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So she was, with her head nestled into the shepherd's neck, nor did she waken when after a tramp of more than a mile the bleatings of the folded sheep announced that they were nearly arrived, and in the low doorway there shone a light, and in the light stood a motherly form, in a white woollen hood and dark serge dress. Tired as he was, Hal ran on to her, exclaiming 'All well, Mammy Doll?
"Dear me!" it exclaimed, "the sight of those sheep is beginning to excite me, and I can hardly keep still! I wonder what there is so exciting about sheep!" Dot could now see the advancing flock of sheep, with their attendant mob of Emu, quite well. The animals had got scent of the water, and with contented bleatings were slowly moving with a rippling effect across the dusty plain.
He was long miles away from his beloved home now, lying on his back, a disabled man who would never again follow a flock on the hills nor listen to the sounds he loved best to hear the multitudinous tremulous bleatings of the sheep, the tinklings of numerous bells, and crisp ringing bark of his dog.
The animals were trembling and covered with sweat; some of them uttered piteous whinnyings, or rather bleatings, like distressed sheep; five or six lay down with hollow moans and rumblings. It was absolutely necessary to take a short rest.
"I am not anxious to accelerate the approach of the period when the great mass of American labor shall not find its employment in the field; when the young men of the country shall be obliged to shut their eyes upon external nature, upon the heavens and the earth, and immerse themselves in close and unwholesome workshops; when they shall be obliged to shut their ears to the bleatings of their own flocks upon their own hills, and to the voice of the lark that cheers them at the plough, that they may open them in dust and smoke and steam to the perpetual whirl of spools and spindles, and the grating of rasps and saws.
It received neither the ungenerous and purblind, though not wholly unjust, abuse which in the long run did so much good to Tennyson himself, nor the absurd and pernicious bleatings of praise which have greeted certain novices of late years. It seems to have been simply let alone, or else made the subject of quite insignificant comments.
The small luxuriant hills, folding one over the other, and terminating in the most exquisite valleys and bosky glades the imagination can conceive the rich mixture of pasture and meadow land the Downs, stretching to King's Ferry, whitened by thousands of sheep, whose bleatings and whose bells made the isle musical while, beyond, the narrow Swale, widening into the open sea, shone like a silver girdle in the rays of the glorious sun were objects, indeed, delicious to gaze upon.
I heard the dinghy splash overboard ere I could cry "Murder!" Heard the rasp of a boat-hook along the wire-rope, and then, as it had been in my ear, Pyecroft's enormous and jubilant bellow astern: "Why, he's here! Right atop of us! The blighter 'as pouched half the tow, like a shark!" A long pause filled with soft Devonian bleatings. Then Pyecroft, solo arpeggie: "Rum? Rum? Rum? Is that all?
As for the fowls they were greedily pecking away at the seeds and worms in the banks of the rivulet. Animal life was already manifesting itself in such goings and comings, such flights and gambols, such bleatings and gruntings and cluckings as had doubtless never been heard of in these parts before.
The quartermaster proved right, for as the cloud came nearer, quite a chorus of bleatings and neighings, and bel-lowings escaped from it, mingled with the loud tones of a human voice, in the shape of cries, and whistles, and vo-ciferations. Presently a man came out of the cloud. This was the leader-in-chief of the four-footed army.
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