Thou wast brought up to the flock from thy boyhood, and a ram’s head has more interest for thee than a verse of Scripture; thy steady, easy gait was always the finest known on these hills for leading a flock; but my feet pain me after a dozen miles, and a shepherd with corny feet is like a bird with a torn wing.  Thou understandest the hardship of a shepherd, and that one isn’t a shepherd for willing it; and I rely on thee, Brother, to take my part and to speak up for me when Hazael puts questions to thee.  So thou wouldst be freed from the care of the flock?  Jesus said.  My only wish, he answered.  But thou’lt make it clear to Hazael that it was for lack of a good ram the flock fell away.  I gave thee over a young ram with the flock, one of the finest on these hills, Jesus said.  Thou didst; and he seemed like coming into such a fine beast, Amos answered, that we hadn’t the heart to turn him among the ewes the first year but bred from the old fellow.  An old ram is a waste, Jesus replied, and he would have said more if Amos had not begun to relate the death of the fine young beast that Jesus had bred for the continuance of the flock.  We owe the loss of him, he said, to a ewe that no shepherd would look twice at, one of the ugliest in the flock, she seemed to me to be and to everybody that laid his eyes on her, and she ought to have been put out of the flock, but though uninviting to our eyes she was longed for by another ram, and so ardently that he could not abide his own ewes and became as a wild sheep on the hills, always on the prowl about my flock, seeking his favourite, and she casting her head back at him nothing loath.

It would have been better if I had turned the evil ewe out of the flock, making him a present of her, but I kept on foiling him; and my own ram, taking rage against this wild one, challenged him, and one day, seeing me asleep on the hillside, the wild ram came down and with a great bleat summoned mine to battle.  It seemed to me that heaven was raining thunderbolts, so loud was the noise of their charging; and looking out of my dreams I saw the two rams backing away from each other, making ready for another onset.  My ram’s skull was the softer, he being a youngling, it had been already shaken in several charges, and it was broken in this last one, a terrible one it was, I can still hear them, they are still at it in my mind—­the ewes of both flocks gathered on different sides, spectators.

But where were thy dogs all this while?  Jesus inquired.  My dogs!  If I’d had a Thracian he never would have suffered that the sheep killed each other.  A Thracian would have awakened me.  My dogs are of the soft Syrian breed given to growling and no more.  The wild ram might have become tame again, and would doubtless have stayed with me as long as I had the ewe; but he might have refused to serve any but she.  No man can say how it would have ended if I had not killed him in my anger.  So thou wast left, Jesus remarked, without a serviceable ram.  With naught, Amos sighed, but the old one, and he was that weary of jumping that he began to think more of his fodder than ewes.  Without money one can’t get a well-bred ram, as I often said to Hazael, but he answered me always that he had no money to give me, and that I must do as well as I could with the ram I had....  He is gone now, but before he died he ruined my flock.