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Updated: May 18, 2025
"It is a legend of a poor shepherd-boy, who, lonely and neglected, had fallen asleep under a tree near the highway. Before sleeping, he had prayed to God to have pity upon him; to fill this great and painful void in his heart, or to send His Minister, Death, to his release. While sleeping he had a beautiful dream.
Are you then a fit mate for an uneducated shepherd-boy, whose only inheritance is his father's tarnished name?"
While the tinkling of sheep-bells from the ledges of the rocks came down to me, the passionate warble of nightingales, that could not wait for the night, must have risen from the leafy valley to the ears of the listless shepherd-boy gathering feather-grass where goats would not dare to venture, or eating his dark bread in the sun on the edge of a precipice.
Without them, the shepherd-boy might remain an ignorant, unprogressive shepherd all his life long, even his undeniable native energy using itself up on nothing better than a wattled hurdle or a thatched roof; with them, the path is open before him which led Tam Telford at last to the Menai Bridge and Westminster Abbey.
And yet, what lad could ever have started in the world under apparently more hopeless circumstances than widow Janet Telford's penniless orphan shepherd-boy Tam, in the bleakest and most remote of all the lonely border valleys of southern Scotland?
When I was fourteen, I met a shepherd-boy reading a French book. It was called "Le Secret de Delphine." I asked him how he came to know French and he told me it was the extra subject he had been allowed to choose for studying in his holidays; he walked eighteen miles a day to school nine there and nine back taking his chance of a lift from any passing vehicle.
Returning again many years afterward, the minstrel once more heard the same song which the King had sung to his harp in the castle of Trifels. Entering the inn, he recognized in the landlord the one-time shepherd-boy.
The lad, however, suddenly stopped: he had lost a little tin ring off his finger and a four-kreuzer piece from his pocket too great a loss for a shepherd-boy. The combat therefore was speedily closed, both antagonists and their partisans hunting in the unmowed grass until the treasures were again trove.
To be a shepherd-boy, and sit among beautiful mountains, and sing hymns of my own making, and kill lions and bears, with now and then the chance of a stray giant what a glorious life! And if David slew giants with a sling and a stone, why should not I? at all events, one ought to know how; so I made a sling out of an old garter and some string, and began to practise in the little back-yard.
The old dame, well supplied with sighs and groans, tottered across the field to the shepherd-boy, who was still ringing his bell and wondering what was become of the beautiful bird. She cleared her throat, and coughing, bid him a kind good evening, and asked him which was the way to Bergen. Pretending then that she had just seen the little bell, she exclaimed
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