An hour later the fanner appeared on the scene. "What are you doing here, shepherd?" he demanded in surprise. "Not trimming the lambs!"

Bawcombe, raising himself on his elbow, replied that he was not trimming the lambs—that he would trim no lambs that day.

"Oh, but we must get on with the trimming!" cried the farmer.

Bawcombe returned that the dog had put him out, and now the dog was dead—he had killed him in his anger, and he would trim no more lambs that day. He had said it and would keep to what he had said.

Then the farmer got angry and said that the dog had a very good nose and would have been useful to him to take rabbits.

"Master," said the other, "I got he when he were a pup and broke 'n to help me with the sheep and not to catch rabbits; and now I've killed 'n and he'll catch no rabbits."

The farmer knew his man, and swallowing his anger walked off without another word.

Later on in the day he was severely blamed by a shepherd friend who said that he could easily have sold the dog to one of the drovers, who were always anxious to pick up a dog in their village, and he would have had the money to repay him for his trouble; to which Bawcombe returned, "If he wouldn't work for I that broke 'n he wouldn't work for another. But I'll never again break a dog that isn't pure-bred."

But though he justified himself he had suffered remorse for what he had done; not only at the time, when he covered the dead dog up with bracken and refused to work any more that day, but the feeling had persisted all his life, and he could not relate the incident without showing it very plainly. He bitterly blamed himself for having taken the pup and for spending long months in training him without having first taken pains to inform himself that there was no bad blood in him. And although the dog was perhaps unfit to live he had finally killed him in anger. If it had not been for that sudden impetuous chase after a swallow he would have borne with him and considered afterwards what was to be done; but that dash after the bird was more than he could stand; for it looked as if Tory had done it purposely, in something of a mocking spirit, to exhibit his wonderful activity and speed to his master, sweating there at his task, and make him see what he had lost in offending him.

The shepherd gave another instance of a mistake he once made which caused him a good deal of pain. It was the case of a dog named Bob which he owned when a young man. He was an exceptionally small dog, but his quick intelligence made up for lack of strength, and he was of a very lively disposition, so that he was a good companion to a shepherd as well as a good servant.

One summer day at noon Caleb was going to his flock in the fields, walking by a hedge, when he noticed Bob sniffing suspiciously at the roots of an old holly-tree growing on the bank. It was a low but very old tree with a thick trunk, rotten and hollow inside, the cavity being hidden with the brushwood growing up from the roots. As he came abreast of the tree, Bob looked up and emitted a low whine, that sound which says so much when used by a dog to his master and which his master does not always rightly understand. At all events he did not do so in this case. It was August and the shooting had begun, and Caleb jumped to the conclusion that a wounded bird had crept into the hollow tree to hide, and so to Bob's whine, which expressed fear and asked what he was to do, the shepherd answered, "Get him." Bob dashed in, but quickly recoiled, whining in a piteous way, and began rubbing his face on his legs. Bawcombe in alarm jumped down and peered into the hollow trunk and heard a slight rustling of dead leaves, but saw nothing. His dog had been bitten by an adder, and he at once returned to the village, bitterly blaming himself for the mistake he had made and greatly fearing that he would lose his dog. Arrived at the village his mother at once went off to the down to inform Isaac of the trouble and ask him what they were to do. Caleb had to wait some time, as none of the villagers who gathered round could suggest a remedy, and in the meantime Bob continued rubbing his cheek against his foreleg, twitching and whining with pain; and before long the face and head began to swell on one side, the swelling extending to the nape and downwards to the throat. Presently Isaac himself, full of concern, arrived on the scene, having left his wife in charge of the flock, and at the same time a man from a neighbouring village came riding by and joined the group. The horseman got off and assisted Caleb in holding the dog while Isaac made a number of incisions with his knife in the swollen place and let out some blood, after which they rubbed the wounds and all the swollen part with an oil used for the purpose. The composition of this oil was a secret: it was made by a man in one of the downland villages and sold at eighteenpence a small bottle; Isaac was a believer in its efficacy, and always kept a bottle hidden away somewhere in his cottage.

Bob recovered in a few days, but the hair fell out from all the part which had been swollen, and he was a curious-looking dog with half his face and head naked until he got his fresh coat, when it grew again. He was as good and active a dog as ever, and lived to a good old age, but one result of the poison he never got over: his bark had changed from a sharp ringing sound to a low and hoarse one. "He always barked," said the shepherd, "like a dog with a sore throat."

To go back to the subject of training a dog. Once you make a beginning it must be carried through to a finish. You take him at the age of six months, and the education must be fairly complete when he is a year old. He is then lively, impressionable, exceedingly adaptive; his intelligence at that period is most like man's; but it would be a mistake to think that it will continue so—that to what he learns now in this wonderful half-year, other things may be added by and by as opportunity arises. At a year he has practically got to the end of his capacity to learn. He has lost his human-like receptivity, but what he has been taught will remain with him for the rest of his life. We can hardly say that he remembers it; it is more like what is called "inherited memory" or "lapsed intelligence."

All this is very important to a shepherd, and explains the reason an old head-shepherd had for saying to me that he had never had, and never would have, a dog he had not trained himself. No two men follow precisely the same method in training, and a dog transferred from his trainer to another man is always a little at a loss; method, voice, gestures, personality, are all different; his new master must study him and in a way adapt himself to the dog. The dog is still more at a loss when transferred from one kind of country to another where the sheep are worked in a different manner, and one instance Caleb gave me of this is worth relating. It was, I thought, one of his best dog stories.

His dogs as a rule were bought as pups; occasionally he had had to get a dog already trained, a painful necessity to a shepherd, seeing that the pound or two it costs—the price of an ordinary animal—is a big sum of money to him. And once in his life he got an old trained sheep-dog for nothing. He was young then, and acting as under-shepherd in his native village, when the report came one day that a great circus and menagerie which had been exhibiting in the west was on its way to Salisbury, and would be coming past the village about six o'clock on the following morning. The turnpike was a little over a mile away, and thither Caleb went with half a dozen other young men of the village at about five o'clock to see the show pass, and sat on a gate beside a wood to wait its coming. In due time the long procession of horses and mounted men and women, and gorgeous vans containing lions and tigers and other strange beasts, came by, affording them great admiration and delight. When it had gone on and the last van had disappeared at the turning of the road, they got down from the gate and were about to set out on their way back when a big, shaggy sheepdog came out of the wood and running to the road began looking up and down in a bewildered way. They had no doubt that he belonged to the circus and had turned aside to hunt a rabbit in the wood; then, thinking the animal would understand them, they shouted to it and waved their arms in the direction the procession had gone. But the dog became frightened, and turning fled back into cover, and they saw no more of it.

Two or three days later it was rumoured that a strange dog had been seen in the neighbourhood of Winterbourne Bishop, in the fields; and women and children going to or coming from outlying cottages and farms had encountered it, sometimes appearing suddenly out of the furze-bushes and staring wildly at them; or they would meet him in some deep lane between hedges, and after standing still a moment eyeing them he would turn and fly in terror from their strange faces. Shepherds began to be alarmed for the safety of their sheep, and there was a good deal of excitement and talk about the strange dog. Two or three days later Caleb encountered it. He was returning from his flock at the side of a large grass field where four or five women were occupied cutting the thistles, and the dog, which he immediately recognized as the one he had seen at the turnpike, was following one of the women about. She was greatly alarmed, and called to him, "Come here, Caleb, for goodness' sake, and drive this big dog away! He do look so desprit, I'm afeared of he."

"Don't you be feared," he shouted back. "He won't hurt 'ee; he's starving—don't you see his bones sticking out? He's asking to be fed." Then going a little nearer he called to her to take hold of the dog by the neck and keep him while he approached. He feared that the dog on seeing him coming would rush away. After a little while she called the dog, but when he went to her she shrank away from him and called out, "No, I daren't touch he—he'll tear my hand off. I never see'd such a desprit-looking beast!"

"'Tis hunger," repeated Caleb, and then very slowly and cautiously he approached, the dog all the time eyeing him suspiciously, ready to rush away on the slightest alarm. And while approaching him he began to speak gently to him, then coming to a stand stooped and patting his legs called the dog to him. Presently he came, sinking his body lower as he advanced and at last crawling, and when he arrived at the shepherd's feet he turned himself over on his back—that eloquent action which a dog uses when humbling himself before and imploring mercy from one mightier than himself, man or dog.

Caleb stooped, and after patting the dog gripped him firmly by the neck and pulled him up, while with his free hand he undid his leather belt to turn it into a dog's collar and leash; then, the end of the strap in his hand, he said "Come," and started home with the dog at his side. Arrived at the cottage he got a bucket and mixed as much meal as would make two good feeds, the dog all the time watching him with his muscles twitching and the water running from his mouth. The meal well mixed he emptied it out on the turf, and what followed, he said, was an amazing thing to see: the dog hurled himself down on the food and started devouring it as if the mass of meal had been some living savage creature he had captured and was frenziedly tearing to pieces. He turned round and round, floundering on the earth, uttering strange noises like half-choking growls and screams while gobbling down the meal; then when he had devoured it all he began tearing up and swallowing the turf for the sake of the little wet meal still adhering to it.

