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A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

WORKS OF W. H. HUDSON

The Purple Land
Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt

A Crystal Age

Foreword by Clifford Smyth
Dead Man’s Plack and An Old Thorn

Birds in Town and Village
Illustrated in color

Adventures Among Birds
Head and Tail Pieces after Bewick

Birds of La Plata (2 vols.)
Superbly Illustrated

Far Away and Long Ago
With Photogravure Portrait

Idle Days in Patagonia
Fully Illustrated

A Traveller in Little Things

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

WOAUVS ATO

A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

IMPRESSIONS OF THE
SOUTH WILTSHIRE DOWNS

BY

W. H. HUDSON

ILLUSTRATED BY

Dae OD GONE C Hi

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
1921

New American Edition
Entirely re-set

Published 1921 VY A

uv? ‘
By E. P. Dutron & Company \\ 4X" ‘1

All Rights Reserved

Publisher
Mant) j R p> |

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

NOTE

I am obliged to Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Co., for
permission to make use of an article entitled “A Shep-
herd of the Downs,” which appeared in the October and
November numbers of “Longmans’ Magazine,” in 1902.
With the exception of that article, portions of which I
have incorporated in different chapters, the whole of the
matter contained in this work now appears for the first

time.

CIHTAPTER

‘CONTENTS

SALISBURY PLAIN .
SALISBURY AS I SEE IT .
WINTERBOURNE BISHOP

A SHEPHERD OF THE DowNs .
Earty Memories :
SHEPHERD IsAAc BAWCOMBE .
THE DEER-STEALERS
SHEPHERDS AND POACHING

A SHEPHERD ON FoxEs
BIRD-LIFE ON THE DowNs .
STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS .
THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLE .
VALE OF THE WYLYE .

A SHEEP-poc’s LIFE
CoNCERNING CaTs .

THE ELLersys OF DovETON .
Op WILTSHIRE Days .

Oxtp WILTSHIRE Days (continued) .

THE SHEPHERD’S RETURN

Tue Dark PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE .

SoME SHEEP-DOGS .
Tue SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST .

Tue MASTER OF THE VILLAGE

Isaac’s CHILDREN .
LIVING IN THE PAST .

INDEX
Vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Old Sarum

Broad Chalke on the Ebble .
Turnip Pecking

The Five Rivers of ciety

Old Wiltshire Horned Sheep
Salisbury Cathedral from the Avon
Carriers’ Carts, Salisbury Market .
Stalls in the Market at Salisbury
The Market House, Salisbury
Ebbesborne Wake on the Ebble .
Tilshead ihe
Idminster on the Bourne

Harnham Bridge over the Avon at Salisbury :

Unloading Sheep at the Market
The Hurdlemaker

Shrewton

Shepherd and bids ‘
Barford St. Martin on the Madde: t
Near Rollestone, on Salisbury Plain
Hurdle Pitching

Imber ; ‘
“Peacocks” at Parte St. Meet :
Gomeldon on the Bourne

Frontispiece
PAGE

x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Shepherds and their Dogs
Coombe Bissett on the Ebble
Boscombe on the Bourne
Hurdle and Crib Mending .
Winterbourne Stoke .
Allington on the Bourne .
Upton Lovell on the Wylye .
Filling the Cribs

Ansty on the Nadder .
Carting Water for the Flock
Codford on the Wylye
Fisherton de la Mere on the Wylye
Titherington Church .

Knook Church and Manor House on sate Wylye ;

Wishford on the Wylye .

Chitterne

The Lambing Fold

On Guard . eae

Stockton on the Wylye . .
Winterbourne Earls on the Bourne
Woodford on the Avon .

Fovant on the Nadder

The Bourne at Winterbourne Gunner .
Salisbury from the Race Course
Fonthill Bishop

Hindon

Courtyard of “The en “a Hindon
Swallowcliffe on the Nadder

Joan

218

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Tithe Barn, Tisbury .
Newton Tony on the Bourne
Burcombe on the Nadder
Misselfore, Bower Chalke
In the Fold

Shrewton . . BN Rae SN

Dwarf Oaks in the oe Ridge Wood
Chilmark eee

Orcheston St. Mary .

The Head Shepherd .

Orcheston St. George

Folding for the Night

White Sheet Hill from the Shaitesbury ee

xl
PAGE
PRS
236
245
264
268
283
286
293
305
312
319
330
332

A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

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A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

CHAPTER I

Salisbury Plain

Introductory remarks—Wiltshire little favoured by tour-
ists—Aspect of the downs—Bad weather—Desolate
aspect—The bird-scarer—Fascination of the downs
—The larger Salisbury Plain—Effect of the military
occupation—A century’s changes — Birds — Old
Wiltshire sheep—Sheep-horns in a well—Changes
wrought by cultivation — Rabbit-warrens on the
downs—Barrows obliterated by the plough and by
rabbits

WictsuireE looks large on the map of England, a great

green county, yet it never appears to be a favourite one

to those who go on rambles in the land. At all events

Iam unable to bring to mind an instance of a lover of
1

2 ‘A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

Wiltshire who was not a native or a resident, or had
not been to Marlborough and loved the country on ac-
count of early associations. Nor can I regard myself
as an exception, since, owing to a certain kind of adap-
tiveness in me, a sense of being at home wherever grass’
grows, I am in a way a native too. Again listen to any
half-dozen of your friends discussing the places they
have visited, or intend visiting, comparing notes about
the counties, towns, churches, castles, scenery—all that
draws them and satisfies their nature, and the chances
are that they will not even mention Wiltshire. They
all know it “in a way’; they have seen Salisbury
Cathedral and Stonehenge, which everybody must go
to look at once in his life; and they have also viewed
the country from the windows of a railroad carriage as
they passed through on their flight to Bath and to Wales
with its mountains, and to the west country, which many
of us love best of all—Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall.
For there is nothing striking in Wiltshire, at all events
to those who love nature first; nor mountains, nor sea,
nor anything to compare with the places they are hasten-
ing to, west or north. The downs! Yes, the downs are
there, full in sight of your window, in their flowing forms
resembling vast, pale green waves, wave beyond wave,
“in fluctuation fixed”; a fine country to walk on in fine
weather for all those who regard the mere exercise of
walking as sufficient pleasure. But to those who wish
for something more, these downs may be neglected, since,
if downs are wanted, there is the higher, nobler Sussex
range within an hour of London. There are others on
whom the naked aspect of the downs has a repelling
effect. Like Gilpin they love not an undecorated earth;

SALISBURY PLAIN 3

and false and ridiculous as Gilpin’s taste may seem to
me and to all those who love the chalk, which “spoils
everything’ as Gilpin said, he certainly expresses a
feeling common to those who are unaccustomed to the
emptiness and silence of these great spaces.

As to walking on the downs, one remembers that the
fine days are not so many, even in the season when they
are looked for—they have certainly been few during
this wet and discomfortable one of 1909. It is indeed
only on the chalk hills that I ever feel disposed to quarrel
with this English climate, for all weathers are good to
those who love the open air, and have their special attrac-
tions. What a pleasure it is to be out in rough weather
in October when the equinoctial gales are on, “the wind
Euroclydon,” to listen to its roaring in the bending trees,
to watch the dead leaves flying, the pestilence-stricken
multitudes, yellow and black and red, whirled away in
flight on flight before the volleying blast, and to hear and
see and feel the tempests of rain, the big silver-grey
drops that smite you like hail! And what pleasure, too,
in the still grey November weather, the time of suspense
and melancholy before winter, a strange quietude, like
a sense of apprehension in nature! And so on through
the revolving year, in all places in all weathers, there is
pleasure in the open air, except on these chalk hills be-
cause of their bleak nakedness. There the wind and
driving rain are not for but against you, and may over-
come you with misery. One feels their loneliness, monot-
ony, and desolation on many days, sometimes even when
it is not wet, and I here recall an amusing encounter
with a bird-scarer during one of these dreary spells.

It was in March, bitterly cold, with an east wind

4 [A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

which had been blowing many days, and overhead the
sky was of a hard, steely grey. I was cycling along the
valley of the Ebble, and finally leaving it pushed up a
long steep slope and set off over the high plain by a dusty
road with the wind hard against me. A more desolate
scene than the one before me it would be hard to imagine,
for the land was all ploughed and stretched away before
me, an endless succession of vast grey fields, divided by
wire fences. On all that space there was but one living
thing in sight, a human form, a boy, far away on the
left side, standing in the middle of a big field with some-
thing which looked like a gun in his hand. Immediately
after I saw him he, too, appeared to have caught sight
of me, for turning he set off running as fast as he could
over the ploughed ground towards the road, as if intend-
ing to speak to me. The distance he would have to run
was about a quarter of a mile and I doubted that he
would be there in time to catch me, but he ran fast and
the wind was against me, and he arrived at the road
just as I got to that point. There by the side of the
fence he stood, panting from his race, his handsome
face glowing with colour, a boy about twelve or thirteen,
with a fine strong figure, remarkably well dressed for a
bird-scarer. For that was what he was, and he carried
a queer, heavy-looking old gun. I got off my wheel and
waited for him to speak, but he was silent, and continued
regarding me with the smiling countenance of one well
pleased with himself. “Well?” I said, but there was no
answer ; he only kept on smiling.
“What did you want?” I demanded impatiently.
“T didn’t want anything.”

