They were shearing by hand this year, nine of them, counting the postman, who, though farm-bred, “did’n putt much to the shearin’,” but had come to round the sheep up and give general aid.

Sitting on the creatures, or with a leg firmly crooked over their heads, each shearer, even the two boys, had an air of going at it in his own way.  In their white canvas shearing suits they worked very steadily, almost in silence, as if drowsed by the “click-clip, click-clip” of the shears.  And the sheep, but for an occasional wriggle of legs or head, lay quiet enough, having an inborn sense perhaps of the fitness of things, even when, once in a way, they lost more than wool; glad too, mayhap, to be rid of their matted vestments.  From time to time the little damsel offered each shearer a jug and glass, but no man drank till he had finished his sheep; then he would get up, stretch his cramped muscles, drink deep, and almost instantly sit down again on a fresh beast.  And always there was the buzz of flies swarming in the sunlight of the open doorway, the dry rustle of the pollarded lime-trees in the sharp wind outside, the bleating of some released ewe, upset at her own nakedness, the scrape and shuffle of heels and sheep’s limbs on the floor, together with the “click-clip, click-clip” of the shears.

As each ewe, finished with, struggled up, helped by a friendly shove, and bolted out dazedly into the pen, I could not help wondering what was passing in her head—­in the heads of all those unceremoniously treated creatures; and, moving nearer to the postman, I said: 

“They’re really very good, on the whole.”

He looked at me, I thought, queerly.

“Yaas,” he answered; “Mr. Molton’s the best of them.”

I looked askance at Mr. Molton; but, with his knee crooked round a young ewe, he was shearing calmly.

“Yes,” I admitted, “he is certainly good.”

“Yaas,” replied the postman.

Edging back into the darkness, away from that uncomprehending youth, I escaped into the air, and passing the remains of last year’s stacks under the tall, toppling elms, sat down in a field under the bank.  It seemed to me that I had food for thought.  In that little misunderstanding between me and the postman was all the essence of the difference between that state of civilisation in which sheep could prompt a sentiment, and that state in which sheep could not.

The heat from the dropping sun, not far now above the moorline, struck full into the ferns and long grass of the bank where I was sitting, and the midges rioted on me in this last warmth.  The wind was barred out, so that one had the full sweetness of the clover, fast becoming hay, over which the swallows were wheeling and swooping after flies.  And far up, as it were the crown of Nature’s beautiful devouring circle, a buzzard hawk, almost stationary on the air, floated, intent on something pleasant below him.  A number of little hens crept through