floating poa grass fast held in their pebbly beds, flowing through
smooth downs, with small ancient churches in their green villages, and
pretty thatched cottages smothered in flowers--which yet do not produce
the same effect as the Wylye. Not Avon for all its beauty, nor Itchen,
nor Test. Wherein, then, does the "Wylye bourne" differ from these
others, and what is its special attraction? It was only when I set
myself to think about it, to analyse the feeling in my own mind, that I
discovered the secret--that is, in my own case, for of its effect on
others I cannot say anything. What I discovered was that the various
elements of interest, all of which may be found in other chalk-stream
valleys, are here concentrated, or comprised in a limited space, and
seen together produce a combined effect on the mind. It is the
narrowness of the valley and the nearness of the high downs standing
over it on either side, with, at some points, the memorials of antiquity
carved on their smooth surfaces, the barrows and lynchetts or terraces,
and the vast green earth-works crowning their summit. Up here on the
turf, even with the lark singing his shrill music in the blue heavens,
you are with the prehistoric dead, yourself for the time one of that
innumerable, unsubstantial multitude, invisible in the sun, so that the
sheep travelling as they graze, and the shepherd following them, pass
through their ranks without suspecting their presence. And from that
elevation you look down upon the life of to-day--the visible life, so
brief in the individual, which, like the swift silver stream beneath,
yet flows on continuously from age to age and for ever. And even as you
look down you hear, at that distance, the bell of the little hidden
church tower telling the hour of noon, and quickly following, a shout of
freedom and joy from many shrill voices of children just released from
school. Woke to life by those sounds, and drawn down by them, you may
sit to rest or sun yourself on the stone table of a tomb overgrown on
its sides with moss, the two-century-old inscription well-nigh
obliterated, in the little grass-grown, flowery churchyard which serves
as village green and playground in that small centre of life, where the
living and the dead exist in a neighbourly way together. For it is not
here as in towns, where the dead are away and out of mind and the past
cut off. And if after basking too long in the sun in that tree-sheltered
spot you go into the little church to cool yourself, you will probably
find in a dim corner not far from the altar a stone effigy of one of an
older time; a knight in armour, perhaps a crusader with legs crossed,
lying on his back, dimly seen in the dim light, with perhaps a coloured
sunbeam on his upturned face. For this little church where the villagers
worship is very old; Norman on Saxon foundations; and before they were
ever laid there may have been a temple to some ancient god at that spot,
or a Roman villa perhaps. For older than Saxon foundations are found in
the vale, and mosaic floors, still beautiful after lying buried so long.

All this--the far-removed events and periods in time--are not in the
conscious mind when we are in the vale or when we are looking down on it
from above: the mind is occupied with nothing but visible nature. Thus,
when I am sitting on the tomb, listening to the various sounds of life
about me, attentive to the flowers and bees and butterflies, to man or
woman or child taking a short cut through the churchyard, exchanging a
few words with them; or when I am by the water close by, watching a
little company of graylings, their delicately-shaded, silver-grey scales
distinctly seen as they lie in the crystal current watching for flies;
or when I listen to the perpetual musical talk and song combined of a
family of green-finches in the alders or willows, my mind is engaged
with these things. But if one is familiar with the vale; if one has
looked with interest and been deeply impressed with the signs and
memorials of past life and of antiquity everywhere present and forming
part of the scene, something of it and of all that it represents remains
in the subconscious mind to give a significance and feeling to the
scene, which affects us here more than in most places; and that, I take
it, is the special charm of this little valley.

CHAPTER XIV

A SHEEP-DOG'S LIFE

  Watch--His visits to a dew-pond--David and his dog Monk--Watch goes to
  David's assistance--Caleb's new master objects to his dog--Watch and the
  corn-crake--Watch plays with rabbits and guinea-pigs--Old Nance the
  rook-scarer--The lost pair of spectacles--Watch in decline--Grey hairs
  in animals--A grey mole--Last days of Watch--A shepherd on old
  sheep-dogs

Perhaps the most interesting of the many sheep-dog histories the
shepherd related was that of Watch, a dog he had at Winterbourne Bishop
for three years before he migrated to Warminster. Watch, he said, was
more "like a Christian," otherwise a reasonable being, than any other
dog he had owned. He was exceedingly active, and in hot weather suffered
more from heat than most dogs. Now the only accessible water when they
were out on the down was in the mist-pond about a quarter of a mile from
his "liberty," as he called that portion of the down on which he was
entitled to pasture his sheep. When Watch could stand his sufferings no
longer, he would run to his master, and sitting at his feet look up at
his face and emit a low, pleading whine.