SALISBURY PLAIN 5

“But you started running here as fast as you could
the moment you caught sight of me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Well, what did you do it for—what was your object
in running here?”

“Just to see you pass,” he answered.

It was a little ridiculous and vexed me at first, but
by and by when I left him, after some more conversation,
I felt rather pleased; for it was a new and somewhat
flattering experience to have any person run a long dis-
tance over a ploughed field, burdened with a heavy gun,
“just to see me pass.”

But it was not strange in the circumstances; his hours
in that grey, windy desolation must have seemed like
days, and it was a break in the monotony, a little joyful
excitement in getting to the road in time to see a passer-
by more closely, and for a few moments gave him a
sense of human companionship. I began even to feel
a little sorry for him, alone there in his high, dreary
world, but presently thought he was better off and better
employed than most of his fellows poring over miserable
books in school, and I wished we had a more rational
system of education for the agricultural districts, one
which would not keep the children shut up in a room
during all the best hours of the day, when to be out of
doors, seeing, hearing, and doing, would fit them so
much better for the life-work before them. Squeers’
method was a wiser one. We think less of it than of
the delightful caricature, which makes Squeers “a joy
for ever,” as Mr. Lang has said of Pecksniff. But
Dickens was a Londoner, and incapable of looking at
this or any other question from any other than the Lon-

6 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

doner’s standpoint. Can you have a better system for
the children of all England than this one which will turn
out the most perfect draper’s assistant in Oxford Street,
or, to go higher, the most efficient Mr. Guppy in a solici-
tor’s office? It is true that we have Nature’s unconscious
intelligence against us; that by and by, when at the age
of fourteen the boy is finally released, she will set to
work to undo the wrong by discharging from his mind
its accumulations of useless knowledge as soon as he
begins the work of life. But what a waste of time and
energy and money! One can only hope that the slow
intellect of the country will wake to this question some
day, that the countryman will say to the townsman, Go
on making your laws and systems of education for your
own children, who will live as you do indoors; while I
shall devise a different one for mine, one which will give
them hard muscles and teach them to raise the mutton
and pork and cultivate the potatoes and cabbages on
which we all feed.

To return to the downs. Their very emptiness and
desolation, which frightens the stranger from them, only
serves to make them more fascinating to those who are
intimate with and have learned to love them. That
dreary aspect brings to mind the other one, when, on
waking with the early sunlight in the room, you look
out on a blue sky, cloudless or with white clouds. It
may be fancy, or the effect of contrast, but it has always
seemed to me that just as the air is purer and fresher on
these chalk heights than on the earth below, and as the
water is of a more crystal purity, and the sky perhaps
bluer, so do all colours and all sounds have a purity and
vividness and intensity beyond that of other places. [

SALISBURY PLAIN 7

see it in the yellows of hawkweed, rock-rose, and bird’s-
foot-trefoil, in the innumerable specks of brilliant colour
—blue and white and rose—of milk-wort and squinancy-
wort, and in the large flowers of the dwarf thistle, glow-
ing purple in its green setting; and I hear it in every
bird-sound, in the trivial songs of yellow-hammer and
corn-bunting, and of dunnock and wren and whitethroat.

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The pleasure of walking on the downs is not, however,
a subject which concerns me now;; it is one I have written
about in a former work, “Nature in Downland,” descrip-
tive of the South Downs. The theme of the present
work is the life, human and other, of the South Wiltshire
Downs, or of Salisbury Plain. It is the part of Wilt-
shire which has most attracted me. Most persons would
say that the Marlborough Downs are greater, more like
the great Sussex range as it appears from the Weald:

8 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

but chance brought me farther south, and the character
and life of the village people when I came to know them
made this appear the best place to be in.

The Plain itself is not a precisely defined area, and
may be made to include as much or little as will suit the
writer’s purpose. If you want a continuous plain, with
no dividing valley cutting through it, you must place it
between the Avon and Wylye Rivers, a distance about
fifteen miles broad and as many long, with the village of
Tilshead in its centre; or, if you don’t mind the valleys,
you can say it extends from Downton and Tollard Royal
south of Salisbury to the Pewsey vale in the north, and
from the Hampshire border on the east side to Dorset
and Somerset on the west, about twenty-five to thirty
miles each way. My own range is over this larger Salis-
bury Plain, which includes the River Ebble, or Ebele,
with its numerous interesting villages, from Odstock and
Combe Bisset, near Salisbury and “the Chalks,” to pretty
Alvediston near the Dorset line, and all those in the
Nadder valley, and westward to White Sheet Hill above
Mere. You can picture this high chalk country as an
open hand, the left hand, with Salisbury in the hollow
of the palm, placed nearest the wrist, and the five valleys
which cut through it as the five spread fingers, from the
Bourne (the little finger) succeeded by Avon, Wylye,
and Nadder, to the Ebble, which comes in lower down
as the thumb and has its junction with the main stream
below Salisbury.

A very large portion of this high country is now in
a transitional state, that was once a sheep-walk and is
now a training ground for the army. Where the sheep
are taken away the turf loses the smooth, elastic char-

SALISBURY PLAIN ,

acter which makes it better to walk on than the most
perfect lawn. The sheep fed closely, and everything
that grew on the down—grasses, clovers, and numerous

a

small creeping herbs—had acquired the habit of growing
and flowering close to the ground, every species and
each individual plant striving, with the unconscious intel-
ligence that is in all growing things, to hide its leaves

10 A, SHEPHERD'S; LIFE

and pushing sprays under the others, to escape the nib-
bling teeth by keeping closer to the surface. There are
grasses and some herbs, the plantain among them, which
keep down very close but must throw up a tall stem to
flower and seed. Look at the plantain when its flowering
time comes; each particular plant growing with its leaves
so close down on the surface as to be safe from the
busy, searching mouths, then all at once throwing up
tall, straight stems to flower and ripen its seeds quickly.
Watch a flock at this time, and you will see a sheep walk-
ing about, rapidly plucking the flowering spikes, cutting
them from the stalk with a sharp snap, taking them off
at the rate of a dozen or so in twenty seconds. But the
sheep cannot be all over the downs at the same time,
and the time is short, myriads of plants throwing up their
stems at once, so that many escape, and it has besides a
deep perennial root so that the plant keeps its own life
though it may be unable to sow any seeds for many
seasons. So with other species which must send up a
tall flower stem; and by and by, the flowering over and
the seeds ripened or lost, the dead, scattered stems remain
like long hairs growing out of a close fur. The turf
remains unchanged; but take the sheep away and it is
like the removal of a pressure, or a danger: the plant
recovers liberty and confidence and casts off the old habit ;
it springs and presses up to get the better of its fellows
—to get all the dew and rain and sunshine that it can—
and the result is a rough surface.

Another effect of the military occupation is the destruc-
tion of the wild life of the Plain, but that is a matter
I have written about in my last book, ‘“Afoot in England,”
in a chapter on Stonehenge, and need not dwell on here.

SALISBURY PLAIN 11

To the lover of Salisbury Plain as it was, the sight of
military camps, with white tents or zinc houses, and of
bodies of men in khaki marching and drilling, and the
sound of guns, now informs him that he is in a district
which has lost its attraction, where nature has been
dispossessed.

Meanwhile, there is a corresponding’ change going on
in the human life of the district. Let anyone describe
it as he thinks best, as an improvement or a deterioration,
it is a great change nevertheless, which in my case and
probably that of many others is as disagreeable to con-
template as that which we are beginning to see in the
down, which was once a sheep-walk and is so no longer.
On this account I have ceased to frequent that portion
of the Plain where the War Office is in possession of
the land, and to keep to the southern side in my rambles,
out of sight and hearing of the “white-tented camps”
and mimic warfare. Here is Salisbury Plain as it has
been these thousand years past, or ever since sheep were
pastured here more than in any other district in England,
and that may well date even more than ten centuries back.

Undoubtedly changes have taken place even here, some
very great, chiefly during the last, or from the late eigh-
teenth century. Changes both in the land and the animal
life, wild and domestic. Of the losses in wild bird life
there will be something to say in another chapter; they
relate chiefly to the extermination of the finest species,
the big bird, especially the soaring bird, which is now
gone out of all this wide Wiltshire sky. As a naturalist
I must also lament the loss of the old Wiltshire breed of
sheep, although so long gone. Once it was the only
breed known in Wilts, and extended over the entire

12 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

county ; it was a big animal, the largest of the fine-wooled
sheep in England, but for looks it certainly compared
badly with modern downland breeds and possessed, it
was said, all the points which the breeder, or improver,
was against. Thus, its head was big and clumsy, with
a round nose, its legs were long and thick, its belly with-
out wool, and both sexes were horned. Horns, even
in a ram, are an abomination to the modern sheep-farmer
in Southern England. Finally, it was hard to fatten.
On the other hand it was a sheep which had been from
of old on the bare open downs and was modified to suit
the conditions, the scanty feed, the bleak, bare country,
and the long distances it had to travel to and from the
pasture ground. It was a strong, healthy, intelligent
animal, in appearance and character like the old original
breed of sheep on the pampas of South America, which
I knew as a boy, a coarse-wooled sheep with naked belly,
tall and hardy, a greatly modified variety of the sheep
introduced by the Spanish colonist three centuries ago.
At all events, the old Wiltshire sheep had its merits, and
when the South Down breed was introduced during the
late eighteenth century the farmer viewed it with dis-
favour; they liked their old native animal, and did not
want to lose it. But it had to go in time, just as in later
times the South Down had to go when the Hampshire
Down took its place—the breed which is now universal,
in South Wilts at all events.

