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Sheep-washing, for instance, is simply working a whole spring day in very chilly water, and sheep-shearing is a task at which he makes "ridgy" work and endures the horror of seeing the gentle, thin-skinned creatures bleed under his awkward shears. The boy cannot conceive what poetry there is about oxen.
He had not the farming instincts in his blood; the distant bleating, the hot June sunshine and cloudless sky did not suggest to him sheep-washing; but now came a boy's voice shouting and a cry of distress, and he remembered with a thrill that Friend Barton used the stream for that peaceful purpose.
And indeed they have a very rude manner of teaching children to swim there; for the big boys take the little boys, and put them through a certain process, which they grimly call "sheep-washing." In the third meadow from the gate of the school, going up the river, there is a fine pool in the Lowman, where the Taunton brook comes in, and they call it the Taunton Pool.
As compared with the ploughs of to-day they were clumsy things, but were a great advance over the old wooden ploughs which had not yet altogether gone out of use. Tree tops were frequently used for drags. Riding a horse in the field, under a hot sun, which I frequently had to do, was not as agreeable as it might seem at the first blush. In June came sheep-washing.
Trying to get a drink of water, he overbalanced himself and fell in. He walks about shaking himself, and doubtless feels very uncomfortable. Sheep do not care much for bathing in cold water. You have only to see the sheep-washing in the spring to realise how they dislike it.
Then comes breakfast in the kitchen with the farm-hands with their clattering hobnailed shoes and tarry hands, after which follows the business of sheep-washing, which Will views from the shady bank of the pool, and in his small heart he is quite torn because of the plaintive bleatings of the frightened sheep. But he swallows it as a man should.
He had by this time grown used to being in love; the passion now startled him less even when it tortured him more, and he felt himself adequate to the situation. On inquiring for her at her house they had told him she was at the sheepwashing, and he went off to seek her there. The sheep-washing pool was a perfectly circular basin of brickwork in the meadows, full of the clearest water.
The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass. Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr.
Ah! it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all well, just as I saw it last summer in June. Another catastrophe from too fierce zeal on the part of the tithingman is recorded. An old farmer, worn out with a hard Saturday's work at sheep-washing, fell asleep ere the hour-glass had once been turned.
The shepherds' meetings first at Clough End for the Cheshire side of the Scout, and then at the 'Snake Inn' for the Sheffield side when the strayed sheep of the year were restored to their owners, came and went in due course; sheep-washing and sheep-shearing were over; the summer was halfway through; and still no word from Mr. Ancrum.
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