“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 the gate one by one, and came round me.  It seemed to them that I was there to feed them; and they held their neat red or yellow heads to one side and the other, inquiring with their beady eyes, surprised at my stillness.  They were pretty with their speckled feathers, and as it seemed to me, plump and young, so that I wondered how many of them would in time feed me.  Finding, however, that I gave them nothing to eat, they went away, and there arose, in place of their clucking, the thin singing of air passing through some long tube.  I knew it for the whining of my dog, who had nosed me out, but could not get through the padlocked gate.  And as I lifted him over, I was glad the postman could not see me—­for I felt that to lift a dog over a gate would be against the principles of one for whom the connection of sheep with good behaviour had been too strange a thought.  And it suddenly rushed into my mind that the time would no doubt come when the conduct of apples, being plucked from the mother tree, would inspire us, and we should say:  “They’re really very good!” And I wondered, were those future watchers of apple-gathering farther from me than I, watching sheep-shearing, from the postman?  I thought, too, of the pretty dreams being dreamt about the land, and of the people who dreamed them.  And I looked at that land, covered with the sweet pinkish-green of the clover, and considered how much of it, through the medium of sheep, would find its way into me, to enable me to come out here and be eaten by midges, and speculate about things, and conceive the sentiment of how good the sheep were.  And it all seemed queer.  I thought, too, of a world entirely composed of people who could see the