A solitary flock of the pure-bred old Wiltshire sheep
existed in the county as late as 1840, but the breed has
now so entirely disappeared from the country that you
find many shepherds who have never even heard of it.
Not many days ago I met with a curious instance of

SALISBURY PLAIN 13

this ignorance of the past. I was talking to a shepherd,
a fine intelligent fellow, keenly interested in the subjects
of sheep and sheep-dogs, on the high down above the
village of Broad Chalk on the Ebble, and he told me
that his dog was of mixed breed, but on its mother’s
side came from a Welsh sheep-dog, that his father had
always had the Welsh dog, once common in Wiltshire,

ean a
OLD WILTSMRE

HORNED SHEEP

and he wondered why it had gone out as it was so good
an animal. This led me to say something about the
old sheep having gone out too, and as he had never
heard of the old breed I described the animal to him.
What I told him, he said, explained something which
had been a puzzle to him for some years. There was
a deep hollow in the down near the spot where we were
standing, and at the bottom he said there was an old
well which had been used in former times to water the
sheep, but masses of earth had fallen down from the
sides, and in that condition it had remained for no one
knew how long—perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred years.
Some years ago it came into his master’s head to have
this old well cleaned out, and this was done with a good

14 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

deal of labour, the sides having first been boarded over
to make it safe for the workmen below. At the bottom
of the well a vast store of rams’ horns was discovered
and brought out; and it was a mystery to the farmer
and the men how so large a number of sheep’s horns
had been got together; for rams are few and do not
dié often, and here there were hundreds of horns. He
understood it now, for if all the sheep, ewes as well as
rams, were horned in the old breed, a collection like this
might easily have been made.

The greatest change of the last hundred years is no
doubt that which the plough has wrought in the aspect
of the downs. There is a certain pleasure to the eye
in the wide fields of golden corn, especially of wheat,
in July and August; but a ploughed down is a down made
ugly, and it strikes one as a mistake, even from a purely
economic point of view, that this old rich turf, the slow
product of centuries, should be ruined for ever as sheep-
pasture when so great an extent of uncultivated land
exists elsewhere, especially the heavy clays of the Mid-
lands, better suited for corn. The effect of breaking up
the turf on the high downs is often disastrous; the thin
soil which was preserved by the close, hard turf is blown
or washed away, and the soil becomes poorer year by
year, in spite of dressing, until it is hardly worth culti-
vating. Clover may be grown on it, but it continues
to deteriorate; or the tenant or landlord may turn it
into a rabbit-warren, the most fatal policy of all. How
hideous they are—those great stretches of downland,
enclosed in big wire fences and rabbit netting, with little
but wiry weeds, moss, and lichen growing on them, the
earth dug up everywhere by the disorderly little beasts!

SALISBURY PLAIN 15

For a while there is a profit—‘“‘it will serve me my time,”
the owner says—but the end is utter barrenness.

One must lament, too, the destruction of the ancient
earth-works, especially of the barrows, which is going
on all over the downs, most rapidly where the land is
broken up by the plough. One wonders if the ever-
increasing curiosity of our day with regard to the history
of the human race in the land continues to grow, what
our descendants of the next half of the century, to go
no further, will say of us and our incredible carelessness
in the matter! So small a matter to us, but one which
will, perhaps, be immensely important to them! It is,
perhaps, better for our peace that we do not know; it
would not be pleasant to have our children’s and children’s
children’s contemptuous expressions sounding in our pro-
phetic ears. Perhaps we have no right to complain of
the obliteration of these memorials of antiquity by the
plough; the living are more than the dead, and in this
case it may be said that we are only following the
Artemisian example in consuming (in our daily bread)
minute portions of the ashes of our old relations, albeit
untearfully, with a cheerful countenance. Still one cari-
not but experience a shock on seeing the plough driven
through an ancient, smooth turf, curiously marked with
barrows, lynchetts, and other mysterious mounds and
depressions, where sheep have been pastured for a thou-
sand years, without obscuring these chance hieroglyphs
scored by men on the surface of the hills.

It is not, however, only on the cultivated ground that
the destruction is going on; the rabbit, too, is an active
agent in demolishing the barrows and other earth-works.
He burrows into the mound and throws out bushels of

16 ‘A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

chalk and clay, which is soon washed down by the rains;
he tunnels it through and through and sometimes makes
it his village; then one day the farmer or keeper, who is
not an archzologist, comes along and puts his ferrets
into the holes, and one of them, after drinking his fill
of blood, falls asleep by the side of his victim, and the
keeper sets to work with pick and shovel to dig him out
and demolishes half the barrow to recover his vile little .
beast.

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CHAPTER II

Salisbury as I See It

The Salisbury of the villager—The cathedral from the
meadows—Walks to Wilton and Old Sarum—The
spire and a rainbow—Charm of Old Sarum—The
devastation—Salisbury from Old Sarum—Leland’s
description—Salisbury and the village mind—Mar-
ket-day—The infirmary—The cathedral— The lesson
of a child’s desire—In the streets again—An Apollo
of the downs

To the dwellers on the Plain Salisbury itself is an ex-

ceedingly important place—the most important in the

world. For if they have seen a greater—London, let

us say—it has left but a confused, a phantasmagoric

image on the mind, an impression of endless thorough-

fares and of innumerable people all apparently in a
17

18 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

desperate hurry to do something, yet doing nothing; a
labyrinth of streets and wilderness of houses, swarming
with beings who have no definite object and no more to
do with realities than so many lunatics, and are uncon-
fined because they are so numerous that all the asylums
in the world could not contain them. But of Salisbury
they have a very clear image: inexpressibly rich as it is
in sights, in wonders, full of people—hundreds of people |
in the streets and market-place—they can take it all in
and know its meaning. Every man and woman, of all
classes. in all that concourse, is there for some definite
purpose which they can guess and understand; and the
busy street and market, and red houses and soaring spire,
are all one, and part and parcel too of their own lives
in their own distant little village by the Avon or Wylye,
or anywhere on the Plain. And that soaring spire which,
rising so high above the red town, first catches the eye,
the one object which gives unity and distinction to the
whole picture, is not more distinct in the mind than the
entire Salisbury with its manifold interests and activities.

There is nothing in the architecture of England more
beautiful than that same spire. I have seen it many times,
far and near, from all points of view, and am never in
or near the place but I go to some. spot where I look at
and enjoy the sight; but I will speak here of the two
best points of view.

The nearest, which is the artist’s favourite point, is
from the meadows; there, from the waterside, you have
the cathedral not too far away nor too near for a picture,
whether on canvas or in the mind, standing amidst its
great old trees, with nothing but the moist green meadows
and the river between. One evening, during the late

SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 19

summer of this wettest season, when the rain was begin-
ning to cease, I went out this way for my stroll, the
pleasantest if not the only “walk” there is in Salisbury.
It is true, there are two others: one to Wilton by its
long, shady avenue; the other to Old Sarum; but these
are now motor-roads, and until the loathed hooting and
dusting engines are thrust away into roads of their own
there is little pleasure in them for the man on foot. The
rain ceased, but the sky was still stormy, with a great
blackness beyond the cathedral and still other black clouds
coming up from the west behind me. Then the sun,
near its setting, broke out, sending a flame of orange
colour through the dark masses around it, and at the
same time flinging a magnificent rainbow on that black
cloud against which the immense spire stood wet with
rain and flushed with light, so that it looked like a spire
built of a stone impregnated with silver. Never had
Nature so glorified man’s work! It was indeed a mar-
vellous thing to see, an effect so rare that in all the years
I had known Salisbury, and the many times I had taken
that stroll in all weathers, it was my first experience of
such a thing. How lucky, then, was Constable to have
seen it, when he set himself to paint his famous picture!
And how brave he was and even wise to have attempted
such a subject, one which, I am informed by artists with
the brush, only a madman would undertake, however
great a genius he might be. It was impossible, we know,
even to a Constable, but we admire his failure neverthe-
less, even as we admire Turner’s many failures; but
when we go back to Nature we are only too glad to
forget all about the picture.

The view from the meadows will not, in the future,

20 [A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

I fear, seem so interesting to me; I shall miss the rain-
bow, and shall never see again except in that treasured
image the great spire as Constable saw and tried to
paint it. In like manner, though for a different reason,
my future visits to Old Sarum will no longer give me
the same pleasure experienced on former occasions.