Such rage of hunger Caleb had never seen, and it was painful to him to think of what the dog had endured during those days when it had been roaming foodless about the neighbourhood. Yet it was among sheep all the time—scores of flocks left folded by night at a distance from the village; one would have imagined that the old wolf and wild-dog instinct would have come to life in such circumstances, but the instinct was to all appearance dead.

My belief is that the pure-bred sheep-dog is indeed the last dog to revert to a state of nature; and that when sheep-killing by night is traced to a sheep-dog, the animal has a bad strain in him, of retriever, or cur, or "rabbit-dog," as the shepherds call all terriers. When I was a boy on the pampas sheep-killing dogs were common enough, and they were always curs, or the common dog of the country, a smooth-haired animal about the size of a coach-dog, red, or black, or white. I recall one instance of sheep-killing being traced to our own dogs—we had about six or eight just then. A native neighbour, a few miles away, caught them at it one morning; they escaped him in spite of his good horse, with lasso and bolas also, but his sharp eyes saw them pretty well in the dim light, and by and by he identified them, and my father had to pay him for about thirty slain and badly injured sheep; after which a gallows was erected and our guardians ignominiously hanged. Here we shoot dogs; in some countries the old custom of hanging them, which is perhaps less painful, is still followed.

To go back to our story. From that time the stray dog was Caleb's obedient and affectionate slave, always watching his face and every gesture, and starting up at his slightest word in readiness to do his bidding. When put with the flock he turned out to be a useful sheep-dog, but unfortunately he had not been trained on the Wiltshire Downs. It was plain to see that the work was strange to him, that he had been taught in a different school, and could never forget the old and acquire a new method. But as to what conditions he had been reared in or in what district or country no one could guess. Every one said that he was a sheep-dog, but unlike any sheep-dog they had ever seen; he was not Wiltshire, nor Welsh, nor Sussex, nor Scotch, and they could say no more. Whenever a shepherd saw him for the first time his attention was immediately attracted, and he would stop to speak with Caleb. "What sort of a dog do you call that?" he would say. "I never see'd one just like 'n before."

At length one day when passing by a new building which some workmen had been brought from a distance to erect in the village, one of the men hailed Caleb and said, "Where did you get that dog, mate?"

"Why do you ask me that?" said the shepherd.

"Because I know where he come from: he's a Rooshian, that's what he is. I've see'd many just like him in the Crimea when I was there. But I never see'd one before in England."

Caleb was quite ready to believe it, and was a little proud at having a sheep-dog from that distant country. He said that it also put something new into his mind. He didn't know nothing about Russia before that, though he had been hearing so much of our great war there and of all the people that had been killed. Now he realized that Russia was a great country, a land where there were hills and valleys and villages, where there were flocks and herds, and shepherds and sheepdogs just as in the Wiltshire Downs. He only wished that Tramp—that was the name he had given his dog—could have told him his history.

Tramp, in spite of being strange to the downs and the downland sheep-dog's work, would probably have been kept by Caleb to the end but for his ineradicable passion for hunting rabbits. He did not neglect his duty, but he would slip away too often, and eventually when a man who wanted a good dog for rabbits one day offered Caleb fifteen shillings for Tramp, he sold him, and as he was taken away to a distance by his new master, he never saw him again.



CHAPTER XXI

THE SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST

General remarks—Great Ridge Wood—Encounter with a roe-deer—A hare on a stump—A gamekeeper's memory—Talk with a gipsy—A strange story of a hedgehog—A gipsy on memory—The shepherd's feeling for animals—Anecdote of a shrew—Anecdote of an owl—Reflex effect of the gamekeeper's calling—We remember best what we see emotionally

It will appear to some of my readers that the interesting facts about wild life, or rather about animal life, wild and domestic, gathered in my talks with the old shepherd, do not amount to much. If this is all there is to show after a long life spent out of doors, or all that is best worth preserving, it is a somewhat scanty harvest, they will say. To me it appears a somewhat abundant one. We field naturalists, who set down what we see and hear in a notebook, lest we forget it, do not always bear in mind that it is exceedingly rare for those who are not naturalists, whose senses and minds are occupied with other things, to come upon a new and interesting fact in animal life, or that these chance observations are quickly forgotten. This was strongly borne in upon me lately while staying in the village of Hindon in the neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood, which clothes the summit of the long high down overlooking the vale of the Wylye. It is an immense wood, mostly of scrub or dwarf oak, very dense in some parts, in others thin, with open, barren patches, and like a wild forest, covering altogether twelve or fourteen square miles—perhaps more. There are no houses near, and no people in it except a few gamekeepers: I spent long days in it without meeting a human being. It was a joy to me to find such a spot in England, so wild and solitary, and I was filled with pleasing anticipation of all the wild life I should see in such a place, especially after an experience I had on my second day in it. I was standing in an open glade when a cock-pheasant uttered a cry of alarm, and immediately afterwards, startled by the cry perhaps, a roe-deer rushed out of the close thicket of oak and holly in which it had been hiding, and ran past me at a very short distance, giving me a good sight of this shyest of the large wild animals still left to us. He looked very beautiful to me, in that mouse-coloured coat which makes him invisible in the deep shade in which he is accustomed to pass the daylight hours in hiding, as he fled across the green open space in the brilliant May sunshine. But he was only one, a chance visitor, a wanderer from wood to wood about the land; and he had been seen once, a month before my encounter with him, and ever since then the keepers had been watching and waiting for him, gun in hand, to send a charge of shot into his side.

That was the best and the only great thing I saw in the Great Ridge Wood, for the curse of the pheasant is on it as on all the woods and forests in Wiltshire, and all wild life considered injurious to the semi-domestic bird, from the sparrowhawk to the harrier and buzzard and goshawk, and from the little mousing weasel to the badger; and all the wild life that is only beautiful, or which delights us because of its wildness, from the squirrel to the roe-deer, must be included in the slaughter.

One very long summer day spent in roaming about in this endless wood, always on the watch, had for sole result, so far as anything out of the common goes, the spectacle of a hare sitting on a stump. The hare started up at a distance of over a hundred yards before me and rushed straight away at first, then turned, and ran on my left so as to get round to the side from which I had come. I stood still and watched him as he moved swiftly over the ground, seeing him not as a hare but as a dim brown object successively appearing, vanishing, and reappearing, behind and between the brown tree-trunks, until he had traced half a circle and was then suddenly lost to sight. Thinking that he had come to a stand I put my binocular on the spot where he had vanished, and saw him sitting on an old oak stump about thirty inches long. It was a round mossy stump, about eighteen inches in diameter, standing in a bed of brown dead leaves, with the rough brown trunks of other dwarf oak-trees on either side of it. The animal was sitting motionless, in profile, its ears erect, seeing me with one eye, and was like a carved figure of a hare set on a pedestal, and had a very striking appearance.

As I had never seen such a thing before I thought it was worth mentioning to a keeper I called to see at his lodge on my way back in the evening. It had been a blank day, I told him—a hare sitting on a stump being the only thing I could remember to tell him. "Well," he said, "you've seen something I've never seen in all the years I've been in these woods. And yet, when you come to think of it, it's just what one might expect a hare would do. The wood is full of old stumps, and it seems only natural a hare should jump on to one to get a better view of a man or animal at a distance among the trees. But I never saw it."

What, then, had he seen worth remembering during his long hours in the wood on that day, or the day before, or on any day during the last thirty years since he had been policing that wood, I asked him. He answered that he had seen many strange things, but he was not now able to remember one to tell me! He said, further, that the only things he remembered were those that related to his business of guarding and rearing the birds; all other things he observed in animals, however remarkable they might seem to him at the moment, were things that didn't matter and were quickly forgotten.

On the very next day I was out on the down with a gipsy, and we got talking about wild animals. He was a middle-aged man and a very perfect specimen of his race—not one of the blue-eyed and red or light-haired bastard gipsies, but dark as a Red Indian, with eyes like a hawk, and altogether a hawk-like being, lean, wiry, alert, a perfectly wild man in a tame, civilized land. The lean, mouse-coloured lurcher that followed at his heels was perfect too, in his way—man and dog appeared made for one another. When this man spoke of his life, spent in roaming about the country, of his very perfect health, and of his hatred of houses, the very atmosphere of any indoor place producing a suffocating and sickening effect on him, I envied him as I envy birds their wings and as I can never envy men who live in mansions. His was the wild, the real life, and it seemed to me that there was no other worth living.

"You know," said he, in the course of our talk about wild animals, "we are very fond of hedgehogs—we like them better than rabbits."

