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Updated: May 28, 2025
On the plain-stones there are a number of benches on which men sit down to gossip and chaffer. Scraps of dialogue float about in the moist air. If you care to be an eavesdropper you must have a knowledge of Gaelic to be one effectively. "It's to be a stout market," remarks stalwart Macrae of Invershiel, come of a fine old West Highland stock and himself a very large sheep-farmer.
The hand press is a wooden box, made the size of the canvas bale, which is suspended therein by hooks from the open top; the box has a movable side, which is loosened out to give exit to the bale when pressed. The pressing is done by the feet, assisted by a blunt spade, and the bales are generally very creditably turned out, the sheep-farmer priding himself on a neatly pressed bale.
These are drawbacks which might be easily avoided by common precaution, and I feel thoroughly convinced that sheep-farming upon the highland pasturage would be a valuable adjunct to a coffee estate, both as productive of manure and profit. I have heard the same opinion expressed by an experienced Australian sheep-farmer.
Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on an extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than with sheep turned most of his land into a warren.
I was gradually adding to my stock of sheep, and had nothing occurred to disturb me I should doubtless have continued at work and in time have become a veritable squatter. I was able to command constant employment in any colonial capacity, and had been more than once offered the overseership of a run, but the old distaste for the life of a sheep-farmer was as strong as ever.
A "deck" of cards is produced and a quartette betake themselves to whist with half-crown stakes on the rubber and sixpenny points. This was mild speculation to that which was engaged in on the homeward journey after the market, when a Strathspey sheep-farmer won L8 between Dalvey and Forres.
Though he was a man of dignity, for he sat in his own pew, he could not escape the rod of the pragmatical tithingman. Being rudely disturbed, but not wholly wakened, the bewildered sheep-farmer sprung to his feet, seized his astonished and mortified wife by the shoulders and shook her violently, shouting at the top of his voice, "Haw back! haw back! Stand still, will ye?"
"There are only two persons in this country who know anything of me," replied the prisoner. "One is a plain Liddesdale sheep-farmer, called Dinmont of Charlies-hope; but he knows nothing more of me than what I told him, and what I now tell you."
Staniford?" He could not recollect that she had pronounced his name before; he thought it came very winningly from her lips. "No, I'm not a painter. I'm not anything." He hesitated; then he added recklessly, "I'm a farmer." "A farmer?" Lydia looked incredulous, but grave. "Yes; I'm a horny-handed son of the soil. I'm a cattle-farmer; I'm a sheep-farmer; I don't know which.
It was the custom to pretend not to see or hear him go, and it would have annoyed him exceedingly had anyone bidden him good-night. The pair talked shop, after the manner of old squatters when they sit apart; but the tall, spare, grey man with the thoughtful face more like a soldier than a sheep-farmer was not thinking much of his flocks and herds.
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