Old Sarum stands over the Avon, a mile and a half
from Salisbury; a round chalk hill about 300 feet high,
in its round shape and isolation resembling a stupendous
tumulus in which the giants of antiquity were buried,
its steeply sloping, green sides ringed about with vast,
concentric earth-works and ditches, the work of the “‘old
people,”’ as they say on the Plain, when referring to the
ancient Britons, but how ancient, whether invading Celts
or Aborigines—the true Britons, who possessed the land
from neolithic times—even the anthropologists, the wise
men of to-day, are unable to tell us. Later, it was a
Roman station, one of the most important, and in after
ages a great Norman castle and cathedral city, until early
in the thirteenth century, when the old church was pulled
down and a new and better one to last for ever was built
in the green plain by many running waters. Church
and people gone, the castle fell into ruin, though some
believe it existed down to the fifteenth century; but from
that time onwards the site has been a place of historical
memories and a wilderness. Nature had made it a sweet
and beautiful spot; the earth over the old buried ruins
was covered with an elastic turf, jewelled with the bright
little flowers of the chalk, the ramparts and ditches being
all overgrown with a dense thicket of thorn, holly, elder,
bramble, and ash, tangled up with ivy, briony, and trav-
eller’s-joy. Once only during the last five or six centuries

SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 21

some slight excavations were made when, in 1834, as
the result of an excessively dry summer, the lines of the
cathedral foundations were discernible on the surface.
But it will no longer be the place it was, the Society of
Antiquaries having received permission from the Dea:
and Chapter of Salisbury to work their sweet will on
the site. That ancient, beautiful carcass, which had long
made their mouths water, on which they have now fallen
like a pack of hungry hyenas to tear off the old hide of
green turf and burrow down to open to the light or drag
out the deep, stony framework. The beautiful surround-
ing thickets, too, must go, they tell me, since you cannot
turn the hill inside out without destroying the trees and
bushes that crown it. What person who has known it
and has often sought that spot for the sake of its ancient
associations, and of the sweet solace they have found in
the solitude, or for the noble view of the sacred city from
its summit, will not deplore this fatal amiability of the
authorities, this weak desire to please every one and
inability to say no to sucha proposal!

But let me now return to the object which brings me
to this spot ; it was not to lament the loss of the beautiful,
which cannot be preserved in our age—even this best
one of all which Salisbury possessed cannot be preserved
—but to look at Salisbury from this point of view. It
is not as from “the meadows” a view of the cathedral
only, but of the whole town, amidst its circle of vast
green downs. It has a beautiful aspect from that point:
a red-brick and red-tiled town, set low on that circum-
scribed space, whose soft, brilliant green is in lovely
contrast with the paler hue of the downs beyond, the
perennial moist green of its water-meadows. For many

2a A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

swift, clear currents flow around and through Salisbury,
and doubtless in former days there were many more
channels in the town itself. Leland’s description is worth
quoting: ““There be many fair streates in the Cite Sares-
byri, and especially the High Streate and Castle Streate

. . Al the Streates in a maner, in New Saresbyri,
hath little streamlettes and arms derivyd out of Avon
than runneth through them. The site of the very town
of Saresbyri and much ground thereabout is playne and
low, and as a pan or receyvor of most part of the waters
of Wiltshire.”

On this scene, this red town with the great spire, set
down among water-meadows, encircled by paler green
chalk hills, I look from the top of the inner and highest
rampart or earth-work; or going a little distance down
sit at ease on the turf to gaze at it by the hour. Nor
could a sweeter resting-place be found, especially at the
time of ripe elder-berries, when the thickets are purple
with their clusters and the starlings come in flocks to
feed on them, and feeding keep up a perpetual, low
musical jangle about me.

It is not, however, of “(New Saresbyri’” as seen by the
tourist, with a mind full of history, archeology, and the
esthetic delight in cathedrals, that I desire to write, but
of Salisbury as it appears to the dweller on the Plain.
For Salisbury is the capital of the Plain, the head and
heart of all those villages, too many to count, scattered
far and wide over the surrounding country. It is the
villager’s own peculiar city, and even as the spot it stands
upon is the “pan or receyvor, of most part of the waters
of Wiltshire,” so is it the receyvor of all he accomplishes
in his laborious life, and thitherward flow all his thoughts

SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 23

and ambitions. Perhaps it is not so difficult for me as
it would be for most persons who are not natives to
identify myself with him and see it as he sees it. That
greater place we have been in, that mighty, monstrous
London, is ever present to the mind and is like a mist
before the sight when we look at other places; but for
me there is no such mist, no image so immense and per-
sistent as to cover and obscure all others, and no such
mental habit as that of regarding people as a mere crowd,
a mass, a monstrous organism, in and on which each
individual is but a cell, a scale. This feeling troubles
and confuses my mind when I am in London, where we
live “too thick”; but quitting it I am absolutely free; it
has not entered my soul and coloured me with its colour
or shut me out from those who have never known it,
even of the simplest dwellers on the soil who, to our
sophisticated minds, may seem like beings of another
species. This is my happiness—to feel, in all places, that
I am one with them. To say, for instance, that I am
going to Salisbury to-morrow, and catch the gleam in
the children’s eye and watch them, furtively watching
me, whisper to one another that there will be something
for them, too, on the morrow. ‘To set out betimes and
overtake the early carriers’ carts on the road, each with
its little cargo of packages and women with baskets and
an old man or two, to recognize acquaintances among
those who sit in front, and as I go on overtaking and
passing carriers and the half-gipsy, little “general dealer”
in his dirty, ramshackle, little cart drawn by a rough,
fast-trotting pony, all of us intent on business and
pleasure, bound for Salisbury—the great market and
emporium and place of all delights for all the great Plain.

a A SHEPHERD'S RIFE

I remember that on my very last expedition, when I had
come twelve miles in the rain and was standing at a street
corner, wet to the skin, waiting for my carrier, a man
in a hurry said to me, “I say, just keep an eye on my
cart for a minute or two while I run round to see some-
body. I’ve got some fowls in it, and if you see anyone
come poking round just ask them what they want—you
can’t trust every one. I'll be back in a minute.” And

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CARRIERS CARTS
SALISBURY MARKET

he was gone, and I was very pleased to watch his cart
and fowls till he came back.

Business is business and must be attended to, in fair
or foul weather, but for business with pleasure we prefer
it fine on market-day. The one great and chief pleasure,
in which all participate, is just to be there, to be in the
crowd—a joyful occasion which gives a festive look to
every face. The mere sight of it exhilarates like wine.
The numbers—the people and the animals! The car-
riers’ carts drawn up in rows on rows—carriers from a

SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 25

hundred little villages on the Bourne, the Avon, the
Wylye, the Nadder, the Ebble, and from all over the
Plain, each bringing its little contingent. Hundreds and
hundreds more coming by train; you see them pouring
down Fisherton Street in a continuous procession, all
hurrying market-wards. And what a lively scene the
market presents now, full of cattle and sheep and pigs
and crowds of people standing round the shouting auc-
tioneers! And horses, too, the beribboned hacks, and
ponderous draught horses with manes and tails deco-
rated with golden straw, thundering over the stone
pavement as they are trotted up and down! And what
a profusion of fruit and vegetables, fish and meat, and
all kinds of provisions on the stalls, where women with
baskets on their arms are jostling and bargaining! The
Corn Exchange is like a huge beehive, humming with
the noise of talk, full of brown-faced farmers in their
riding and driving clothes and leggings, standing in knots
or thrusting their hands into sacks of oats and barley.
You would think that all the farmers from all the Plain
were congregated there. There is a joyful contagion
in it all) Even the depressed young lover, the forlornest
of beings, repairs his wasted spirits and takes heart again.
Why, if I’ve seen a girl with a pretty face to-day I’ve seen
a hundred—and more. And she thinks they be so few
she can treat me like that and barely give me a pleasant
word in a month! Let her come to Salisbury and see
how many there be!

And so with every one in that vast assemblage—vast
to the dweller in the Plain. Each one is present as it
were in two places, since each has in his or her heart the
constant image of home—the little, peaceful village in

26 ‘A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

the remote valley; of father and mother and neighbours
and children, in school just now, or at play, or home to
dinner—home cares and concerns and the business in
Salisbury. The selling and buying; friends and relations
to visit or to meet in the market-place, and—how often!
—the sick one to be seen at the Infirmary. This home
of the injured and ailing, which is in the mind of so
many of the people gathered together, is indeed the cord
that draws and binds the city and the village closest
together and makes the two like one.

That great, comely building of warm, red brick in
Fisherton Street, set well back so that you can see it as
a whole, behind its cedar and beech-trees—how familiar
it is to the villagers! In numberless humble homes, in
hundreds of villages of the Plain, and all over the sur-
rounding country, the “Infirmary” is a name of the
deepest meaning, and a place of many sad and tender
and beautiful associations. I heard it spoken of in a
manner which surprised me at first, for I know some
of the London poor and am accustomed to their attitude
towards the metropolitan hospitals. The Londoner uses
them very freely; they have come to be as necessary to
him as the grocer’s shop and the public-house, but for
all the benefits he receives from them he has no faintest
sense of gratitude, and it is my experience that if you
speak to him of this he is roused to anger and demands
“What are they for?” So far is he from having any
thankful thoughts for all that has been given him for
nothing and done for him and for his, if he has anything
to say at all on the matter it is to find fault with the
hospitals and cast blame on them for not having healed
him more quickly or thoroughly.