"Well, so do I," was my remark. I am not quite sure that I do, but that is what I told him. "But now you talk of hedgehogs," I said, "it's funny to think that, common as the animal is, it has some queer habits I can't find anything about from gamekeepers and others I've talked to on the subject, or from my own observation. Yet one would imagine that we know all there is to be known about the little beast; you'll find his history in a hundred books—perhaps in five hundred. There's one book about our British animals so big you'd hardly be able to lift its three volumes from the ground with all your strength, in which its author has raked together everything known about the hedgehog, but he doesn't give me the information I want—just what I went to the book to find. Now here's what a friend of mine once saw. He's not a naturalist, nor a sportsman, nor a gamekeeper, and not a gipsy; he doesn't observe animals or want to find out their ways; he is a writer, occupied day and night with his writing, sitting among books, yet he saw something which the naturalists and gamekeepers haven't seen, so far as I know. He was going home one moonlight night by a footpath through the woods when he heard a very strange noise a little distance ahead, a low whistling sound, very sharp, like the continuous twittering of a little bird with a voice like a bat, or a shrew, only softer, more musical. He went on very cautiously, until he spied two hedgehogs standing on the path facing each other, with their noses almost or quite touching. He remained watching and listening to them for some moments, then tried to go a little nearer and they ran away.

"Now I've asked about a dozen gamekeepers if they ever saw such a thing, and all said they hadn't; they never heard hedgehogs make that twittering sound, like a bird or a singing mouse; they had only heard them scream like a rabbit when in a trap. Now what do you say about it?"

"I've never seen anything like that," said the gipsy. "I only know the hedgehog makes a little whistling sound when he first comes out at night; I believe it is a sort of call they have."

"But no doubt," I said, "you've seen other queer things in hedgehogs and in other little animals which I should like to hear."

Yes, he had, first and last, seen a good many queer things both by day and night, in woods and other places, he replied, and then continued: "But you see it's like this. We see something and say, 'Now that's a very curious thing!' and then we forget all about it. You see, we don't lay no store by such things; we ain't scholards and don't know nothing about what's said in books. We see something and say That's something we never saw before and never heard tell of, but maybe others have seen it and you can find it in the books. So that's how 'tis, but if I hadn't forgotten them I could have told you a lot of queer things."

That was all he could say, and few can say more. Caleb was one of the few who could, and one wonders why it was so, seeing that he was occupied with his own tasks in the fields and on the down where wild life is least abundant and varied, and that his opportunities were so few compared with those of the gamekeeper. It was, I take it, because he had sympathy for the creatures he observed, that their actions had stamped themselves on his memory, because he had seen them emotionally. We have seen how well he remembered the many sheep-dogs he had owned, how vividly their various characters are portrayed in his account of them. I have met with shepherds who had little to tell about the dogs they had possessed; they had regarded their dogs as useful servants and nothing more as long as they lived, and when dead they were forgotten. But Caleb had a feeling for his dogs which made it impossible for him to forget them or to recall them without that tenderness which accompanies the thought of vanished human friends. In a lesser degree he had something of this feeling for all animals, down even to the most minute and unconsidered. I recall here one of his anecdotes of a very small creature—a shrew, or over-runner, as he called it.

One day when out with his flock a sudden storm of rain caused him to seek for shelter in an old untrimmed hedge close by. He crept into the ditch, full of old dead leaves beneath the tangle of thorns and brambles, and setting his back against the bank he thrust his legs out, and as he did so was startled by an outburst of shrill little screams at his feet. Looking down he spied a shrew standing on the dead leaves close to his boot, screaming with all its might, its long thin snout pointed upwards and its mouth wide open; and just above it, two or three inches perhaps, hovered a small brown butterfly. There for a few moments it continued hovering while the shrew continued screaming; then the butterfly flitted away and the shrew disappeared among the dead leaves.

Caleb laughed (a rare thing with him) when he narrated this little incident, then remarked: "The over-runner was a-crying 'cause he couldn't catch that leetel butterfly."

The shepherd's inference was wrong; he did not know—few do—that the shrew has the singular habit, when surprised on the surface and in danger, of remaining motionless and uttering shrill cries. His foot, set down close to it, had set it screaming; the small butterfly, no doubt disturbed at the same moment, was there by chance. I recall here another little story he related of a bird—a long-eared owl.

One summer there was a great drought, and the rooks, unable to get their usual food from the hard, sun-baked pasture-lands, attacked the roots and would have pretty well destroyed them if the farmer had not protected his swedes by driving in stakes and running cotton-thread and twine from stake to stake all over the field. This kept them off, just as thread keeps the chaffinches from the seed-beds in small gardens, and as it keeps the sparrows from the crocuses on lawn and ornamental grounds. One day Caleb caught sight of an odd-looking, brownish-grey object out in the middle of the turnip-field, and as he looked it rose up two or three feet into the air, then dropped back again, and this curious movement was repeated at intervals of two or three minutes until he went to see what the thing was. It turned out to be a long-eared owl, with its foot accidentally caught by a slack thread, which allowed the bird to rise a couple of feet into the air; but every such attempt to escape ended in its being pulled back to the ground again. It was so excessively lean, so weightless in his hand, when he took it up after disengaging its foot, that he thought it must have been captive for the space of two or three days. The wonder was that it had kept alive during those long midsummer days of intolerable heat out there in the middle of the burning field. Yet it was in very fine feather and beautiful to look at with its long, black ear-tufts and round, orange-yellow eyes, which would never lose their fiery lustre until glazed in death. Caleb's first thought on seeing it closely was that it would have been a prize to anyone who liked to have a handsome bird stuffed in a glass case. Then raising it over his head he allowed it to fly, whereupon it flew off a distance of a dozen or fifteen yards and pitched among the turnips, after which it ran a little space and rose again with labour, but soon recovering strength it flew away over the field and finally disappeared in the deep shade of the copse beyond.

In relating these things the voice, the manner, the expression in his eyes were more than the mere words, and displayed the feeling which had caused these little incidents to endure so long in his memory.

The gamekeeper cannot have this feeling: he may come to his task with the liveliest interest in, even with sympathy for, the wild creatures amidst which he will spend his life, but it is all soon lost. His business in the woods is to kill, and the reflex effect is to extinguish all interest in the living animal—in its life and mind. It would, indeed, be a wonderful thing if he could remember any singular action or appearance of an animal which he had witnessed before bringing his gun automatically to his shoulder.



CHAPTER XXII

THE MASTER OF THE VILLAGE

Moral effect of the great man—An orphaned village—The masters of the village.—Elijah Raven—Strange appearance and character—Elijah's house—The owls—Two rooms in the house—Elijah hardens with time—The village club and its arbitrary secretary—Caleb dips the lambs and falls ill—His claim on the club rejected—Elijah in court

In my roamings about the downs it is always a relief—a positive pleasure in fact—to find myself in a village which has no squire or other magnificent and munificent person who dominates everybody and everything, and, if he chooses to do so, plays providence in the community. I may have no personal objection to him—he is sometimes almost if not quite human; what I heartily dislike is the effect of his position (that of a giant among pigmies) on the lowly minds about him, and the servility, hypocrisy, and parasitism which spring up and flourish in his wide shadow whether he likes these moral weeds or not. As a rule he likes them, since the poor devil has this in common with the rest of us, that he likes to stand high in the general regard. But how is he to know it unless he witnesses its outward beautiful signs every day and every hour on every countenance he looks upon? Better, to my mind, the severer conditions, the poverty and unmerited sufferings which cannot be relieved, with the greater manliness and self-dependence when the people are left to work out their own destiny. On this account I was pleased to make the discovery on my first visit to Caleb's native village that there was no magnate, or other big man, and no gentleman except the parson, who was not a rich man. It was, so to speak, one of the orphaned villages left to fend for itself and fight its own way in a hard world, and had nobody even to give the customary blankets and sack of coals to its old women. Nor was there any very big farmer in the place, certainly no gentleman farmer; they were mostly small men, some of them hardly to be distinguished in speech and appearance from their hired labourers.

In these small isolated communities it is common to find men who have succeeded in rising above the others and in establishing a sort of mastery over them. They are not as a rule much more intelligent than the others who are never able to better themselves; the main difference is that they are harder and more grasping and have more self-control. These qualities tell eventually, and set a man a little apart, a little higher than the others, and he gets the taste of power, which reacts on him like the first taste of blood on the big cat. Henceforward he has his ideal, his definite goal, which is to get the upper hand—to be on top. He may be, and generally is, an exceedingly unpleasant fellow to have for a neighbour—mean, sordid, greedy, tyrannous, even cruel, and he may be generally hated and despised as well, but along with these feelings there will be a kind of shamefaced respect and admiration for his courage in following his own line in defiance of what others think and feel. It is after all with man as with the social animals: he must have a master—not a policeman, or magistrate, or a vague, far-away, impersonal something called the authorities or the government; but a head of the pack or herd, a being like himself whom he knows and sees and hears and feels every day. A real man, dressed in old familiar clothes, a fellow-villager, who, wolf or dog-like, has fought his way to the mastership.

