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That designation, however, is not Snarley's, but my own; and I use it because I do not wish to commit myself to the identification of this personage with any individual, historical or imaginary. Snarley generally called him "the Shepherd"; sometimes, "the Master"; and he used no other name.
None but a dreamer of dreams could have brought them into being; every one of them is an embodied ideal. Don't make the blunder of thinking that Snarley's sheep-raising has nothing to do with his star-gazings and spirit-rappings. It's all one.
His system of "observation and experiment" was peculiarly his own; it is written down in no book, but stands recorded on barn-doors, on gate-posts, on hurdles, and on the walls of a wheeled box which was Snarley's main residence during the spring months of the year.
It is a literature of notches and lines cross, parallel, perpendicular, and horizontal of which the chief merit in Snarley's eyes was that nobody could understand it save himself. But it was enough to give his faculties all the aid they required.
I have often thought that any Cause or Doctrine which could get itself expressed in Snarley's tones would be in a fair way to conquer the world. Fortunately for the world, however, it is not every Cause, nor every Doctrine, which would lend itself to expression in that manner.
But now his attitude is noticed, and somebody says, "Hullo, Snarley's had a drop too much this time. Give him a shake-up, missis." The "shake-up," however, is not needed. For Snarley, after a few minutes of apparent sleep, raises his head, looks round him, and again stands upright. A flood of incoherencies, spoken in a high-pitched, whining voice, pours from his lips.
He it was who, under Snarley's direction, presided over the generation, birth, and early upbringing of the thrice-renowned "Thunderbolt." So it went on for three years. At the end of that time Toller had an accident. He fell through the aperture of a feeding-loft, and his spinal column received an ugly shock. Symptoms of his old malady began to return.
"Snarley Bob," she used to say to me, with a frank disregard for my own feelings "Snarley Bob is the one man in the world whom I have found worth talking to." The feature in Snarley's appearance that no one could fail to see, or, having seen, forget, was the extraordinary width between the eyes. It was commonly said that he had the power of seeing people behind his back.
Abel as a worker of miracles to whom few things were impossible; but this conquest of Snarley's reluctance to be interviewed, and in a manner so exceptional, has always impressed me as one of her greatest achievements.
It must be Satan that's got into him." "It's a awful thing to 'ave a man like that livin' in the next cottage to your own. I'll be frightened out o' my wits when my master's not at 'ome." "They ought to do something to 'im I've said so many a time." And then the voice of Snarley's wife as she chafed her husband's hands: "No, sir, don't you believe 'em when they say he's drunk.
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