SALISBURY (AS: I) SEE .IT or

This country town hospital and infirmary is differently
regarded by the villagers of the Plain. It is curious to
find how many among them are personally acquainted
with it; perhaps it is not easy for anyone, even in this
most healthy district, to get through life without sickness,
and all are liable to accidents. The injured or afflicted
youth, taken straight from his rough, hard life and poor
cottage, wonders at the place he finds himself in—the
wide, clean, airy room and white, easy bed, the care
and skill of the doctors, the tender nursing by women,
and comforts and luxuries, all without payment, but
given as it seems to him out of pure divine love and
compassion—all this comes to him as something strange,
almost incredible. He suffers much perhaps, but can
bear pain stoically and forget it when it is past, but the
loving kindness he has experienced is remembered.

That is one of the very great things Salisbury has
for the villagers, and there are many more which may
not be spoken of, since we do not want to lose sight of
the wood on account of the trees; only one must be men-
tioned for a special reason, and that is the cathedral. The
villager is extremely familiar with it as he sees it from
the market and the street and from a distance, from all
the roads which lead him to Salisbury. Seeing it he
sees everything beneath it—all the familiar places and
objects, all the streets—High and Castle and Crane
Streets, and many others, including Endless Street, which
reminds one of Sydney Smith’s last flicker of fun before
that candle went out; and the “White Hart’ and the
“Angel” and “Old George,” and the humbler “Goat” and
“Green Man” and “Shoulder of Mutton,” with many
besides; and the great, red building with its cedar-tree,

28 A’ SHEPHERD'S, LIFE

and the knot of men and, boys standing on the bridge
gazing down on the trout in the swift river below; and
the market-place and its busy crowds—all the familiar
sights and scenes that come under the spire like a flock
of sheep on a burning day in summer, grouped about a
great tree growing in the pasture-land. But he is not
familiar with the interior of the great fane; it fails to

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up

MARKET at SALJSBURY

draw him, doubtless because he has no time in his busy,
practical life for the cultivation of the zsthetic faculties.
There is a crust over that part of his mind; but it need
not always and ever be so; the crust is not on the mind
of the child.

Before a stall in the market-place a child is standing
with her mother—a commonplace-looking, little girl of
about twelve, blue-eyed, light-haired, with thin arms
and legs, dressed, poorly enough, for her holiday. The
mother, stoutish, in her best but much-worn black gown

SALISBURY AS I SEE IT ay

and a brown straw, out-of-shape hat, decorated with
bits of ribbon and a few soiled and frayed, artificial
flowers. Probably she is the wife of a labourer who
works hard to keep himself and family on fourteen shil-
lings a week; and she, too, shows, in her hard hands and
sunburnt face, with little wrinkles appearing, that she
is a hard worker; but she is very jolly, for she is in
Salisbury on market-day, in fine weather, with several
shillings in her purse—a shilling for the fares, and per-
haps eightpence for refreshments, and the rest to be
expended in necessaries for the house. And now to
increase the pleasure of the day she has unexpectedly
run against a friend! There they stand, the two friends,
basket on arm, right in the midst of the jostling crowd,
talking in their loud, tinny voices at a tremendous rate;
while the girl, with a half-eager, half-listless expression,
stands by with her hand on her mother’s dress, and every
time there is a second’s pause in the eager talk she gives
a little tug at the gown and ejaculates “Mother!” ‘The
woman impatiently shakes off the hand and says sharply,
“What now, Marty! Can’t ’ee let me say just a word
without bothering!’ and on the talk runs again; then
another tug and “Mother!” and then, “You promised,
Mother,” and by and by, “Mother, you said you'd take
me to the cathedral next time.”

Having heard so much I wanted to hear more, and-
addressing the woman I asked her why her child wanted
to go. She answered me with a good-humoured laugh,
“?Tis all because she heard ’em talking about it last win-
ter, and she’d never been, and I says to her, ‘Never you
mind, Marty, I’ll take you there the next time I go to
Salisbury.’ ”

30 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

“And she’s never forgot it,’’ said the other woman.

“Not she—Marty ain’t one to forget.”

“And you been four times, Mother,” put in the girl.

“Have I now! Well, ’tis too late now—half-past two
and we must be ’t ‘Goat’ at four.”

“Oh, Mother, you promised!”

“Well, then, come along, you worriting child, and let’s
have it over or you'll give me no peace;” and away they
went. And I would have followed to know the result if
it had been in my power to look into that young brain
and see the thoughts and feelings there as the crystal-
gazer sees things in a crystal. In a vague way, with
some very early memories to help me, I can imagine it
—the shock of pleased wonder at the sight of that im-
mense interior, that far-extending nave with pillars that
stand like the tall trunks of pines and beeches, and at
the end the light screen which allows the eye to travel
on through the rich choir, to see, with fresh wonder and
delight, high up and far off, that glory of coloured glass
as of a window half-open to an unimaginable place be-
yond—a heavenly cathedral to which all this is but a
dim porch or passage!

We do not properly appreciate the educational value
of such early experiences; and I use that dismal word
not because it is perfectly right or for want of a better
one, but because it is in everybody’s mouth and under-
stood by all. For all I know to the contrary, village
schools may be bundled in and out of the cathedral from
time to time, but that is not the right way, seeing that the
child’s mind is not the crowd-of-children’s mind. But
I can imagine that when we have a wiser, better system of
education in the villages, in which books will not be

SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 31

everything, and to be shut up six or seven hours every
day to prevent the children from learning the things that
matter most—I can imagine at such a time that the
schoolmaster or mistress will say to the village woman,
“T hear you are going to Salisbury to-morrow, or next
Tuesday, and I want you to take Janie or little Dan or

= Sane ee

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ti Ll ce

THE MARKET HOUSE
SALISBURY

Peter, and leave him for an hour to play about on the
cathedral green and watch the daws flying round the spire,
and take a peep inside while you are doing your
marketing.”

Back from the cathedral once more, from the infirmary,
and from shops and refreshment-houses, out in the sun
among the busy people, let us delay a little longer for
the sake of our last scene.

It was past noon on a hot, brilliant day in August,
and that splendid weather had brought in more people |

3a A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

than I had ever before seen congregated in Salisbury,
and never had the people seemed so talkative and merry
and full of life as on that day. I was standing at a busy
spot by a row of carriers’ carts drawn up at the side of
the pavement, just where there are three public-houses
close together, when I caught sight of a young man of
about twenty-two or twenty-three, a shepherd in a grey
suit and thick, iron-shod, old boots and brown leggings,
with a soft felt hat thrust jauntily on the back of his
head, coming along towards me with that half-slouching,
half-swinging gait peculiar to the men of the downs,
especially when they are in the town on pleasure bent.
Decidedly he was there on pleasure and had been indulg-
ing in a glass or two of beer (perhaps three) and was
very happy, trolling out a song in a pleasant, musical
voice as he swung along, taking no notice of the people
stopping and turning round to stare after him, or of
those of his own party who were following and trying
to keep up with him, calling to him all the time to stop,
to wait, to go slow, and give them a chance. There were
seven following him: a stout, middle-aged woman, then
a grey-haired, old woman and two girls, and last a young-
ish, married woman with a small boy by the hand; and
the stout woman, with a red, laughing face, cried out,
“Oh, Dave, do stop, can’t ’ee! Where be going so fast,
man—don’t ’ee see we can’t keep up with ’ee?” But
he would not stop nor listen. It was his day out, his
great day in Salisbury, a very rare occasion, and he was
very happy. Then she would turn back to the others
and cry, “’Tisn’t no use, he won’t bide for us—did ’ee
ever see such a boy!” and laughing and perspiring she
would start on after him again.

SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 33

Now this incident would have been too trivial to relate
had it not been for the appearance of the man himself—
his powerful and perfect physique and marvellously
handsome face—such a face as the old Greek sculptors
have left to the world to be universally regarded and
admired for all time as the most perfect. I do not think
that this was my feeling only; I imagine that the others
in that street who were standing still and staring after
him had something of the same sense of surprise and
admiration he excited in me. Just then it happened that
there was a great commotion outside one of the public-
houses, where a considerable party of gipsies in their
little carts had drawn up, and were all engaged in a
violent, confused altercation. Probably they, or one of
them, had just disposed of a couple of stolen ducks, or
a sheepskin, or a few rabbits, and they were quarrelling
over the division of the spoil. At all events they were
violently excited, scowling at each other and one or two
in a dancing rage, and had collected a crowd of amused
lookers-on; but when the young man came singing by
they all turned to stare at him.

As he came on I placed myself directly in his path and
stared straight into his eyes—grey eyes and very beau-
tiful; but he refused to see me; he stared through me
like an animal when you try to catch its eyes, and went
by still trolling out his song, with all the others streaming
after him.

CHAPTER yA TE

Winterbourne Bishop

A favourite village—Isolated situation—Appearance of
the village—Hedge-fruit—The winterbourne—Hu-
man interest—The home feeling—Man in harmony
with nature—Human bones thrown out by a rabbit
—A spot unspoiled and unchanged

OF the few widely separated villages, hidden away among
the lonely downs in the large, blank spaces between the
rivers, the one I love best is Winterbourne Bishop. Yet
of the entire number—I know them all intimately—I
daresay it would be pronounced by most persons the least
attractive. It has less shade from trees in summer and
is more exposed in winter to the bleak winds of this high
country, from whichever quarter they may blow. Placed
high itself on a wide, unwooded valley or depression, with
the low, sloping downs at some distance away, the village
is about as cold a place to pass a winter in as one could
34

WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 35

find in this district. And, it may be added, the most
inconvenient to live in at any time, the nearest town,
or the easiest to get to, being Salisbury, twelve miles dis-
tant by a hilly road. The only means of getting to that
great centre of life which the inhabitants possess is by
the carrier’s cart, which makes the weary four-hours’
journey once a week, on market-day. Naturally, not
many of them see that place of delights oftener than
once a year, and some but once in five or more years.