There was a person of this kind at Winterbourne Bishop who was often mentioned in Caleb's reminiscences, for he had left a very strong impression on the shepherd's mind—as strong, perhaps, though in a disagreeable way, as that of Isaac his father, and of Mr. Ellerby of Doveton. For not only was he a man of great force of character, but he was of eccentric habits and of a somewhat grotesque appearance. The curious name of this person was Elijah Raven. He was a native of the village and lived till extreme old age in it, the last of his family, in a small house inherited from his father, situated about the centre of the village street. It was a quaint, old, timbered house, little bigger than a cottage, with a thatched roof, and behind it some outbuildings, a small orchard, and a field of a dozen or fifteen acres. Here he lived with one other person, an old man who did the cooking and housework, but after this man died he lived alone. Not only was he a bachelor, but he would never allow any woman to come inside his house. Elijah's one idea was to get the advantage of others—to make himself master in the village. Beginning poor, he worked in a small, cautious, peddling way at farming, taking a field or meadow or strip of down here and there in the neighbourhood, keeping a few sheep, a few cows, buying and selling and breeding horses. The men he employed were those he could get at low wages—poor labourers who were without a place and wanted to fill up a vacant time, or men like the Targetts described in a former chapter who could be imposed upon; also gipsies who flitted about the country, working in a spasmodic way when in the mood for the farmers who could tolerate them, and who were paid about half the wages of an ordinary labourer. If a poor man had to find money quickly, on account of illness or some other cause, he could get it from Elijah at once—not borrowed, since Elijah neither lent nor gave—but he could sell him anything he possessed—a horse or cow, or sheepdog, or a piece of furniture; and if he had nothing to sell, Elijah would give him something to do and pay him something for it. The great thing was that Elijah had money which he was always willing to circulate. At his unlamented death he left several thousands of pounds, which went to a distant relation, and a name which does not smell sweet, but is still remembered not only at Winterbourne Bishop but at many other villages on Salisbury Plain.

Elijah was short of stature, broad-shouldered, with an abnormally big head and large dark eyes. They say that he never cut his hair in his life. It was abundant and curly, and grew to his shoulders, and when he was old and his great mass of hair and beard became white it was said that he resembled a gigantic white owl. Mothers frightened their children into quiet by saying, "Elijah will get you if you don't behave yourself." He knew and resented this, and though he never noticed a child, he hated to have the little ones staring in a half-terrified way at him. To seclude himself more from the villagers he planted holly and yew bushes before his house, and eventually the entire building was hidden from sight by the dense evergreen thicket. The trees were cut down after his death: they were gone when I first visited the village and by chance found a lodging in the house, and congratulated myself that I had got the quaintest, old rambling rooms I had ever inhabited. I did not know that I was in Elijah Raven's house, although his name had long been familiar to me: it only came out one day when I asked my landlady, who was a native, to tell me the history of the place. She remembered how as a little girl, full of mischief and greatly daring, she had sometimes climbed over the low front wall to hide under the thick yew bushes and watch to catch a sight of the owlish old man at his door or window.

For many years Elijah had two feathered tenants, a pair of white owls—the birds he so much resembled. They occupied a small garret at the end of his bedroom, having access to it through a hole under the thatch. They bred there in peace, and on summer evenings one of the common sights of the village was Elijah's owls flying from the house behind the evergreens and returning to it with mice in their talons. At such seasons the threat to the unruly children would be varied to "Old Elijah's owls will get you." Naturally, the children grew up with the idea of the birds and the owlish old man associated in their minds.

It was odd that the two very rooms which Elijah had occupied during all those solitary years, the others being given over to spiders and dust, should have been assigned to me when I came to lodge in the house. The first, my sitting-room, was so low that my hair touched the ceiling when I stood up my full height; it had a brick floor and a wide old fireplace on one side. Though so low-ceilinged it was very large and good to be in when I returned from a long ramble on the downs, sometimes wet and cold, to sit by a wood fire and warm myself. At night when I climbed to my bedroom by means of the narrow, crooked, worm-eaten staircase, with two difficult and dangerous corners to get round, I would lie awake staring at the small square patch of greyness in the black interior made by the latticed window; and listening to the wind and rain outside, would remember that the sordid, owlish old man had slept there and stared nightly at that same grey patch in the dark for very many years. If, I thought, that something of a man which remains here below to haunt the scene of its past life is more likely to exist and appear to mortal eyes in the case of a person of strong individuality, then there is a chance that I may be visited this night by Elijah Raven his ghost. But his owlish countenance never appeared between me and that patch of pale dim light; nor did I ever feel a breath of cold unearthly air on me.

Elijah did not improve with time; the years that made him long-haired, whiter, and more owl-like also made him more penurious and grasping, and anxious to get the better of every person about him. There was scarcely a poor person in the village—not a field labourer nor shepherd nor farmer's boy, nor any old woman he had employed, who did not consider that they had suffered at his hands. The very poorest could not escape; if he got some one to work for fourpence a day he would find a reason to keep back a portion of the small sum due to him. At the same time he wanted to be well thought of, and at length an opportunity came to him to figure as one who did not live wholly for himself but rather as a person ready to go out of his way to help his neighbours.

There had long existed a small benefit society or club in the village to which most of the farm-hands in the parish belonged, the members numbering about sixty or seventy. Subscriptions were paid quarterly, but the rules were not strict, and any member could take a week or a fortnight longer to pay; when a member fell ill he received half the amount of his wages a week from the funds in hand, and once a year they had a dinner. The secretary was a labourer, and in time he grew old and infirm and could not hold a pen in his rheumaticky fingers, and a meeting was held to consider what was to be done in the matter. It was not an easy one to settle. There were few members capable of keeping the books who would undertake the duty, as it was unpaid, and no one among them well known and trusted by all the members. It was then that Elijah Raven came to the rescue. He attended the meeting, which he was allowed to do owing to his being a person of importance—the only one of that description in the village; and getting up on his legs he made the offer to act as secretary himself. This came as a great surprise, and the offer was at once and unanimously accepted, all unpleasant feelings being forgotten, and for the first time in his life Elijah heard himself praised as a disinterested person, one it was good to have in the village.

Things went on very well for a time, and at the yearly dinner of the club, a few months later, Elijah gave an account of his stewardship, showing that the club had a surplus of two hundred pounds. Shortly after this trouble began; Elijah, it was said, was making use of his position as secretary for his own private interests and to pay off old scores against those he disliked. When a man came with his quarterly subscription Elijah would perhaps remember that this person had refused to work for him or that he had some quarrel with him, and if the subscription was overdue he would refuse to take it; he would tell the man that he was no longer a member, and he also refused to give sick pay to any applicant whose last subscription was still due, if he happened to be in Elijah's black book. By and by he came into collision with Caleb, one of the villagers against whom he cherished a special grudge, and this small affair resulted in the dissolution of the club.

At this time Caleb was head-shepherd at Bartle's Cross, a large farm above a mile and a half from the village. One excessively hot day in August he had to dip the lambs; it was very hard work to drive them from the farm over a high down to the stream a mile below the village, where there was a dipping place, and he was tired and hot, and in a sweat when he began the work. With his arms bared to the shoulders he took and plunged his first lamb into the tank. When engaged in dipping, he said, he always kept his mouth closed tightly for fear of getting even a drop of the mixture in it, but on this occasion it unfortunately happened that the man assisting him spoke to him and he was compelled to reply, but had no sooner opened his mouth to speak than the lamb made a violent struggle in his arms and splashed the water over his face and into his mouth. He got rid of it as quickly as he could, but soon began to feel bad, and before the work was over he had to sit down two or three times to rest. However, he struggled on to the finish, then took the flock home and went to his cottage. He could do no more. The farmer came to see what the matter was, and found him in a fever, with face and throat greatly swollen. "You look bad," he said; "you must be off to the doctor." But it was five miles to the village where the doctor lived, and Bawcombe replied that he couldn't go. "I'm too bad—I couldn't go, master, if you offered me money for it," he said.

Then the farmer mounted his horse and went himself, and the doctor came. "No doubt," he said, "you've got some of the poison into your system and took a chill at the same time." The illness lasted six weeks, and then the shepherd resumed work, although still feeling very shaky. By and by when the opportunity came, he went to claim his sick pay—six shillings a week for the six weeks, his wages being then twelve shillings. Elijah flatly refused to pay him; his subscription, he said, had been due for several weeks and he had consequently forfeited his right to anything. In vain the shepherd explained that he could not pay when lying ill at home with no money in the house and receiving no pay from the farmer. The old man remained obdurate, and with a very heavy heart the shepherd came out and found three or four of the villagers waiting in the road outside to hear the result of the application.

They, too, were men who had been turned away from the club by the arbitrary secretary. Caleb was telling them about his interview when Elijah came out of the house and, leaning over the front gate, began to listen. The shepherd then turned towards him and said in a loud voice: "Mr. Elijah Raven, don't you think this is a tarrible hard case! I've paid my subscription every quarter for thirty years and never had nothing from the fund except two weeks' pay when I were bad some years ago. Now I've been bad six weeks, and my master giv' me nothing for that time, and I've got the doctor to pay and nothing to live on. What am I to do?"

Elijah stared at him in silence for some time, then spoke: "I told you in there I wouldn't pay you one penny of the money and I'll hold to what I said—in there I said it indoors, and I say again that indoors I'll never pay you—no, not one penny piece. But if I happen some day to meet you out of doors then I'll pay you. Now go."

