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Updated: May 10, 2025
The "few reforms," whether in the direction of import duties, or small holdings, or "technical education" in ploughing or fruit-pruning or forestry or sheep-shearing, can never in themselves be a substitute for the lost peasant traditions, because they are not the same kind of thing. For those traditions were no institutions set up and cherished by outside authority.
One night I met there Prince Paul Esterhazy, so distinguished by his diamonds when Austrian Ambassador at the coronation of Queen Victoria. He talked to me of the Holkham sheep-shearing gatherings, at which from 200 to 300 guests sat down to dinner every day, including crowned heads, and celebrities from both sides of the Atlantic. He had twice assisted at these in my father's time.
Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds. The next day to that of the declaration she found Gabriel Oak at the bottom of her garden, grinding his shears for the sheep-shearing.
Tusser, who wrote a book upon Five Hundred Points of Husbandry, did not forget the treats which ought to be given to the labourers, and alludes to the sheep-shearing festival in the following lines
Let us not rush blindly into this thing. You had promised anyhow, you remember, to take Will out to the sheep-shearing." So the next morning John Shakespeare swung Will up on the horse before him, and the two rode away through the chill mistiness of the dawn, Will kissing his hand back to Mother in the doorway. Bound for Grandfather's at Snitterfield they were.
Just as after a dilatory voyage a crew will brace themselves for the run in, recording with sudden energy their consciousness of triumph over the elements, so on a farm the harvests of hay and corn, sheep-shearing, and threshing will bring out in all a common sentiment, a kind of sporting energy, a defiant spurt, as it were, to score off Nature; for it is only a philosopher here and there among them, I think, who sees that Nature is eager to be scored off in this fashion, being anxious that some one should eat her kindly fruits.
However, it had been finally fixed that a boat should put in to the Abbey steps to receive the fleeces of the sheep-shearing of the home grange, and that, rolled in one of these fleeces, the wounded knight should be brought on board the Vrow Gudule, where Groot and the women would await him, their freight being already embarked, and all ready to weigh anchor.
The thirty shearers, running into the nearest pen, dragged each his sheep into the shed, in a twinkling of an eye had the creature between his knees, helpless, immovable, and the sharp sound of the shears set in. The sheep-shearing had begun. No rest now.
"I think it is enough for him to know that the sheep-shearing waits for my pleasure," answered Felipe, still wrathful, "and that is the end of it." And so it was; and, moreover, precisely the end which Senora Moreno had had in her own mind from the beginning; but not even Juan Canito himself suspected its being solely her purpose, and not her son's.
Were the vile barbers of the gun-deck to reap our long, nodding harvests, and expose our innocent chins to the chill air of the Yankee coast! And our viny locks! were they also to be shorn? Was a grand sheep-shearing, such as they annually have at Nantucket, to take place; and our ignoble barbers to carry off the fleece?
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