Then, as to the village itself, when you have got down
into its one long, rather winding street, or road. This
has a green bank, five or six feet high, on either side,
on which stand the cottages, mostly facing the road.
Real houses there are none—buildings worthy of being
called houses in these great days—unless the three small
farm-houses are considered better than cottages, and the
rather mean-looking rectory—the rector, poor man, is
very poor. Just in the middle part, where the church
stands in its green churchyard, the shadiest spot in the
village, a few of the cottages are close together, almost
touching, then farther apart, twenty yards or so, then
farther still, forty or fifty yards. They are small, old
cottages; a few have seventeenth-century dates cut on
stone tablets on their fronts, but the undated ones look
equally old; some thatched, others tiled, but none par-
ticularly attractive. -Certainly they are without the added
charm of a green drapery—creeper or ivy rose, clematis,
and honeysuckle; and they are also mostly without the
cottage-garden flowers, unprofitably gay like the blossom-
ing furze, but dear to the soul; the flowers we find in so
many of the villages along the rivers, especially in those
of the Wylye valley to be described in a later chapter.

36 [A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

The trees, I have said, are few, though the churchyard
is shady, where you can refresh yourself beneath its
ancient beeches and its one wide-branching yew, or sit
on a tomb in the sun when you wish for warmth and
brightness. The trees growing by or near the street are
mostly ash or beech, with a pine or two, old but not
large; and there are small or dwarf yew-, holly-, and
thorn-trees. Very little fruit is grown; two or three to -
half a dozen apple- and damson-trees are called an or-
chard, and one is sorry for the children. But in late
summer and autumn they get their fruit from the hedges.
These run up towards the downs on either side of the
village, at right angles with its street ; long, unkept hedges,
beautiful with scarlet haws and traveller’s-joy, rich in
bramble and elder berries and purple sloes and nuts—
a thousand times more nuts than.the little dormice require
for their own modest wants.

Finally, to go back to its disadvantages, the village is
waterless; at all events in summer, when water is most
wanted. Water is such a blessing and joy in a village—
a joy for ever when it flows throughout the year, as at
Nether Stowey and Winsford and Bourton-on-the-Water,
to mention but three of all those happy villages in the
land which are known to most of us! What man on
coming to such places and watching the rushing, spark-
ling, foaming torrent by day and listening to its splashing,
gurgling sounds by night, does not resolve that he will
live in no village that has not a perennial stream in it!
This unblessed, high and dry village has nothing but
the winterbourne which gives it its name; a sort of sur-
name common to a score or two of villages in Wiltshire,
Dorset, Somerset, and Hants. Here the bed of the stream

WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 37

lies by the bank on one side of the village street, and
when the autumn and early winter rains have fallen
abundantly, the hidden reservoirs within the chalk hills
are filled to overflowing; then the water finds its way out
and fills the dry old channel and sometimes turns the
whole street into a rushing river, to the immense joy of
the village children. They are like ducks, hatched and
reared at some upland farm where there was not even
a muddy pool to dibble in. For a season (the wet one)
the village women have water at their own doors and
can go out and dip pails in it as often as they want.
When spring comes it is still flowing merrily, trying to
make you believe that it is going to flow for ever; beau-
tiful, green water-loving plants and grasses spring up
and flourish along the roadside, and you may see comfrey
and water forget-me-not in flower. Pools, too, have
been formed in some deep, hollow places; they are fringed
with tall grasses, whitened over with bloom of water-
crowfoot, and poa grass grows up from the bottom to
spread its green tresses over the surface. Better still,
by and by a couple of stray moorhens make their appear-
ance in the pool—strange birds, coloured glossy olive-
brown, slashed with white, with splendid scarlet and
yellow beaks! If by some strange chance a shining blue
kingfisher were to appear it could not create a greater
excitement. So much attention do they receive that
the poor strangers have no peace of their lives. It is
a happy time for the children, and a good time for the
busy housewife, who has all the water she wants for
cooking and washing and cleaning—she may now dash
as many pailfuls over her brick floors as she likes. Then
the clear, swift current begins to diminish, and scarcely

38 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

have you had time to notice the change than it is alto-
gether gone! The women must go back to the well and
let the bucket down, and laboriously turn and turn the
handle of the windlass till it mounts to the top again.
The pretty moist, green herbage, the graceful grasses,
quickly wither away; dust and straws and rubbish from
the road lie in the dry channel, and by and by it is filled
with a summer growth of dock and loveless nettles which
no child may touch with impunity.

No, I cannot think that any person for whom it had
no association, no secret interest, would, after looking
at this village with its dried-up winterbourne, care to
make his home in it. And no person, I imagine, wants
to see it; for it has no special attraction and is away
from any road, at a distance from everywhere. I knew
a great many villages in Salisbury Plain, and was always
adding to their number, but there was no intention of
visiting this one. Perhaps there is not a village on the
Plain, or anywhere in Wiltshire for that matter, which
sees fewer strangers. ‘Then I fell in with the old shep-
herd whose life will be related in the succeeding chapter,
and who, away from his native place, had no story about
his past life and the lives of those he had known—no
thought in his mind, I might almost say, which was not
connected with the village of Winterbourne Bishop.
And many of his anecdotes and reflections proved so
interesting that I fell into the habit of putting them down
in my notebook; until in the end the place itself, where
he had followed his “homely trade” so long, seeing and
feeling so much, drew me to it. JI knew there was
“nothing to see” in it, that it was without the usual
attractions; that there was, in fact, nothing but the

WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 39

human interest, but that was enough. So I came to it
to satisfy an idle curiosity—just to see how it would
accord with the mental picture produced by his descrip-
tion of it. I came, I may say, prepared to like the place
for the sole but sufficient reason that it had been his
home. Had it not been for this feeling he had produced
in me I should not, I imagine, have cared to stay long
in it. As it was, I did stay, then came again and found

-
= ee

——— TT
Sesh Te Ne ees
ila ih carn ape re Pees Ps
Nts ee

TILSHEAD

that it was growing on me. I wondered why; for the
mere interest in the old shepherd’s life memories did not
seem enough to account for this deepening attachment.
It began to seem to me that I liked it more and more
because of its very barrenness—the entire absence of
all the features which make a place attractive, noble
scenery, woods, and waters; deer parks and old houses,
Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, stately and beautiful, full
of art treasures; ancient monuments and historical asso-
ciations. There were none of these things; there was

40 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

nothing here but that wide, vacant expanse, very thinly
populated with humble, rural folk—farmers, shepherds,
labourers—living in very humble houses. England is
so full of riches in ancient monuments and grand and
interesting and lovely buildings and objects and scenes,
that it is perhaps too rich. For we may get into the habit
of looking for such things, expecting them at every turn,
every mile of the way.

I found it a relief, at Winterbourne Bishop, to be in
a country which had nothing to draw a man out of a
town. A wide, empty land, with nothing on it to look
at but a furze-bush; or when I had gained the summit
of the down, and to get a little higher still stood on the
top of one of its many barrows, a sight of the distant
village, its low, grey or reddish-brown cottages half
hidden among its few trees, the square, stone tower of
its little church looking at a distance no taller than a
milestone. That emptiness seemed good for both mind
and body: I could spend long hours idly sauntering or
sitting or lying on the turf, thinking of nothing, or only
of one thing—that it was a relief to have no thought
about anything.

But no, something was secretly saying to me all the
time, that it was more than what I have said which con-
tinued to draw me to this vacant place—more than the
mere relief experienced on coming back to nature and
solitude, and the freedom of a wide earth and sky. I
was not fully conscious of what the something more was
until after repeated visits. On each occasion it was a
pleasure to leave Salisbury behind and set out on that
long, hilly road, and the feeling would keep with me all
the journey, even in bad weather, sultry or cold, or with

WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 41

the wind hard against me, blowing the white chalk dust
into my eyes. From the time I left the turnpike to go
the last two and a half to three miles by the side-road
I would gaze eagerly ahead for a sight of my destina-
tion long before it could possibly be seen; until, on gain-
ing the summit of a low, intervening down, the wished
scene would be disclosed—the vale-like, wide depression,
with its line of trees, blue-green in the distance, flecks
of red and grey colour of the houses among them—and
at that sight there would come a sense of elation, like
that of coming home.

This in fact was the secret! This empty place was,
in its aspect, despite the difference in configuration be-
tween down and undulating plain, more like the home of
my early years than any other place known to me in the
country. I can note many differences, but they do not
deprive me of this home feeling; it is the likenesses that
hold me, the spirit of the place, one which 4s not a desert
with the desert’s melancholy or sense of desolation, but
inhabited, although thinly and by humble-minded men
whose work and dwellings are unobtrusive. The final
effect of this wide, green space with signs of human life
and labour on it, and sight of animals—sheep and cattle
—at various distances, is that we are not aliens here,
intruders or invaders on the earth, living in it but apart,
perhaps hating and spoiling it, but with the other animals
are children of Nature, like them living and seeking our
subsistence under her sky, familiar with her sun and
wind and rain.