And go he did, very meekly, his wrath going down as he trudged home; for after all he would have his money by and by, although the hard old man would punish him for past offences by making him wait for it.

A week or so went by, and then one day while passing through the village he saw Elijah coming towards him, and said to himself, Now I'll be paid! When the two men drew near together he cried out cheerfully, "Good morning, Mr. Raven." The other without a word and without a pause passed by on his way, leaving the poor shepherd gazing crestfallen after him.

After all he would not get his money! The question was discussed in the cottages, and by and by one of the villagers who was not so poor as most of them, and went occasionally to Salisbury, said he would ask an attorney's advice about the matter. He would pay for the advice out of his own pocket; he wanted to know if Elijah could lawfully do such things.

To the man's astonishment the attorney said that as the club was not registered and the members had themselves made Elijah their head he could do as he liked—no action would lie against him. But if it was true and it could be proved that he had spoken those words about paying the shepherd his money if he met him out of doors, then he could be made to pay. He also said he would take the case up and bring it into court if a sum of five pounds was guaranteed to cover expenses in case the decision went against them.

Poor Caleb, with twelve shillings a week to pay his debts and live on, could guarantee nothing, but by and by when the lawyer's opinion had been discussed at great length at the inn and in all the cottages in the village, it was found that several of Bawcombe's friends were willing to contribute something towards a guarantee fund, and eventually the sum of five pounds was raised and handed over to the person who had seen the lawyer.

His first step was to send for Bawcombe, who had to get a day off and journey in the carrier's cart one market-day to Salisbury. The result was that action was taken, and in due time the case came on. Elijah Raven was in court with two or three of his friends—small working farmers who had some interested motive in desiring to appear as his supporters. He, too, had engaged a lawyer to conduct his case. The judge, said Bawcombe, who had never seen one before, was a tarrible stern-looking old man in his wig. The plaintiff's lawyer he did open the case and he did talk and talk a lot, but Elijah's counsel he did keep on interrupting him, and they two argued and argued, but the judge he never said no word, only he looked blacker and more tarrible stern. Then when the talk did seem all over, Bawcombe, ignorant of the forms, got up and said, "I beg your lordship's pardon, but may I speak?" He didn't rightly remember afterwards what he called him, but 'twere your lordship or your worship, he was sure. "Yes, certainly, you are here to speak," said the judge, and Bawcombe then gave an account of his interview with Elijah and of the conversation outside the house.

Then up rose Elijah Raven, and in a loud voice exclaimed, "Lord, Lord, what a sad thing it is to have to sit here and listen to this man's lies!"

"Sit down, sir," thundered the judge; "sit down and hold your tongue, or I shall have you removed."

Then Elijah's lawyer jumped up, and the judge told him he'd better sit down too because he knowed who the liar was in this case. "A brutal case!" he said, and that was the end, and Bawcombe got his six weeks' sick pay and expenses, and about three pounds besides, being his share of the society's funds which Elijah had been advised to distribute to the members.

And that was the end of the Winterbourne Bishop club, and from that time it has continued without one.



CHAPTER XXIII

ISAAC'S CHILDREN

Isaac Bawcombe's family—The youngest son—Caleb goes to seek David at Wilton sheep-fair—Martha, the eldest daughter—Her beauty—She marries Shepherd Ierat—The name of Ierat—Story of Ellen Ierat—The Ierats go to Somerset—Martha and the lady of the manor—Martha's travels—Her mistress dies—Return to Winterbourne Bishop—Shepherd Ierat's end

Caleb was one of five, the middle one, with a brother and sister older and a brother and sister younger than himself—a symmetrical family. I have already written incidentally of the elder brother and the youngest sister, and in this chapter will complete the history of Isaac's children by giving an account of the eldest sister and youngest brother.

The brother was David, the hot-tempered young shepherd who killed his dog Monk, and who afterwards followed his brother to Warminster. In spite of his temper and "want of sense" Caleb was deeply attached to him, and when as an old man his shepherding days were finished he followed his wife to their new home, he grieved at being so far removed from his favourite brother. For some time he managed to make the journey to visit him once a year. Not to his home near Warminster, but to Wilton, at the time of the great annual sheep-fair held on 12th September. From his cottage he would go by the carrier's cart to the nearest town, and thence by rail with one or two changes by Salisbury to Wilton.

After I became acquainted with Caleb he was ill and not likely to recover, and for over two years could not get about. During all this time he spoke often to me of his brother and wished he could see him. I wondered why he did not write; but he would not, nor would the other. These people of the older generation do not write to each other; years are allowed to pass without tidings, and they wonder and wish and talk of this and that absent member of the family, trusting it is well with them, but to write a letter never enters into their minds.

At last Caleb began to mend and determined to go again to Wilton sheep-fair to look for his beloved brother; to Warminster he could not go; it was too far. September the 12th saw him once more at the old meeting-place, painfully making his slow way to that part of the ground where Shepherd David Bawcombe was accustomed to put his sheep. But he was not there. "I be here too soon," said Caleb, and sat himself patiently down to wait, but hours passed and David did not appear, so he got up and made his way about the fair in search of him, but couldn't find 'n. Returning to the old spot he got into conversation with two young shepherds and told them he was waiting for his brother who always put his sheep in that part. "What be his name?" they asked, and when he gave it they looked at one another and were silent. Then one of them said, "Be you Shepherd Caleb Bawcombe?" and when he had answered them the other said, "You'll not see your brother at Wilton to-day. We've come from Doveton, and knew he. You'll not see your brother no more. He be dead these two years."

Caleb thanked them for telling him, and got up and went his way very quietly, and got back that night to his cottage. He was very tired, said his wife; he wouldn't eat and he wouldn't talk. Many days passed and he still sat in his corner and brooded, until the wife was angry and said she never knowed a man make so great a trouble over losing a brother. 'Twas not like losing a wife or a son, she said; but he answered not a word, and it was many weeks before that dreadful sadness began to wear off, and he could talk cheerfully once more of his old life in the village.

Of the sister, Martha, there is much more to say; her life was an eventful one as lives go in this quiet downland country, and she was, moreover, distinguished above the others of the family by her beauty and vivacity. I only knew her when her age was over eighty, in her native village where her life ended some time ago, but even at that age there was something of her beauty left and a good deal of her charm. She had a good figure still and was of a good height; and had dark, fine eyes, clear, dark, unwrinkled skin, a finely shaped face, and her grey hair, once black, was very abundant. Her manner, too, was very engaging. At the age of twenty-five she married a shepherd named Thomas Ierat—a surname I had not heard before and which made me wonder where were the Ierats in Wiltshire that in all my rambles among the downland villages I had never come across them, not even in the churchyards. Nobody knew—there were no Ierats except Martha Ierat, the widow, of Winterbourne Bishop and her son—nobody had ever heard of any other family of the name. I began to doubt that there ever had been such a name until quite recently when, on going over an old downland village church, the rector took me out to show me "a strange name" on a tablet let into the wall of the building outside. The name was Ierat and the date the seventeenth century. He had never seen the name excepting on that tablet. Who, then, was Martha's husband? It was a queer story which she would never have told me, but I had it from her brother and his wife.

A generation before that of Martha, at a farm in the village of Bower Chalk on the Ebble, there was a girl named Ellen Ierat employed as a dairymaid. She was not a native of the village, and if her parentage and place of birth were ever known they have long passed out of memory. She was a good-looking, nice-tempered girl, and was much liked by her master and mistress, so that after she had been about two years in their service it came as a great shock to find that she was in the family way. The shock was all the greater when the fresh discovery was made one day that another unmarried woman in the house, who was also a valued servant, was in the same condition. The two unhappy women had kept their secret from every one except from each other until it could be kept no longer, and they consulted together and determined to confess it to their mistress and abide the consequences.

Who were the men? was the first question asked There was only one—Robert Coombe, the shepherd, who lived at the farm-house, a slow, silent, almost inarticulate man, with a round head and flaxen hair; a bachelor of whom people were accustomed to say that he would never marry because no woman would have such a stolid, dull-witted fellow for a husband. But he was a good shepherd and had been many years on the farm, and it was altogether a terrible business. Forthwith the farmer got out his horse and rode to the downs to have it out with the unconscionable wretch who had brought that shame and trouble on them. He found him sitting on the turf eating his midday bread and bacon, with a can of cold tea at his side, and getting off his horse he went up to him and damned him for a scoundrel and abused him until he had no words left, then told his shepherd that he must choose between the two women and marry at once, so as to make an honest woman of one of the two poor fools; either he must do that or quit the farm forthwith.

Coombe heard in silence and without a change in his countenance, masticating his food the while and washing it down with an occasional draught from his can, until he had finished his meal; then taking his crook he got up, and remarking that he would "think of it" went after his flock.

The farmer rode back cursing him for a clod; and in the evening Coombe, after folding his flock, came in to give his decision, and said he had thought of it and would take Jane to wife. She was a good deal older than Ellen and not so good-looking, but she belonged to the village and her people were there, and everybody knowed who Jane was, an' she was an old servant an' would be wanted on the farm. Ellen was a stranger among them, and being only a dairymaid was of less account than the other one.