"What be you wanting, Watch--a drink or a swim?" the shepherd would say,
and Watch, cocking up his ears, would repeat the whine.

"Very well, go to the pond," Bawcombe would say, and off Watch would
rush, never pausing until he got to the water, and dashing in he would
swim round and round, lapping the water as he bathed.

At the side of the pond there was a large, round sarsen-stone, and
invariably on coming out of his bath Watch would jump upon it, and with
his four feet drawn up close together would turn round and round,
surveying the country from that elevation; then jumping down he would
return in all haste to his duties.

Another anecdote, which relates to the Winterbourne Bishop period, is a
somewhat painful one, and is partly about Monk, the sheep-dog already
described as a hunter of foxes, and his tragic end. Caleb had worked him
for a time, but when he came into possession of Watch he gave Monk to
his younger brother David, who was under-shepherd on the same farm.

One morning Caleb was with the ewes in a field, when David, who was in
charge of the lambs two or three fields away, came to him looking very
strange--very much put out.

"What are you here for--what's wrong with 'ee?" demanded Caleb.

"Nothing's wrong," returned the other.

"Where's Monk then?" asked Caleb.

"Dead," said David.

"Dead! How's he dead?"

"I killed'n. He wouldn't mind me and made me mad, and I up with my stick
and gave him one crack on the head and it killed'n."

"You killed 'n!" exclaimed Caleb. "An' you come here an' tell I
nothing's wrong! Is that a right way to speak of such a thing as that?
What be you thinking of? And what be you going to do with the lambs?"

"I'm just going back to them--I'm going to do without a dog. I'm going
to put them in the rape and they'll be all right."

"What! put them in the rape and no dog to help 'ee?" cried the other.
"You are not doing things right, but master mustn't pay for it. Take
Watch to help 'ee--I must do without'n this morning."

"No, I'll not take'n," he said, for he was angry because he had done an
evil thing and he would have no one, man or dog, to help him. "I'll do
better without a dog," he said, and marched off.

Caleb cried after him: "If you won't have the dog don't let the lambs
suffer but do as I tell 'ee. Don't you let 'em bide in the rape more 'n
ten minutes; then chase them out, and let 'em stand twenty minutes to
half an hour; then let them in another ten minutes and out again for
twenty minutes, then let them go back and feed in it quietly, for the
danger 'll be over. If you don't do as I tell 'ee you'll have many
blown."

David listened, then without a word went his way. But Caleb was still
much troubled in his mind. How would he get that flock of hungry lambs
out of the rape without a dog? And presently he determined to send
Watch, or try to send him, to save the situation. David had been gone
half an hour when he called the dog, and pointing in the direction he
had taken he cried, "Dave wants 'ee--go to Dave."

Watch looked at him and listened, then bounded away, and after running
full speed about fifty yards stopped to look back to make sure he was
doing the right thing. "Go to Dave," shouted Caleb once more; and away
went Watch again, and arriving at a very high gate at the end of the
field dashed at and tried two or three times to get over it, first by
jumping, then by climbing, and falling back each time. But by and by he
managed to force his way through the thick hedge and was gone from
sight.

When David came back that evening he was in a different mood, and said
that Watch had saved him from a great misfortune: he could never have
got the lambs out by himself, as they were mad for the rape. For some
days after this Watch served two masters. Caleb would take him to his
ewes, and after a while would say, "Go--Dave wants 'ee," and away Watch
would go to the other shepherd and flock.

When Bawcombe had taken up his new place at Doveton, his master, Mr.
Ellerby, watched him for a while with sharp eyes, but he was soon
convinced that he had not made a mistake in engaging a head-shepherd
twenty-five miles away without making the usual inquiries but merely on
the strength of something heard casually in conversation about this man.
But while more than satisfied with the man he remained suspicious of the
dog. "I'm afraid that dog of yours must hurt the sheep," he would say,
and he even advised him to change him for one that worked in a quieter
manner. Watch was too excitable, too impetuous--he could not go after
the sheep in that violent way and grab them as he did without injuring
them with his teeth.