If some ostentatious person had come to this strangely
quiet spot and raised a staring, big house, the sight of
it in the landscape would have made it impossible to have

42 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

such a feeling as I have described—this sense of man’s
harmony and oneness with nature. From how much of
England has this expression which nature has for the
spirit, which is so much more to us than beauty of scenery,
been blotted out! This quiet spot in Wiltshire has been
inhabited from of old, how far back in time the barrows
raised by an ancient, barbarous people are there to tell us,
and to show us how long it is possible for the race of
men, in all stages of culture, to exist on the earth without
spoiling it.

One afternoon when walking on Bishop Down I noticed
at a distance of a hundred yards or more that a rabbit
had started making a burrow in a new place and had
thrown out a vast quantity of earth. Going to the spot
to see what kind of chalk or soil he was digging so
deeply in, I found that he had thrown out a human thigh-
bone and a rib or two. They were of a reddish-white
colour and had been embedded in a hard mixture of
chalk and red earth. The following day I went again,
and there were more bones, and every day after that the
number increased until it seemed to me that he had
brought out the entire skeleton, minus the skull, which I
had been curious to see. Then the bones disappeared.
The man who looked after the game had seen them, and
recognizing that they were human remains had judiciously
taken them away to destroy or stow them away in some
safe place. For if the village constable had discovered
them, or heard of their presence, he would perhaps have
made a fuss and even thought it necessary to communi-
cate with the coroner of the district. Such things occa-
sionally happen, even in Wiltshire where the chalk hills
are full of the bones of dead men, and a solemn Crowner’s

WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 43

quest is held on the remains of a Saxon or Dane or an
ancient Briton. When some important person—a Sir
Richard Colt Hoare, for example, who dug up 379 bar-
rows in Wiltshire, or a General Pitt Rivers—throws out
human remains nobody minds, but if an unauthorized
rabbit kicks out a lot of bones the matter should be
inquired into,

But the man whose bones had been thus thrown out
into the sunlight after lying so long at that spot, which
commanded a view of the distant, little village looking
so small in that immense, green space—who and what
was he and how long ago did he live on the earth—at
Winterbourne Bishop, let us say? There were two bar-
rows in that part of the down, but quite a stone’s-throw
away from the spot where the rabbit was working, so
that he may not have been one of the people of that
period. Still, it is probable that he was buried a very
long time ago, centuries back, perhaps a thousand years,
perhaps longer, and by chance there was a slope there
which prevented the water from percolating, and the
soil in which he had been deposited, under that close-knit
turf which looked as if it had never been disturbed, was
one in which bones might keep uncrumbled for ever.

The thought that occurred to me at the time was that
if the man himself had come back to life after so long
a period, to stand once more on that down surveying the
scene, he would have noticed little change in it, certainly
nothing of a startling description. The village itself,
looking so small at that distance, in the centre of the
vast depression, would probably not be strange to him.
It was doubtless there as far back as history goes and
probably still farther back in time. For at that point,

44 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

just where the winterbourne gushes out from the low
hills, is the spot man would naturally select to make his
home. And he would see no mansion or big building,
no puff of white steam and sight of a long, black train
creeping over the earth, nor any other strange thing. It
would appear to him even as he knew it before he fell
asleep—the same familiar scene, with furze and bramble
and bracken on the slope, the wide expanse with sheep
and cattle grazing in the distance, and the dark green
of trees in the hollows, and fold on fold of the low
down beyond, stretching away to the dim, farthest
horizon.

CHAPTER. IV

A Shepherd of the Downs

Caleb Bawcombe—An old shepherd’s love of his home—
Fifty years’ shepherding—Bawcombe’s singular ap-
pearance—A tale of a titlark—Caleb Bawcombe’s
father—Father and son—A grateful sportsman and
Isaac Bawcombe’s pension—Death following death
in old married couples—In a village churchyard—
A farm-labourer’s gravestone and his story

Ir is now several years since I first met Caleb Bawcombe,
a shepherd of the South Wiltshire Downs, but already
old and infirm and past work. I met him at a distance
from his native village, and it was only after I had known
him a long time and had spent many afternoons and
evenings in his company, listening to his anecdotes of
his shepherding days, that I went to see his own old home
for myself—the village of Winterbourne Bishop already
described, to find it a place after my own heart. But
as I have said, if I had never known Caleb and heard so
45

46 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

much from him about his own life and the lives of many
of his fellow-villagers, I should probably never have
seen this village.

One of his memories was of an old shepherd named
John, whose acquaintance he made when a very young
man—John being at that time seventy-eight years old
—on the Winterbourne Bishop farm, where he had served
for an unbroken period of close on sixty years. Though
so aged he was still head shepherd, and he continued to
hold that place seven years longer—until his master,
who had taken over old John with the place, finally gave
up the farm and farming at the same time. He, too,
was getting past work and wished to spend his declining
years in his native village in an adjoining parish, where
he owned some house and cottage property. And now
what was to become of the old shepherd, since the new
tenant had brought his own men with him?—and he,
moreover, considered that John, at eighty-five, was too
old to tend a flock on the hills, even of tegs. His old
master, anxious to help him, tried to get him some em-
ployment in the village where he wished to stay; and
failing in this, he at last offered him a cottage rent free
in the village where he was going to live himself, and,
in addition, twelve shillings a week for the rest of his
life. It was in those days an exceedingly generous offer,
but John refused it. “Master,” he said, “I be going to
stay in my own native village, and if I can’t make a
living the parish ‘ll have to keep I; but keep or not keep,
here I be and here I be going to stay, where I were
borned.”

From this position the stubborn old man refused to
be moved, and there at Winterbourne Bishop his master

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 47

had to leave him, although not without having first made
him a sufficient provision.

The way in which my old friend, Caleb Bawcombe,
told the story plainly revealed his own feeling in the
matter. He understood and had the keenest sympathy
with old John, dead now over half a century; or rather,
let us say, resting very peacefully in that green spot under
the old grey tower of Winterbourne Bishop church where
as a small boy he had played among the old gravestones
as far back in time as the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury. But old John had long survived wife and children,
and having no one but himself to think of was at liberty
to end his days where he pleased. Not so with Caleb,
for, although his undying passion for home and his love
of the shepherd’s calling was as great as John’s, he was
not so free, and he was compelled at last to leave his
native downs, which he may never see again, to settle
for the remainder of his days in another part of the
country.

Early in life he “caught a chill” through long exposure
to wet and cold in winter; this brought on rheumatic
fever and a malady of the thigh, which finally affected
the whole limb and made him lame for life. Thus handi-
capped he had continued as shepherd for close on fifty
years, during which time his sons and daughters had
grown up, married, and gone away, mostly to a consider-
able distance, leaving their aged parents alone once more.
Then the wife, who was a strong woman and of an enter-
prising temper, found an opening for herself at a distance
from home where she could start a little business. Caleb
indignantly refused to give up shepherding in his place
to take part in so unheard-of an adventure; but after

48 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

a year or more of life in his lonely hut among the hills
and cold, empty cottage in the village, he at length tore
himself away from that beloved spot and set forth on
the longest journey of his life—about forty-five miles—
to join her and help in the work of her new home. Here
a few years later I found him, aged seventy-two, but
owing to his increasing infirmities looking considerably
more. When he considered that his father, a shepherd

before him on those same Wiltshire Downs, lived to
eighty-six, and his mother to eighty-four, and that both
were vigorous and led active lives almost to the end, he -
thought it strange that his own work should be so soon
done. For in heart and mind he was still young; he
did not want to rest yet.

Since that first meeting nine years have passed, and
as he is actually better in health to-day than he was
then, there is good reason to hope that his staying power
will equal that of his father.

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 49

I was at first struck with the singularity of Caleb’s
appearance, and later by the expression of his eyes. A
very tall, big-boned, lean, round-shouldered man, he
was uncouth almost to the verge of grotesqueness, and
walked painfully with the aid of a stick, dragging his
shrunken and shortened bad leg. His head was long
and narrow, and his high forehead, long nose, long chin,
and long, coarse, grey whiskers, worn like a beard on
his throat, produced a goat-like effect. This was height-
ened by the ears and eyes. The big ears stood out from
his head, and owing to a peculiar bend or curl in the
membrane at the top they looked at certain angles almost
pointed. The hazel eyes were wonderfully clear, but
that quality was less remarkable than the unhuman in-
telligence in them—fawn-like eyes that gazed steadily
at you as one may gaze through the window, open back
and front, of a house at the landscape beyond. This
peculiarity was a little disconcerting at first, when, after
making his acquaintance out of doors, I went in uninvited
and sat down with him at his own fireside. The busy
old wife talked of this and that, and hinted as politely
as she knew how that I was in her way. To her practical,
peasant mind there was no sense in my being there. “He
be a stranger to we, and we be strangers to he.” Caleb
was silent, and his clear eyes showed neither annoyance
nor pleasure but only their native, wild alertness, but
the caste feeling is always less strong in the hill shepherd
than in other men who are on the land; in some cases
it will vanish at a touch, and it was so in this one. A
canary in a cage hanging in the kitchen served to intro-
duce the subject of birds captive and birds free. I said
that I liked the little yellow bird, and was not vexed to

50 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

see him in a cage, since he was cage-born; but I considered
that those who caught wild birds and kept them prisoners
did not properly understand things. This happened to
be Caleb’s view. He had a curiously tender feeling about
the little wild birds, and one amusing incident of his
boyhood which he remembered came out during our talk.
He was out on the down one summer day in charge of
his father’s flock, when two boys of the village on a
ramble in the hills came and sat down on the turf by his
side. One of them had a titlark, or meadow pipit, which
he had just caught, in his hand, and there was a hot
argument as to which of the two was the lawful owner
of the poor little captive. The facts were as follows.
One of the boys having found the nest became possessed
with the desire to get the bird. His companion at once
offered to catch it for him, and together they withdrew
to a distance and sat down and waited until the bird re-
turned to sit on the eggs. Then the young birdcatcher
returned to the spot, and creeping quietly up to within
five or six feet of the nest threw his hat so that it fell
over the sitting titlark; but after having thus secured
it he refused to give it up. The dispute waxed hotter
as they sat there, and at last when it got to the point of
threats of cuffs on the ear and slaps on the face they
agreed to fight it out, the victor to have the titlark. The
bird was then put under a hat for safety on the smooth
turf a few feet away, and the boys proceeded to take
off their jackets and roll up their slirt-sleeves, after
which they faced one another, and were just about to
begin when Caleb, thrusting out his crook, turned the
hat over and away flew the titlark.

