Hence, as in harvest with a short allowance of fair weather, discipline must be tempered with diplomacy.  Lose your temper, and be over particular:  off go Billy May, Abraham Lawson, and half-a-dozen of your best men, making a weekly difference of perhaps two or three thousand sheep for the remainder of the shearing.  Can you not replace them?  Not so!  Every shed in Riverina will be hard at work during this present month of September and for every hour of October.  Till that time not a shearer will come to your gate, except, perhaps, one or two useless, characterless men.  Are you to tolerate bad workmanship?  Not that either.  But try all other means with your men before you resort to harshness; and be quite certain that your sentence is just, and that you can afford the defection.

So our friend Mr Gordon, wise from many tens of thousands of shorn sheep that have been counted out past his steady eye, criticises temperately, but watchfully.  He reproves sufficiently, and no more, any glaring fault; makes his calculation as to who are really bad shearers, and can be discharged without loss to the commonwealth, or who can shear fairly and can be coached up to a decent average.  One division, slow, and good only when slow, have to be watched lest they emulate “the talent,” and so come to grief.  Then “the talent” has to be mildly admonished from time to time lest they force the pace, set a bad example, and lure the other men on to “racing.”  This last leads to slovenly shearing, ill-usage of the sheep, and general dissatisfaction.

Tact, temper, patience, and firmness are each and all necessary in that Captain of Industry who has the very delicate and important task of superintending a large woolshed.  Hugh Gordon had shown all in such proportion as would have made a distinguished man anywhere, had fortune not adjusted for him this particular profession.  Calm with the consciousness of strength, he was kind and considerate in manner as in nature, until provoked by glaring dishonesty or incivility.  Then the lion part of his nature woke up, so that it commonly went ill with the aggressor.  As this was matter of public report, he had little occasion to spoil the repose of his bearing.  Day succeeds day, and for a fortnight the machinery goes on smoothly and successfully.  The sheep arrive at an appointed day and hour by detachments and regiments at the washpen.  They depart thence, like good boys on Saturday night, redolent of soap and water, and clean to a fault.  They enter the shed white and flossy as newly combed poodles to emerge, on the way back to their pasturage, slim, delicate, agile, with a bright black A legibly branded with tar on their paper-white skins.