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Updated: June 18, 2025
The petty proprietor may hire these, but at a dear rate, and few of them can work to any advantage on his small patches of corn. The large farmer has large fields; he saves area as against the petty proprietors; he has fewer headlands and fences, harbouring weeds and stopping the sun and air. The large farmer can work corn and sheep together; one shepherd and his boy will look after 500 ewes.
At the tenth request for the reading of this hymn the clergyman asked him what it was in the lines that made such an appeal to him. "Ah, sir," answered the old shepherd, "here I lie, and I know full well that I shall never get up again; but when you reads me that beautiful 'ymn, I fancies myself on the downs again at daybreak, and can just see 'Them rows of ewes at early dawn'!"
'How long my nap lasted I am not prepared to say. But some faint sounds over and above the rustle of the ewes in the straw, the bleat of the lambs, and the tinkle of the sheep-bell brought me to my waking senses. Uncle Job was still beside me; but he too had fallen asleep. I looked out from the straw, and saw what it was that had aroused me.
Flinging it down with a crash that awakened all the echoes of the cavern, he closed the entrance with an immense mass of stone, which served as a door. Then he sat down and began to milk the ewes and she-goats. Half of the milk he curdled for cheese, and half he kept for drinking.
A shadow in his life had always been that his flock ended in mutton that a day came and found every shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep. His first feeling now was one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle ewes and their unborn lambs. It was a second to remember another phase of the matter. The sheep were not insured.
He was loud in praise of the advantages which he derived from his farm, saying it saved his flocks, and assisted him in the means of food when his ewes were pregnant, or giving lamb. I patronised this farmer, and offered to lend him some tools for digging with, when he said he did not want that so much as some hints about sowing, and wished I would send a man to instruct him.
The new leaves dripped showers at every gust of the wind, then a gleam of wan sunlight brightened distant vistas of the way, while Joan heard the patter of a hundred hoofs in the mud, the bleat of lambs, the deeper answer of ewes, the barking of a shepherd's dog.
She stood looking at the shining rough pieces of gold in her palm, while a certain pride rose through the wonder in her face. "My gracious!" she exclaimed, and a spark of her lost youth revived. "My gracious. And you named your mine after me. I bet it was on account of that billy and the ewes." "Likely," the little man beamed.
We must put some sheep that are wiser than the rest in every flock that they may lead the stupid ones. I dinna ken where they'd be if we didn't. We take as leaders sheep that are 'flock-wise' by that I mean old ewes or wethers that have long been in the herds and know the ways. Sometimes, also, we put in a goat or two, for a goat has the wit to find water and food for himself. Not so the sheep!
He understood it now, for if all the sheep, ewes as well as rams, were horned in the old breed, a collection like this might easily have been made. The greatest change of the last hundred years is no doubt that which the plough has wrought in the aspect of the downs.
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