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Then came a busy day for the shepherd, when the lambs were trimmed before being taken to the Wilton sheep-fair. There was Bawcombe, his boy, the decrepit old dog, and Tory to do the work, but when the time came to start Tory refused to do anything. When sent to turn the lambs he walked off to a distance of about twenty yards, sat down and looked at his master.
He, too, had engaged a lawyer to conduct his case. The judge, said Bawcombe, who had never seen one before, was a tarrible stern-looking old man in his wig.
One autumn day the gentleman was shooting over that down, and seeing a big man in a smock-frock standing motionless, crook in hand, regarding him, he called out to his keeper, who was with him, "Who is that big man?" and was told that it was Shepherd Bawcombe.
In time he recovered from his loss and replaced his dead neddies with others, and continued for many years longer on his rounds. To return to Isaac Bawcombe. He was born, we have seen, in 1800, and began following a flock as a boy and continued as shepherd on the same farm for a period of fifty-five years.
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.
During our frequent evening talks, often continued till a late hour, it was borne in on Caleb Bawcombe that his anecdotes of wild creatures interested me more than anything else he had to tell; but in spite of this, or because he could not always bear it in mind, the conversation almost invariably drifted back to the old subject of sheep, of which he was never tired.
His marriage to Martha Bawcombe came as a surprise to the village, for though no one had any fault to find with Tommy Ierat there was a slur on him, and Martha, who was the finest girl in the place, might, it was thought, have looked for some one better.
Now it happened that an elderly gentleman who had the shooting was a keen sportsman, and that in several successive years he found a wonderful difference in the amount of game at one spot among the hills and in all the rest of his hill property. The only explanation the keeper could give was that Isaac Bawcombe tended his flock on that down where rabbits, hares, and partridges were so plentiful.
The earlier of these memories were always the best to me, because they took one back sixty years or more, to a time when there was more wildness in the earth than now, and a nobler wild animal life. Even more interesting were some of the memories of his father, Isaac Bawcombe, whose time went back to the early years of the nineteenth century.
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.
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