"He did never bite a sheep in his life," Bawcombe assured him, and
eventually he was able to convince his master that Watch could make a
great show of biting the sheep without doing them the least hurt--that
it was actually against his nature to bite or injure anything.

One day in the late summer, when the corn had been cut but not carried,
Bawcombe was with his flock on the edge of a newly reaped cornfield in a
continuous, heavy rain, when he spied his master coming to him. He was
in a very light summer suit and straw hat, and had no umbrella or other
protection from the pouring rain. "What be wrong with master to-day?"
said Bawcombe. "He's tarrably upset to be out like this in such a rain
in a straw hat and no coat."

Mr. Ellerby had by that time got into the habit when troubled in his
mind of going out to his shepherd to have a long talk with him. Not a
talk about his trouble--that was some secret bitterness in his
heart--but just about the sheep and other ordinary topics, and the talk,
Caleb said, would seem to do him good. But this habit he had got into
was observed by others, and the farm-men would say, "Something's wrong
to-day--the master's gone off to the head-shepherd."

When he came to where Bawcombe was standing, in a poor shelter by the
side of a fence, he at once started talking on indifferent subjects,
standing there quite unconcerned, as if he didn't even know that it was
raining, though his thin clothes were wet through, and the water coming
through his straw hat was running in streaks down his face. By and by he
became interested in the dog's movements, playing about in the rain
among the stocks. "What has he got in his mouth?" he asked presently.

"Come here, Watch," the shepherd called, and when Watch came he bent
down and took a corncrake from his mouth. He had found the bird hiding
in one of the stocks and had captured without injuring it.

"Why, it's alive--the dog hasn't hurt it," said the farmer, taking it in
his hands to examine it.

"Watch never hurted any creature yet," said Bawcombe. He caught things
just for his own amusement, but never injured them--he always let them
go again. He would hunt mice in the fields, and when he captured one he
would play with it like a cat, tossing it from him, then dashing after
and recapturing it. Finally, he would let it go. He played with rabbits
in the same way, and if you took a rabbit from him and examined it you
would find it quite uninjured.

The farmer said it was wonderful--he had never heard of a case like it
before; and talking of Watch he succeeded in forgetting the trouble in
his mind which had sent him out in the rain in his thin clothes and
straw hat, and he went away in a cheerful mood.

Caleb probably forgot to mention during this conversation with his
master that in most cases when Watch captured a rabbit he took it to his
master and gave it into his hands, as much as to say, Here is a very big
sort of field-mouse I have caught, rather difficult to manage--perhaps
_you_ can do something with it?

The shepherd had many other stories about this curious disposition of
his dog. When he had been some months in his new place his brother David
followed him to the Wylye, having obtained a place as shepherd on a farm
adjoining Mr. Ellerby's. His cottage was a little out of the village and
had some ground to it, with a nice lawn or green patch. David was fond
of keeping animal pets--birds in cages, and rabbits and guinea-pigs in
hutches, the last so tame that he would release them on the grass to see
them play with one another. When Watch first saw these pets he was very
much attracted, and wanted to get to them, and after a good deal of
persuasion on the part of Caleb, David one day consented to take them
out and put them on the grass in the dog's presence. They were a little
alarmed at first, but in a surprisingly short time made the discovery
that this particular dog was not their enemy but a playmate. He rolled
on the grass among them, and chased them round and round, and sometimes
caught and pretended to worry them, and they appeared to think it very
good fun.

"Watch," said Bawcombe, "in the fifteen years I had 'n, never killed and
never hurt a creature, no, not even a leetel mouse, and when he caught
anything 'twere only to play with it."

Watch comes into a story of an old woman employed at the farm at this
period. She had been in the Warminster workhouse for a short time, and
had there heard that a daughter of a former mistress in another part of
the county had long been married and was now the mistress of Doveton
Farm, close by. Old Nance thereupon obtained her release and trudged to
Doveton, and one very rough, cold day presented herself at the farm to
beg for something to do which would enable her to keep herself. If there
was nothing for her she must, she said, go back and end her days in the
Warminster workhouse. Mrs. Ellerby remembered and pitied her, and going
in to her husband begged him earnestly to find some place on the farm
for the forlorn old creature. He did not see what could be done for her:
they already had one old woman on their hands, who mended sacks and did
a few other trifling things, but for another old woman there would be
nothing to do. Then he went in and had a good long look at her,
revolving the matter in his mind, anxious to please his wife, and
finally, he asked her if she could scare the crows. He could think of
nothing else. Of course she could scare crows--it was the very thing for
her! Well, he said, she could go and look after the swedes; the rooks
had just taken a liking to them, and even if she was not very active
perhaps she would be able to keep them off.

