CHAPTER II.

The sheep-shearing.

     “Plain living and high thinking ... 
        The homely beauty of the good old cause,
       ...our peace, our fearful innocence,
     And pure religion breathing household laws.”

     “A happy youth, and their old age
      Is beautiful and free.”

The sheep-shearings at Up-Hill Farm were a kind of rural Olympics.  Shepherds came there from far and near to try their skill against each other,—­young men in their prime mostly, with brown, ruddy faces, and eyes of that bright blue lustre which is only gained by a free, open-air life.  The hillside was just turning purple with heather bloom, and along the winding, stony road the yellow asphodels were dancing in the wind.  Everywhere there was the scent of bog-myrtle and wild-rose and sweetbrier, and the tinkling sound of becks babbling over glossy rocks; and in the glorious sunshine and luminous air, the mountains appeared to expand and elevate, and to throw out glowing peaks and summits into infinite space.

Hand in hand the squire and his daughter climbed the fellside.  They had left home in high spirits, merrily flinging back the mother’s and Sophia’s last advices; but gradually they became silent, and then a little mournful.  “I wonder why it is, father?” asked Charlotte; “I’m not at all tired, and how can fresh air and sunshine make one melancholy?”

“Maybe, now, sad thoughts are catching.  I was having a few.  Eh?  What?”

“I don’t know.  Why were you having sad thoughts?”

“Well, then, I really can’t understand why.  There’s no need to fret over changes.  At the long end the great change puts all right.  Charlotte, I have been coming to Barf Latrigg’s shearings for about half a century.  I remember the first.  I held my nurse’s hand, and wore such a funny little coat, and such a big lace collar.  And, dear me! it was just such a day as this, thirty-two years ago, that your mother walked up to the shearing with me, Charlotte; and I asked her if she would be my wife, and she said she would.  Thou takes after her a good deal; she had the very same bright eyes and bonny face, and straight, tall shape thou has to-day.  Barf Latrigg was sixty then, turning a bit gray, but able to shear with any man they could put against him.  He’ll be ninety now; but his father lived till he was more than a hundred, and most of his fore-elders touched the century.  He’s had his troubles too.”

“I never heard of them.”

“No.  They are dead and buried.  A dead trouble may be forgot:  it is the living troubles that make the eyes dim, and the heart fail.  Yes, yes; Barf is as happy as a boy now, but I remember when he was back-set and fore-set with trouble.  In life every thing goes round like a cart-wheel.  Eh?  What?”

In a short time they reached the outer wall of the farm.  They were eight hundred feet above the valley; and looking backwards upon the woods from their airy shelf, the tops of the trees appeared like a solid green road, on which they might drop down and walk.  Stone steps in the stone wall admitted them into the enclosure, and then they saw the low gray house spreading itself in the shadow of the noble sycamores—­