So it was settled, and on the following morning Ellen, the rejected, was told to take up her traps and walk.

What was she to do in her condition, no longer to be concealed, alone and friendless in the world? She thought of Mrs. Poole, an elderly woman of Winterbourne Bishop, whose children were grown up and away from home, who when staying at Bower Chalk some months before had taken a great liking for Ellen, and when parting with her had kissed her and said: "My dear, I lived among strangers too when I were a girl and had no one of my own, and know what 'tis." That was all; but there was nobody else, and she resolved to go to Mrs. Poole, and so laden with her few belongings she set out to walk the long miles over the downs to Winterbourne Bishop where she had never been. It was far to walk in hot August weather when she went that sad journey, and she rested at intervals in the hot shade of a furze-bush, haunted all day by the miserable fear that the woman she sought, of whom she knew so little, would probably harden her heart and close her door against her. But the good woman took compassion on her and gave her shelter in her poor cottage, and kept her till her child was born, in spite of all the women's bitter tongues. And in the village where she had found refuge she remained to the end of her life, without a home of her own, but always in a room or two with her boy in some poor person's cottage. Her life was hard but not unpeaceful, and the old people, all dead and gone now, remembered Ellen as a very quiet, staid woman who worked hard for a living, sometimes at the wash-tub, but mostly in the fields, haymaking and harvesting and at other times weeding, or collecting flints, or with a spud or sickle extirpating thistles in the pasture-land. She worked alone or with other poor women, but with the men she had no friendships; the sharpest women's eyes in the village could see no fault in her in this respect; if it had not been so, if she had talked pleasantly with them and smiled when addressed by them, her life would have been made a burden to her. She would have been often asked who her brat's father was. The dreadful experience of that day, when she had been cast out and was alone in the world, when, burdened with her unborn child, she had walked over the downs in the hot August weather, in anguish of apprehension, had sunk into her soul. Her very nature was changed, and in a man's presence her blood seemed frozen, and if spoken to she answered in monosyllables with her eyes on the earth. This was noted, with the result that all the village women were her good friends; they never reminded her of her fall, and when she died still young they grieved for her and befriended the little orphan boy she had left on their hands.

He was then about eleven years old, and was a stout little fellow with a round head and flaxen hair like his father; but he was not so stolid and not like him in character; at all events his old widow in speaking of him to me said that never in all his life did he do one unkind or unjust thing. He came from a long line of shepherds, and shepherding was perhaps almost instinctive in him; from his earliest boyhood the tremulous bleating of the sheep and half-muffled clink of the copper bells and the sharp bark of the sheep-dog had a strange attraction for him. He was always ready when a boy was wanted to take charge of a flock during a temporary absence of the shepherd, and eventually, when only about fifteen, he was engaged as under-shepherd, and for the rest of his life shepherding was his trade.

His marriage to Martha Bawcombe came as a surprise to the village, for though no one had any fault to find with Tommy Ierat there was a slur on him, and Martha, who was the finest girl in the place, might, it was thought, have looked for some one better. But Martha had always liked Tommy; they were of the same age and had been playmates in their childhood; growing up together their childish affection had turned to love, and after they had waited some years and Tommy had a cottage and seven shillings a week, Isaac and his wife gave their consent and they were married. Still they felt hurt at being discussed in this way by the villagers, so that when Ierat was offered a place as shepherd at a distance from home, where his family history was not known, he was glad to take it and his wife to go with him, about a month after her child was born.

The new place was in Somerset, thirty-five to forty miles from their native village, and Ierat as shepherd at the manor-house farm on a large estate would have better wages than he had ever had before and a nice cottage to live in. Martha was delighted with her new home—the cottage, the entire village, the great park and mansion close by, all made it seem like paradise to her. Better than everything was the pleasant welcome she received from the villagers, who looked in to make her acquaintance and seemed very much taken with her appearance and nice, friendly manner. They were all eager to tell her about the squire and his lady, who were young, and of how great an interest they took in their people and how much they did for them and how they were loved by everybody on the estate.

It happens, oddly enough, that I became acquainted with this same man, the squire, over fifty years after the events I am relating, when he was past eighty. This acquaintance came about by means of a letter he wrote me in reference to the habits of a bird or some such small matter, a way in which I have become acquainted with scores—perhaps I should say hundreds—of persons in many parts of the country. He was a very fine man, the head of an old and distinguished county family; an ideal squire, and one of the few large landowners I have had the happiness to meet who was not devoted to that utterly selfish and degraded form of sport which consists in the annual rearing and subsequent slaughter of a host of pheasants.

Now when Martha was entertaining half a dozen of her new neighbours who had come in to see her, and exhibited her baby to them and then proceeded to suckle it, they looked at one another and laughed, and one said, "Just you wait till the lady at the mansion sees 'ee—she'll soon want 'ee to nurse her little one."

What did they mean? They told her that the great lady was a mother too, and had a little sickly baby and wanted a nurse for it, but couldn't find a woman to please her.

Martha fired up at that. Did they imagine, she asked, that any great lady in the world with all her gold could tempt her to leave her own darling to nurse another woman's? She would not do such a thing—she would rather leave the place than submit to it. But she didn't believe it—they had only said that to tease and frighten her!

They laughed again, looking admiringly at her as she stood before them with sparkling eyes, flushed cheeks, and fine full bust, and only answered, "Just you wait, my dear, till she sees 'ee."

And very soon the lady did see her. The people at the manor were strict in their religious observances, and it had been impressed on Martha that she had better attend at morning service on her first Sunday, and a girl was found by one of her neighbours to look after the baby in the meantime. And so when Sunday came she dressed herself in her best clothes and went to church with the others. The service over, the squire and his wife came out first and were standing in the path exchanging greetings with their friends; then as the others came out with Martha in the midst of the crowd the lady turned and fixed her eyes on her, and suddenly stepping out from the group she stopped Martha and said, "Who are you?—I don't remember your face."

"No, ma'am," said Martha, blushing and curtsying. "I be the new shepherd's wife at the manor-house farm—we've only been here a few days."

The other then said she had heard of her and that she was nursing her child, and she then told Martha to go to the mansion that afternoon as she had something to say to her.

The poor young mother went in fear and trembling, trying to stiffen herself against the expected blandishments.

Then followed the fateful interview. The lady was satisfied that she had got hold of the right person at last—the one in the world who would be able to save her precious little one "from to die," the poor pining infant on whose frail little life so much depended! She would feed it from her full, healthy breasts and give it something of her own abounding, splendid life. Martha's own baby would do very well—there was nothing the matter with it, and it would flourish on "the bottle" or anything else, no matter what. All she had to do was to go back to her cottage and make the necessary arrangements, then come to stay at the mansion.

Martha refused, and the other smiled; then Martha pleaded and cried and said she would never never leave her own child, and as all that had no effect she was angry, and it came into her mind that if the lady would get angry too she would be ordered out and all would be over. But the lady wouldn't get angry, for when Martha stormed she grew more gentle and spoke tenderly and sweetly, but would still have it her own way, until the poor young mother could stand it no longer, and so rushed away in a great state of agitation to tell her husband and ask him to help her against her enemy. But Tommy took the lady's side, and his young wife hated him for it, and was in despair and ready to snatch up her child and run away from them all, when all at once a carriage appeared at the cottage, and the great lady herself, followed by a nurse with the sickly baby in her arms, came in. She had come, she said very gently, almost pleadingly, to ask Martha to feed her child once, and Martha was flattered and pleased at the request, and took and fondled the infant in her arms, then gave it suck at her beautiful breast. And when she had fed the child, acting very tenderly towards it like a mother, her visitor suddenly burst into tears, and taking Martha in her arms she kissed her and pleaded with her again until she could resist no more; and it was settled that she was to live at the mansion and come once every day to the village to feed her own child from the breast.

Martha's connexion with the people at the mansion did not end when she had safely reared the sickly child. The lady had become attached to her and wanted to have her always, although Martha could not act again as wet nurse, for she had no more children herself. And by and by when her mistress lost her health after the birth of a third child and was ordered abroad, she took Martha with her, and she passed a whole year with her on the Continent, residing in France and Italy. They came home again, but as the lady continued to decline in health she travelled again, still taking Martha with her, and they visited India and other distant countries, including the Holy Land; but travel and wealth and all that the greatest physicians in the world could do for her, and the tender care of a husband who worshipped her, availed not, and she came home in the end to die; and Martha went back to her Tommy and the boy, to be separated no more while their lives lasted.

The great house was shut up and remained so for years. The squire was the last man in England to shirk his duties as landlord and to his people whom he loved, and who loved him as few great landowners are loved in England, but his grief was too great for even his great strength to bear up against, and it was long feared by his friends that he would never recover from his loss. But he was healed in time, and ten years later married again and returned to his home, to live there until nigh upon his ninetieth year. Long before this the Ierats had returned to their native village. When I last saw Martha, then in her eighty-second year, she gave me the following account of her Tommy's end.