Old Nance got up to go and begin her duties at once. Then the farmer,
looking at her clothes, said he would give her something more to protect
her from the weather on such a bleak day. He got her an old felt hat, a
big old frieze overcoat, and a pair of old leather leggings. When she
had put on these somewhat cumbrous things, and had tied her hat firmly
on with a strip of cloth, and fastened the coat at the waist with a
cord, she was told to go to the head-shepherd and ask him to direct her
to the field where the rooks were troublesome. Then when she was setting
out the farmer called her back and gave her an ancient, rusty gun to
scare the birds. "It isn't loaded," he said, with a grim smile. "I don't
allow powder and shot, but if you'll point it at them they'll fly fast
enough."

Thus arrayed and armed she set forth, and Caleb seeing her approach at a
distance was amazed at her grotesque appearance, and even more amazed
still when she explained who and what she was and asked him to direct
her to the field of swedes.

Some hours later the farmer came to him and asked him casually if he had
seen an old gallus-crow about.

"Well," replied the shepherd, "I seen an old woman in man's coat and
things, with an old gun, and I did tell she where to bide."

"I think it will be rather cold for the old body in that field," said
the farmer. "I'd like you to get a couple of padded hurdles and put them
up for a shelter for her."

And in the shelter of the padded or thatched hurdles, by the hedge-side,
old Nance spent her days keeping guard over the turnips, and afterwards
something else was found for her to do, and in the meanwhile she lodged
in Caleb's cottage and became like one of the family. She was fond of
the children and of the dog, and Watch became so much attached to her
that had it not been for his duties with the flock he would have
attended her all day in the fields to help her with the crows.

Old Nance had two possessions she greatly prized--a book and a pair of
spectacles, and it was her custom to spend the day sitting, spectacles
on nose and book in hand, reading among the turnips. Her spectacles were
so "tarrable" good that they suited all old eyes, and when this was
discovered they were in great request in the village, and every person
who wanted to do a bit of fine sewing or anything requiring young vision
in old eyes would borrow them for the purpose. One day the old woman
returned full of trouble from the fields--she had lost her spectacles;
she must, she thought, have lent them to some one in the village on the
previous evening and then forgotten all about it. But no one had them,
and the mysterious loss of the spectacles was discussed and lamented by
everybody. A day or two later Caleb came through the turnips on his way
home, the dog at his heels, and when he got to his cottage Watch came
round and placed himself square before his master and deposited the lost
spectacles at his feet. He had found them in the turnip-field over a
mile from home, and though but a dog he remembered that he had seen them
on people's noses and in their hands, and knew that they must therefore
be valuable--not to himself, but to that larger and more important kind
of dog that goes about on its hind legs.

There is always a sad chapter in the life-history of a dog; it is the
last one, which tells of his decline; and it is ever saddest in the case
of the sheep-dog, because he has lived closer to man and has served him
every day of his life with all his powers, all his intelligence, in the
one useful and necessary work he is fitted for or which we have found
for him to do. The hunting and the pet, or parasite, dogs--the "dogs for
sport and pleasure"--though one in species with him are not like beings
of the same order; they are like professional athletes and performers,
and smart or fashionable people compared to those who do the work of the
world--who feed us and clothe us. We are accustomed to speak of dogs
generally as the servants and the friends of man; it is only of the
sheep-dog that this can be said with absolute truth. Not only is he the
faithful servant of the solitary man who shepherds his flock, but the
dog's companionship is as much to him as that of a fellow-being would
be.

Before his long and strenuous life was finished. Watch, originally
jet-black without a spot, became quite grey, the greyness being most
marked on the head, which became at last almost white.

