There were real sheep every few hundred yards, for a sheep fair was taking place somewhere near by.  The sheep came out of the mist like armies of giants, and shrank as they grew clearer.  The roads were rippled with the footprints of many sheep.  Even when there were no sheep in sight, the mist filled their places with ghostly flocks.

Each sheep as it passed examined the wheels of Christina as long as the dogs allowed it to do so.  Each flock was followed by two men, and sometimes a child in ill-fitting clothes on a pony, and sometimes a woman with a shawl over her head.

Anonyma’s notebook became very restless, and finally Mr. Russell was obliged to drive the Family to the point whither the sheep were bound.

So they went to the little town, through which the excitement of the fair thrilled like the blast from a trumpet.  Bewildered sheep looked in at its shop windows; farmers in dog-carts shouted affectionate remarks to each other across its village green, and introduced dear friends at a great distance to other dear friends with much formality.  Dogs argued in a professional way about the merits of their sheep.  Mr. Russell’s Hound, who had never before heard the suggestion that dogs were intended for any purpose but ornament, looked on breathless with surprise.  His morals were affected for life by the revolutionary sight of a dog biting the tail of a disobedient sheep.  “I’ll try it in Kensington Gardens,” thought Mr. Russell’s Hound, as he looked nervously at his master.

Christina, the motor-car, found her way to the centre of this activity.  There the sheep bleated in tight confinement, and to each pen was attached the appropriate dog, looking very self-conscious.  Dogs who had come from great distances to buy sheep were anxiously sniffing up the smell of their purchases, so that no mistake might be made on the way home.  Over the line of pens a two-plank viaduct ran, and it was bent continually by the weight of large shepherds balancing their way along to take a bird’s-eye view of possible bargains.  A facetious auctioneer with the village policeman’s arm round his neck was sitting on the wall at the end of the field, addressing everybody very frequently as “Gentlemen.”  Sheep arrived and sheep departed constantly.

“Isn’t it terribly slavish, somehow?” said Anonyma.  “The sheep never being consulted at all.  Bought and sold and smelt and spat upon as if they had no heart beating beneath that wool.  No ‘Me,’ as Jay used to say.”

Mr. Russell heard and remembered.  There were few doubts left in him as to the truth of his too-funny miracle.

He had a little tune, the scaffolding of a poem, in his head, and to the sound of it he lived that day, although I don’t expect he ever got the poem into words.

If you start your idea along an uncertain course, you have to stop and start afresh to get it straight.  You can never finish it when once it has a crooked swing.  I gather that motor cyclists occasionally have much the same experience with their machines.