He continued shepherding up to the age of seventy-eight. One Sunday, early in the afternoon, when she was ill with an attack of influenza, he came home, and putting aside his crook said, "I've done work."

"It's early," she replied, "but maybe you got the boy to mind the sheep for you."

"I don't mean I've done work for the day," he returned. "I've done for good—I'll not go with the flock no more."

"What be saying?" she cried in sudden alarm. "Be you feeling bad—what be the matter?"

"No, I'm not bad," he said. "I'm perfectly well, but I've done work;" and more than that he would not say.

She watched him anxiously but could see nothing wrong with him; his appetite was good, he smoked his pipe, and was cheerful.

Three days later she noticed that he had some difficulty in pulling on a stocking when dressing in the morning, and went to his assistance. He laughed and said, "Here's a funny thing! You be ill and I be well, and you've got to help me put on a stocking!" and he laughed again.

After dinner that day he said he wanted a drink and would have a glass of beer. There was no beer in the house, and she asked him if he would have a cup of tea.

"Oh, yes, that'll do very well," he said, and she made it for him.

After drinking his cup of tea he got a footstool, and placing it at her feet sat down on it and rested his head on her knees; he remained a long time in this position so perfectly still that she at length bent over and felt and examined his face, only to discover that he was dead.

And that was the end of Tommy Ierat, the son of Ellen. He died, she said, like a baby that has been fed and falls asleep on its mother's breast.



CHAPTER XXIV

LIVING IN THE PAST

Evening talks—On the construction of sheep-folds—Making hurdles—Devil's guts—Character in sheep-dogs—Sally the spiteful dog—Dyke the lost dog who returned—Strange recovery of a lost dog—Badger the playful dog—Badger shepherds the fowls—A ghost story—A Sunday-evening talk—Parsons and ministers—Noisy religion—The shepherd's love of his calling—Mark Dick and the giddy sheep—Conclusion

During our frequent evening talks, often continued till a late hour, it was borne in on Caleb Bawcombe that his anecdotes of wild creatures interested me more than anything else he had to tell; but in spite of this, or because he could not always bear it in mind, the conversation almost invariably drifted back to the old subject of sheep, of which he was never tired. Even in his sleep he does not forget them; his dreams, he says, are always about sheep; he is with the flock, shifting the hurdles, or following it out on the down. A troubled dream when he is ill or uneasy in his sleep is invariably about some difficulty with the flock; it gets out of his control, and the dog cannot understand him or refuses to obey when everything depends on his instant action. The subject was so much to him, so important above all others, that he would not spare the listener even the minutest details of the shepherd's life and work. His "hints on the construction of sheep-folds" would have filled a volume; and if any farmer had purchased the book he would not have found the title a misleading one and that he had been defrauded of his money. But with his singular fawn-like face and clear eyes on his listener it was impossible to fall asleep, or even to let the attention wander; and incidentally even in his driest discourse there were little bright touches which one would not willingly have missed.

About hurdles he explained that it was common for the downland shepherds to repair the broken and worn-out ones with the long woody stems of the bithywind from the hedges; and when I asked what the plant was he described the wild clematis or traveller's-joy; but those names he did not know—to him the plant had always been known as bithywind or else Devil's guts. It struck me that bithywind might have come by the transposition of two letters from withybind, as if one should say flutterby for butterfly, or flagondry for dragonfly. Withybind is one of the numerous vernacular names of the common convolvulus. Lilybind is another. But what would old Gerarde, who invented the pretty name of traveller's-joy for that ornament of the wayside hedges, have said to such a name as Devil's guts?

There was, said Caleb, an old farmer in the parish of Bishop who had a peculiar fondness for this plant, and if a shepherd pulled any of it out of one of his hedges after leafing-time he would be very much put out; he would shout at him, "Just you leave my Devil's guts alone or I'll not keep you on the farm." And the shepherds in revenge gave him the unpleasant nickname of "Old Devil's Guts," by which he was known in that part of the country.

As a rule, talk about sheep, or any subject connected with sheep, would suggest something about sheepdogs individual dogs he had known or possessed, and who always had their own character and peculiarities, like human beings. They were good and bad and indifferent; a really bad dog was a rarity; but a fairly good dog might have some trick or vice or weakness. There was Sally, for example, a stump-tail bitch, as good a dog with sheep as he ever possessed, but you had to consider her feelings. She would keenly resent any injustice from her master. If he spoke too sharply to her, or rebuked her unnecessarily for going a little out of her way just to smell at a rabbit burrow, she would nurse her anger until an opportunity came of inflicting a bite on some erring sheep. Punishing her would have made matters worse: the only way was to treat her as a reasonable being and never to speak to her as a dog—a mere slave.

Dyke was another dog he remembered well. He belonged to old Shepherd Matthew Titt, who was head-shepherd at a farm near Warminster, adjacent to the one where Caleb worked. Old Mat and his wife lived alone in their cottage out of the village, all their children having long grown up and gone away to a distance from home, and being so lonely "by their two selves" they loved their dog just as others love their relations. But Dyke deserved it, for he was a very good dog. One year Mat was sent by his master with lambs to Weyhill, the little village near Andover, where a great sheep-fair is held in October every year. It was distant over thirty miles, but Mat though old was a strong man still and greatly trusted by his master. From this journey he returned with a sad heart, for he had lost Dyke. He had disappeared one night while they were at Weyhill. Old Mrs. Titt cried for him as she would have cried for a lost son, and for many a long day they went about with heavy hearts.

Just a year had gone by when one night the old woman was roused from sleep by loud knocks on the window-pane of the living-room below. "Mat! Mat!" she cried, shaking him vigorously, "wake up—old Dyke has come back to us!" "What be you talking about?" growled the old shepherd. "Lie down and go to sleep—you've been dreaming." "'Tain't no dream; 'tis Dyke—I know his knock," she cried, and getting up she opened the window and put her head well out, and there sure enough was Dyke, standing up against the wall and gazing up at her, and knocking with his paw against the window below.

Then Mat jumped up, and going together downstairs they unbarred the door and embraced the dog with joy, and the rest of the night was spent in feeding and caressing him, and asking him a hundred questions, which he could only answer by licking their hands and wagging his tail.

It was supposed that he had been stolen at the fair, probably by one of the wild, little, lawless men called "general dealers," who go flying about the country in a trap drawn by a fast-trotting pony; that he had been thrown, muffled up, into the cart and carried many a mile away, and sold to some shepherd, and that he had lost his sense of direction. But after serving a stranger a full year he had been taken with sheep to Weyhill Fair once more, and once there he knew where he was, and had remembered the road leading to his old home and master, and making his escape had travelled the thirty long miles back to Warminster.

The account of Dyke's return reminded me of an equally good story of the recovery of a lost dog which I heard from a shepherd on the Avon. He had been lost over a year, when one day the shepherd, being out on the down with his flock, stood watching two drovers travelling with a flock on the turnpike road below, nearly a mile away, and by and by hearing one of their dogs bark he knew at that distance that it was his dog. "I haven't a doubt," he said to himself, "and if I know his bark he'll know my whistle." With that he thrust two fingers in his mouth and blew his shrillest and longest whistle, then waited the result. Presently he spied a dog, still at a great distance, coming swiftly towards him; it was his own dog, mad with joy at finding his old master.

Did ever two friends, long sundered by unhappy chance, recognize each other's voices at such a distance and so come together once more!

Whether the drovers had seen him desert them or not, they did not follow to recover him, nor did the shepherd go to them to find out how they had got possession of him; it was enough that he had got his dog back.

No doubt in this case the dog had recognized his old home when taken by it, but he was in another man's hands now, and the habits and discipline of a life made it impossible for him to desert until that old, familiar, and imperative call reached his ears and he could not disobey.

Then (to go on with Caleb's reminiscences) there was Badger, owned by a farmer and worked for some years by Caleb—the very best stump-tail he ever had to help him. This dog differed from others in his vivacious temper and ceaseless activity. When the sheep were feeding quietly and there was little or nothing to do for hours at a time, he would not lie down and go to sleep like any other sheep-dog, but would spend his vacant time "amusing of hisself" on some smooth slope where he could roll over and over; then run back and roll over again and again, playing by himself just like a child. Or he would chase a butterfly or scamper about over the down hunting for large white flints, which he would bring one by one and deposit them at his master's feet, pretending they were something of value and greatly enjoying the game. This dog, Caleb said, would make him laugh every day with his games and capers.

When Badger got old his sight and hearing failed; yet when he was very nearly blind and so deaf that he could not hear a word of command, even when it was shouted out quite close to him, he was still kept with the flock because he was so intelligent and willing. But he was too old at last; it was time for him to be put out of the way. The farmer, however, who owned him, would not consent to have him shot, and so the wistful old dog was ordered to keep at home at the farm-house. Still he refused to be superannuated, and not allowed to go to the flock he took to shepherding the fowls. In the morning he would drive them out to their run and keep them there in a flock, going round and round them by the hour, and furiously hunting back the poor hens that tried to steal off to lay their eggs in some secret place. This could not be allowed, and so poor old Badger, who would have been too miserable if tied up, had to be shot after all.