It is undoubtedly the case that some animals, like men, turn grey with
age, and Watch when fifteen was relatively as old as a man at sixty-five
or seventy. But grey hairs do not invariably come with age, even in our
domestic animals, which are more subject to this change than those in a
state of nature. But we are never so well able to judge of this in the
case of wild animals, as in most cases their lives end prematurely.

The shepherd related a curious instance in a mole. He once noticed
mole-heaps of a peculiar kind in a field of sainfoin, and it looked to
him as if this mole worked in a way of his own, quite unlike the others.
The hills he threw up were a good distance apart, and so large that you
could fill a bushel measure with the mould from any one of them. He
noticed that this mole went on burrowing every day in the same manner;
every morning there were new chains or ranges of the huge mounds. The
runs were very deep, as he found when setting a mole-trap--over two feet
beneath the surface. He set his trap, filling the deep hole he had made
with sods, and on opening it next day he found his mole and was
astonished at its great size. He took no measurements, but it was
bigger, he affirmed, than he could have believed it possible for a mole
to be. And it was grey instead of black, the grey hairs being so
abundant on the head as to make it almost white, as in the case of old
Watch. He supposed that it was a very old mole, that it was a more
powerful digger than most of its kind, and had perhaps escaped death so
long on account of its strength and of its habit of feeding deeper in
the earth than the others.

To return to Watch. His hearing and eyesight failed as he grew older
until he was practically blind and too deaf to hear any word given in
the ordinary way. But he continued strong as ever on his legs, and his
mind was not decayed, nor was he in the least tired. On the contrary, he
was always eager to work, and as his blindness and deafness had made him
sharper in other ways he was still able to make himself useful with the
sheep. Whenever the hurdles were shifted to a fresh place and the sheep
had to be kept in a corner of the enclosure until the new place was
ready for them, it was old Watch's duty to keep them from breaking away.
He could not see nor hear, but in some mysterious way he knew when they
tried to get out, even if it was but one. Possibly the slight vibration
of the ground informed him of the movement and the direction as well. He
would make a dash and drive the sheep back, then run up and down before
the flock until all was quiet again. But at last it became painful to
witness his efforts, especially when the sheep were very restless, and
incessantly trying to break away; and Watch finding them so hard to
restrain would grow angry and rush at them with such fury that he would
come violently against the hurdles at one side, then getting up, howling
with pain, he would dash to the other side, when he would strike the
hurdles there and cry out with pain once more.

It could not be allowed to go on; yet Watch could not endure to be
deprived of his work; if left at home he would spend the time whining
and moaning, praying to be allowed to go to the flock, until at last his
master with a very heavy heart was compelled to have him put to death.

This is indeed almost invariably the end of a sheepdog; however zealous
and faithful he may have been, and however much valued and loved, he
must at last be put to death. I related the story of this dog to a
shepherd in the very district where Watch had lived and served his
master so well--one who had been head-shepherd for upwards of forty
years at Imber Court, the principal farm at the small downland village
of Imber. He told me that during all his shepherding years he had never
owned a dog which had passed out of his hands to another; every dog had
been acquired as a pup and trained by himself; and he had been very fond
of his dogs, but had always been compelled to have them shot in the end.
Not because he would have found them too great a burden when they had
become too old and their senses decayed, but because it was painful to
see them in their decline, perpetually craving to be at their old work
with the sheep, incapable of doing it any longer, yet miserable if kept
from it.

CHAPTER XV

THE ELLERBYS OF DOVETON

  The Bawcombes at Doveton Farm--Caleb finds favour with his master--Mrs.
  Ellerby and the shepherd's wife--The passion of a childless wife--The
  curse--A story of the "mob"--The attack on the farm--A man transported
  for life--The hundred and ninth Psalm--The end of the Ellerbys

Caleb and his wife invariably spoke of their time at Doveton Farm in a
way which gave one the idea that they regarded it as the most important
period of their lives. It had deeply impressed them, and doubtless it
was a great change for them to leave their native village for the first
time in their lives and go long miles from home among strangers to serve
a new master. Above everything they felt leaving the old father who was
angry with them, and had gone to the length of disowning them for taking
such a step. But there was something besides all this which had served
to give Doveton an enduring place in their memories, and after many
talks with the old couple about their Warminster days I formed the idea
that it was more to them than any other place where they had lived,
because of a personal feeling they cherished for their master and
mistress there.

