My poor sheep, he said, as he watched them scatter over a grassy hillside.  Ye’re happy this springtime for ye do not know that your shepherd is about to be taken from you.  But he has suffered too much in the winter we’ve come out of to remain on the hills many more years.  Before leaving you he must discover a shepherd that will care for you as well as I have done.  Amos is dead; there is no one in the cenoby that understands sheep.  Would ye had speech to counsel me.  But tell me, what would ye say if I were to leave you in Jacob’s charge?  He stood waiting, as if he expected the sheep to answer, and it was then it began to seem to Jesus he might as well entrust his flock to Jacob as to another.

He had sent him out that morning with twenty lambs that were yet too young to run with the flock, and he now stood waiting for him, thinking that if he lost none between this day and the end of the summer, the flock might be handed over to him.  Every young man’s past is tarnished, he continued, for he could not forget that Jacob had begun by losing his master’s dogs, two had been killed by panthers.  Nor was this the only misfortune that had befallen him.  Having heard that rain had fallen in the west, he set out for Caesarea to redeem his credit, he hoped, but at the end of the fourth day he could find no cavern in which to fold his sheep, and he lay down in the open, surrounded by his flock, unsuspicious that a pack of wolves had been trailing him from cavern to cavern since he left the Jordan valley—­the animals divining that their chance would come at last.  It would have been better, Jacob said, if the wolves had fallen upon him, for after this disaster no one would employ him, and he had wandered an outcast, living on the charity of shepherds, sharing a little of their bread.  But such charity could not last long and he would have had to sit with the beggars by the wayside above Jericho if Jesus had not given his lambs into his charge, by this act restoring to Jacob some of his lost faith in himself.  He had gone away saying to himself:  Jesus, who knows more than all the other shepherds put together, holds me to be no fool, and one day I’ll be trusted again with a flock.  I’m young and can wait, and, who knows, Jesus may tell me his cure for the scab, and by serving him I may get a puppy when Thema has a litter.  In such wise Jacob looked to Jesus and Thema for future fortune, and as he came over the ridge and caught sight of Jesus waiting for him, he said:  call up thy dogs, Master, lest they should fall upon mine and upon me.  Gorbotha has already risen to his feet and Thema is growling.