These were always his best stories—his recollections of sheep-dogs, for of all creatures, sheep alone excepted, he knew and loved them best. Yet for one whose life had been spent in that small isolated village and on the bare down about it, his range was pretty wide, and it even included one memory of a visitor from the other world. Let him tell it in his own words.

"Many say they don't believe there be such things as ghosties. They niver see'd 'n. An' I don't say I believe or disbelieve what I hear tell. I warn't there to see. I only know what I see'd myself: but I don't say that it were a ghostie or that it wasn't one. I was coming home late one night from the sheep; 'twere close on 'leven o'clock, a very quiet night, with moonsheen that made it a'most like day. Near th' end of the village I come to the stepping-stones, as we call 'n, where there be a gate and the road, an' just by the road the four big white stones for people going from the village to the copse an' the down on t'other side to step over the water. In winter 'twas a stream there, but the water it dried in summer, and now 'twere summer-time and there wur no water. When I git there I see'd two women, both on 'em tall, with black gowns on, an' big bonnets they used to wear; an' they were standing face to face so close that the tops o' their bonnets wur a'most touching together. Who be these women out so late? says I to myself. Why, says I, they be Mrs. Durk from up in the village an' Mrs. Gaarge Durk, the keeper's wife down by the copse. Then I thought I know'd how 'twas: Mrs. Gaarge, she'd a been to see Mrs. Durk in the village, and Mrs. Durk she were coming out a leetel way with her, so far as the stepping-stones, and they wur just having a last leetel talk before saying Good night. But mind, I hear'd no talking when I passed 'n. An' I'd hardly got past 'n before I says, Why, what a fool be I! Mrs. Durk she be dead a twelvemonth, an' I were in the churchyard and see'd her buried myself. Whatever be I thinking of? That made me stop and turn round to look at 'n agin. An' there they was just as I see'd 'n at first—Mrs. Durk, who was dead a twelvemonth, an' Mrs. Gaarge Durk from the copse, standing there with their bonnets a'most touching together. An' I couldn't hear nothing—no talking, they were so still as two posties. Then something came over me like a tarrible coldness in the blood and down my back, an' I were afraid, and turning I runned faster than I ever runned in my life, an' never stopped—not till I got to the cottage."

It was not a bad ghost story: but then such stories seldom are when coming from those who have actually seen, or believe they have seen, an immaterial being. Their principal charm is in their infinite variety; you never find two real or true ghost stories quite alike, and in this they differ from the weary inventions of the fictionist.

But invariably the principal subject was sheep.

"I did always like sheep," said Caleb. "Some did say to me that they couldn't abide shepherding because of the Sunday work. But I always said, Someone must do it; they must have food in winter and water in summer, and must be looked after, and it can't be worse for me to do it."

It was on a Sunday afternoon, and the distant sound of the church bells had set him talking on this subject. He told me how once, after a long interval, he went to the Sunday morning service in his native village, and the vicar preached a sermon about true religion. Just going to church, he said, did not make men religious. Out there on the downs there were shepherds who seldom saw the inside of a church, who were sober, righteous men and walked with God every day of their lives. Caleb said that this seemed to touch his heart because he knowed it was true.

When I asked him if he would not change the church for the chapel, now he was ill and his vicar paid him no attention, while the minister came often to see and talk to him, as I had witnessed, he shook his head and said that he would never change. He then added: "We always say that the chapel ministers are good men: some say they be better than the parsons; but all I've knowed—all them that have talked to me—have said bad things of the Church, and that's not true religion: I say that the Bible teaches different."

Caleb could not have had a very wide experience, and most of us know Dissenting ministers who are wholly free from the fault he pointed out; but in the purely rural districts, in the small villages where the small men are found, it is certainly common to hear unpleasant things said of the parish priest by his Nonconformist rival; and should the parson have some well-known fault or make a slip, the other is apt to chuckle over it with a very manifest and most unchristian delight.

The atmosphere on that Sunday afternoon was very still, and by and by through the open window floated a strain of music; it was from the brass band of the Salvationists who were marching through the next village, about two miles away. We listened, then Caleb remarked: "Somehow I never cared to go with them Army people. Many say they've done a great good, and I don't disbelieve it, but there was too much what I call—NOISE; if, sir, you can understand what I mean."

I once heard the great Dr. Parker speak the word imagination, or, as he pronounced it, im-madge-i-na-shun, with a volume of sound which filled a large building and made the quality he named seem the biggest thing in the universe. That in my experience was his loftiest oratorical feat; but I think the old shepherd rose to a greater height when, after a long pause during which he filled his lungs with air, he brought forth the tremendous word, dragging it out gratingly, so as to illustrate the sense in the prolonged harsh sound.

To show him that I understood what he meant very well, I explained the philosophy of the matter as follows: He was a shepherd of the downs, who had lived always in a quiet atmosphere, a noiseless world, and from lifelong custom had become a lover of quiet. The Salvation Army was born in a very different world, in East London—the dusty, busy, crowded world of streets, where men wake at dawn to sounds that are like the opening of hell's gates, and spend their long strenuous days and their lives in that atmosphere peopled with innumerable harsh noises, until they, too, acquire the noisy habit, and come at last to think that if they have anything to say to their fellows, anything to sell or advise or recommend, from the smallest thing—from a mackerel or a cabbage or a penn'orth of milk, to a newspaper or a book or a picture or a religion—they must howl and yell it out at every passer-by. And the human voice not being sufficiently powerful, they provide themselves with bells and gongs and cymbals and trumpets and drums to help them in attracting the attention of the public.

He listened gravely to this outburst, and said he didn't know exactly 'bout that, but agreed that it was very quiet on the downs, and that he loved their quiet. "Fifty years," he said, "I've been on the downs and fields, day and night, seven days a week, and I've been told that it's a poor way to spend a life, working seven days for ten or twelve, or at most thirteen shillings. But I never seen it like that; I liked it, and I always did my best. You see, sir, I took a pride in it. I never left a place but I was asked to stay. When I left it was because of something I didn't like. I couldn't never abide cruelty to a dog or any beast. And I couldn't abide bad language. If my master swore at the sheep or the dog I wouldn't bide with he—no, not for a pound a week. I liked my work, and I liked knowing things about sheep. Not things in books, for I never had no books, but what I found out with my own sense, if you can understand me.

"I remember, when I were young, a very old shepherd on the farm; he had been more 'n forty years there, and he was called Mark Dick. He told me that when he were a young man he was once putting the sheep in the fold, and there was one that was giddy—a young ewe. She was always a-turning round and round and round, and when she got to the gate she wouldn't go in but kept on a-turning and turning, until at last he got angry and, lifting his crook, gave her a crack on the head, and down she went, and he thought he'd killed her. But in a little while up she jumps and trotted straight into the fold, and from that time she were well. Next day he told his master, and his master said, with a laugh, 'Well, now you know what to do when you gits a giddy sheep.' Some time after that Mark Dick he had another giddy one, and remembering what his master had said, he swung his stick and gave her a big crack on the skull, and down went the sheep, dead. He'd killed it this time, sure enough. When he tells of this one his master said, 'You've cured one and you've killed one; now don't you try to cure no more,' he says.

"Well, some time after that I had a giddy one in my flock. I'd been thinking of what Mark Dick had told me, so I caught the ewe to see if I could find out anything. I were always a tarrible one for examining sheep when they were ill. I found this one had a swelling at the back of her head; it were like a soft ball, bigger 'n a walnut. So I took my knife and opened it, and out ran a lot of water, quite clear; and when I let her go she ran quite straight, and got well. After that I did cure other giddy sheep with my knife, but I found out there were some I couldn't cure. They had no swelling, and was giddy because they'd got a maggot on the brain or some other trouble I couldn't find out."

Caleb could not have finished even this quiet Sunday afternoon conversation, in the course of which we had risen to lofty matters, without a return to his old favourite subjects of sheep and his shepherding life on the downs. He was long miles away from his beloved home now, lying on his back, a disabled man who would never again follow a flock on the hills nor listen to the sounds he loved best to hear—the multitudinous tremulous bleatings of the sheep, the tinklings of numerous bells, and crisp ringing bark of his dog. But his heart was there still, and the images of past scenes were more vivid in him than they can ever be in the minds of those who live in towns and read books. "I can see it now," was a favourite expression of his when relating some incident in his past life. Whenever a sudden light, a kind of smile, came into his eyes, I knew that it was at some ancient memory, a touch of quaintness or humour in some farmer or shepherd he had known in the vanished time—his father, perhaps, or old John, or Mark Dick, or Liddy, or Dan'l Burdon, the solemn seeker after buried treasure.

After our long Sunday talk we were silent for a time, and then he uttered these impressive words: "I don't say that I want to have my life again, because 'twould be sinful. We must take what is sent. But if 'twas offered to me and I was told to choose my work, I'd say, Give me my Wiltsheer Downs again and let me be a shepherd there all my life long."

THE END