Hitherto Caleb had been in the service of men who were but a little way
removed in thought and feeling from those they employed. They were
mostly small men, born and bred in the parish, some wholly self-made,
with no interest or knowledge of anything outside their own affairs, and
almost as far removed as the labourers themselves from the ranks above.
The Ellerbys were of another stamp, or a different class. If not a
gentleman, Mr. Ellerby was very like one and was accustomed to associate
with gentlemen. He was a farmer, descended from a long line of farmers;
but he owned his own land, and was an educated and travelled man,
considered wealthy for a farmer; at all events he was able to keep his
carriage and riding and hunting horses in his stables, and he was
regarded as the best breeder of sheep in the district. He lived in a
good house, which with its pictures and books and beautiful decorations
and furniture appeared to their simple minds extremely luxurious. This
atmosphere was somewhat disconcerting to them at first, for although he
knew his own value, priding himself on being a "good shepherd," Caleb
had up till now served with farmers who were in a sense on an equality
with him, and they understood him and he them. But in a short time the
feeling of strangeness vanished: personally, as a fellow-man, his master
soon grew to be more to him than any farmer he had yet been with. And he
saw a good deal of his master. Mr. Ellerby cultivated his acquaintance,
and, as we have seen, got into the habit of seeking him out and talking
to him even when he was at a distance out on the down with his flock.
And Caleb could not but see that in this respect he was preferred above
the other men employed on the farm--that he had "found favour" in his
master's eyes.

When he had told me that story about Watch and the corn-crake, it stuck
in my mind, and on the first opportunity I went back to that subject to
ask what it really was that made his master act in such an extraordinary
manner--to go out on a pouring wet day in a summer suit and straw hat,
and walk a mile or two just to stand there in the rain talking to him
about nothing in particular. What secret trouble had he--was it that his
affairs were in a bad way, or was he quarrelling with his wife? No,
nothing of the kind; it was a long story--this secret trouble of the
Ellerbys, and with his unconquerable reticence in regard to other
people's private affairs he would have passed it off with a few general
remarks.

But there was his old wife listening to us, and, woman-like, eager to
discuss such a subject, she would not let it pass. She would tell it and
would not be silenced by him: they were all dead and gone--why should I
not be told if I wanted to hear it? And so with a word put in here and
there by him when she talked, and with a good many words interposed by
her when he took up the tale, they unfolded the story, which was very
long as they told it and must be given briefly here.

It happened that when the Bawcombes settled at Doveton, just as Mr.
Ellerby had taken to the shepherd, making a friend of him, so Mrs.
Ellerby took to the shepherd's wife, and fell into the habit of paying
frequent visits to her in her cottage. She was a very handsome woman, of
a somewhat stately presence, dignified in manner, and she wore her
abundant hair in curls hanging on each side to her shoulders--a fashion
common at that time. From the first she appeared to take a particular
interest in the Bawcombes, and they could not but notice that she was
more gracious and friendly towards them than to the others of their
station on the farm. The Bawcombes had three children then, aged six,
four, and two years respectively, all remarkably healthy, with rosy
cheeks and black eyes, and they were merry-tempered little things. Mrs.
Ellerby appeared much taken with the children; praised their mother for
always keeping them so clean and nicely dressed, and wondered how she
could manage it on their small earnings. The carter and his wife lived
in a cottage close by, and they, too, had three little children, and
next to the carter's was the bailiff's cottage, and he, too, was married
and had children; but Mrs. Ellerby never went into their cottages, and
the shepherd and his wife concluded that it was because in both cases
the children were rather puny, sickly-looking little things and were
never very clean. The carter's wife, too, was a slatternly woman. One
day when Mrs. Ellerby came in to see Mrs. Bawcombe the carter's wife was
just going out of the door, and Mrs. Ellerby appeared displeased, and
before leaving she said, "I hope, Mrs. Bawcombe, you are not going to
mix too freely with your neighbours or let your children go too much
with them and fall into their ways." They also observed that when she
passed their neighbours' children in the lane she spoke no word and
appeared not to see them. Yet she was kind to them too, and whenever she
brought a big parcel of cakes, fruit, and sweets for the children, which
she often did, she would tell the shepherd's wife to divide it into
three lots, one for her own children and the others for those of her two