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But a manly resolve to recognize boldly that he had no longer a lover's interest in her, helped him occasionally to conceal a feeling. "Bottle!" he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine. Cainy Ball ran up, the wound was anointed, and the shearing continued.
"Cain Ball!" "Yes, Mister Oak; here I be!" Cainy now runs forward with the tar-pot. "B. E." is newly stamped upon the shorn skin, and away the simple dam leaps, panting, over the board into the shirtless flock outside.
"We workfolk shall have some lordly- junketing to-night." said Cainy Ball, casting forth his thoughts in a new direction. "This morning I see'em making the great puddens in the milking-pails lumps of fat as big as yer thumb, Mister Oak! I've never seed such splendid large knobs of fat before in the days of my life they never used to be bigger then a horse-bean.
Two more ewes have twinned that's what's the matter, Shepherd Oak." "Oh, that's it," said Oak, jumping up, and dimissing for the present his thoughts on poor Fanny. "You are a good boy to run and tell me, Cain, and you shall smell a large plum pudding some day as a treat. But, before we go, Cainy, bring the tarpot, and we'll mark this lot and have done with 'em."
"Well, Shepherd Oak, and how's lambing this year, if I mid say it?" inquired Joseph Poorgrass. "Terrible trying," said Oak. "I've been wet through twice a-day, either in snow or rain, this last fortnight. Cainy and I haven't tined our eyes to-night." "A good few twins, too, I hear?" "Too many by half. Yes; 'tis a very queer lambing this year. We shan't have done by Lady Day."
Cainy Ball turned the handle of Gabriel's grindstone, his head performing a melancholy see-saw up and down with each turn of the wheel.
"There's a great clumsy sneeze! Why can't ye have better manners, you young dog!" said Coggan, with- drawing the flagon. "The cider went up my nose!" cried Cainy, as soon as he could speak; "and now 'tis gone down my neck, and into my poor dumb felon, and over my shiny buttons and all my best cloze!" "The poor lad's cough is terrible unfortunate." said Matthew Moon.
Oak took from his illimitable pockets a marking iron, dipped it into the pot, and imprinted on the buttocks of the infant sheep the initials of her he delighted to muse on "B. E.," which signified to all the region round that henceforth the lambs belonged to Farmer Bathsheba Everdene, and to no one else. "Now, Cainy, shoulder your two, and off. Good morning, Mr. Boldwood."
Boldwood, looking into the distant meadows, saw there three figures. They were those of Miss Everdene, Shepherd Oak, and Cainy Ball. When Bathsheba's figure shone upon the farmer's eyes it lighted him up as the moon lights up a great tower. A man's body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained.
"'Tis only my manner, Mister Oak, if ye'll excuse it," said Cain Ball, looking reproachfully at Oak, with eyes drenched in their own dew. !Here's some cider for him that'll cure his throat," said Jan Coggan, lifting a flagon of cider, pulling out the cork, and applying the hole to Cainy's mouth; Joseph Poorgrass in the meantime beginning to think apprehensively of the serious consequences that would follow Cainy Ball's strangulation in his cough, and the history of his Bath adventures dying with him.
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