The boys, deprived of their bird and of an excuse for

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 51

a fight, would gladly have discharged their fury on Caleb,
but they durst not, seeing that his dog was lying at his
side; they could only threaten and abuse him, call him
bad names, and finally put on their coats and walk off.

That pretty little tale of a titlark was but the first of
a long succession of memories of his early years, with
half a century of shepherding life on the downs, which
came out during our talks on many autumn and winter
evenings as we sat by his kitchen fire. The earlier of
these memories were always the best to me, because
they took one back sixty years or more, to a time when
there was more wildness in the earth than now, and a
nobler wild animal life. Even more interesting were
some of the memories of his father, Isaac Bawcombe,
whose time went back to the early years of the nineteenth
century. Caleb cherished an admiration and reverence
for his father’s memory which were almost a worship,
and he loved to describe him as he appeared in his old
age, when upwards of eighty. He was erect and tall,
standing six feet two in height, well proportioned, with
a clean-shaved, florid face, clear, dark eyes, and silver-
white hair; and at this later period of his life he always
wore the dress of an old order of pensioners to which
he had been admitted—a soft, broad, white felt hat, thick
boots and brown leather leggings, and a long, grey cloth
overcoat with red collar and brass buttons.

According to Caleb, he must have been an exceedingly
fine specimen of a man, both physically and morally.
Born in 1800, he began following a flock as a boy, and
continued as shepherd on the same farm until he was
sixty, never rising to more than seven shillings a week
and nothing found, since he lived in the cottage where

52 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

he was born and which he inherited from his father.
That a man of his fine powers, a head-shepherd on a
large hill-farm, should have had no better pay than that
down to the year 1860, after nearly half a century of
work in one place, seems almost incredible. Even his
sons, as they grew up to man’s estate, advised him to
ask for an increase, but he would not. Seven shillings
a week he had always had; and that small sum, with ~
something his wife earned by making highly finished
smock-frocks, had been sufficient to keep them all in
a decent way; and his sons were now all earning their
own living. But Caleb got married, and resolved to
leave the old farm at Bishop to take a better place at a
distance from home, at Warminster, which had been
offered him. He would there have a cottage to live in,
nine shillings a week, and a sack of barley for his dog.
At that time the shepherd had to keep his own dog—
no small expense to him when his wages were no more
than six to eight shillings a week. But Caleb was his
father’s favourite son, and the old man could not endure
the thought of losing sight of him; and at last, finding
that he could not persuade him not to leave the old home,
he became angry, and told him that if he went away
to Warminster for the sake of the higher wages and
barley for the dog he would disown him! This was a
serious matter to Caleb, in spite of the fact that a shep-
herd has no money to leave to his children when he passes
away. He went nevertheless, for, though he loved and
reverenced his father, he had a young wife who pulled
the other way; and he was absent for years, and when
he returned the old man’s heart had softened, so that
he was glad to welcome him back to the old home.

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 53

Meanwhile at that humble cottage at Winterbourne
Bishop great things had happened; old Isaac was no
longer shepherding on the downs, but living very com-
fortably in his own cottage in the village. The change
came about in this way.

The downland shepherds, Caleb said, were as a rule
clever poachers; and it is really not surprising, when

‘pre

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UNLOADING SHEEP — Sy £\! “ld pes
AT THE MARKET : es

one considers the temptation to a man with a wife and
several hungry children, besides himself and a dog, to
_ feed out of about seven shillings a week. But old Baw-
combe was an exception: he would take no game, furred
or feathered, nor, if he could prevent it, allow another
to take anything from the land fed by his flock. Caleb
and his brothers, when as boys and youths they began
their shepherding, sometimes caught a rabbit, or their
dog caught and killed one without their encouragement ;

54 A: SHEPHERD'S ‘LIFE

but, however the thing came into their hands, they could
not take it home on account of their father. Now it
happened that an elderly gentleman who had the shooting
was a keen sportsman, and that in several successive
years he found a wonderful difference in the amount
of game at one spot among the hills and in all the rest of
his hill property. The only explanation the keeper could
give was that Isaac Bawcombe tended his flock on that
down where rabbits, hares, and partridges were so plenti-
ful. One autumn day the gentleman was shooting over
that down, and seeing a big man in a smock-frock stand-
ing motionless, crook in hand, regarding him, he called
out to his keeper, who was with him, “Who is that big
man?” and was told that it was Shepherd Bawcombe.
The old gentleman pulled some money out of his pocket,
and said, “Give him this half-crown, and thank him for
the good sport I’ve ‘had to-day.” But after the coin had
been given the giver still remained standing there, think-
ing, perhaps, that he had not yet sufficiently rewarded
the man; and at last, before turning away, he shouted,
“Bawcombe, that’s not all. You'll get something more
by and by.”

Isaac had not long to wait for the something more,
and it turned out not to be the hare or brace of birds he
had half expected. It happened that the sportsman was
one of the trustees of an ancient charity which provided
for six of the most deserving old men of the parish of
Bishop; now, one of the six had recently died, and on
this gentleman’s recommendation Bawcombe had been
elected to fill the vacant place. The letter from Salisbury
informing him of his election and commanding his pres-
ence in that city filled him with astonishment; for, though

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 55

he was sixty years old and the father of three sons now
out in the world, he could not yet regard himself as an
old man, for he had never known a day’s illness, nor
an ache, and was famed in all that neighbourhood for
his great physical strength and endurance. And now,
with his own cottage to live in, eight shillings a week,
and his pensioner’s garments, with certain other benefits,
and a shilling a day besides which his old master paid
him for some services at the farm-house in the village,
Isaac found himself very well off indeed, and he enjoyed
his prosperous state for twenty-six years. Then, in 1886,
his old wife fell ill and died, and no sooner was she in
her grave than he, too, began to droop; and soon, before
the year was out, he followed her, because, as the neigh-
bours said, they had always been a loving pair and one
could not ’bide without the other.

This chapter has already had its proper ending and
there was no intention of adding to it, but now for a
special reason, which I trust the reader will pardon
when he hears it, I must go on to say something about
that strange phenomenon of death succeeding death in
old married couples, one dying for no other reason than
that the other has died. For it is our instinct to hold
fast to life, and the older a man gets if he be sane the
more he becomes like a new-born child in the impulse
to grip tightly. A strange and a rare thing among people
generally (the people we know), it is nevertheless quite
common among persons of the labouring class in the
tural districts. I have sometimes marvelled at the num-
ber of such cases to be met with in the villages; but when
one comes to think about it one ceases to wonder that

56 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

it should be so. For the labourer on the land goes on
from boyhood to the end of life in the same everlasting
round, the changes from task to task, according to the
seasons, being no greater than in the case of the animals
that alter their actions and habits to suit the varying
conditions of the year. March and August and Decem-

Gen

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ber, and every month, will bring about the changes in
the atmosphere and earth and vegetation and in the ani-
mals, which have been from of old, which he knows how
to meet, and the old, familiar task, lambing-time, shear-
ing-time, root and seed crops, hoeing, haymaking, har-
vesting. It is a life of the extremest simplicity, without
all those interests outside the home and the daily task,
the innumerable distractions, common to all persons in

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 57

other classes and to the workmen in towns as well. Inci-
dentally it may be said that it is also the healthiest, that,
speaking generally, the agricultural labourer is the health-
iest and sanest man in the land, if not also the happiest,
as some believe.

It is this life of simple, unchanging actions and of
habits that are like instincts, of hard labour in sun and
wind and rain from day to day, with its weekly break
and rest, and of but few comforts and no luxuries, which
serves to bind man and wife so closely. And the longer
their life goes on together the closer and more unbreakable
the union grows. They are growing old: old friends
and companions have died or left them; their children
have married and gone away and have their own families
and affairs, so that the old folks at home are little remem-
bered, and to all others they have become of little conse-
quence in the world. But they do not know it, for they
are together, cherishing the same memories, speaking
of the same old, familiar things, and their lost friends
and companions, their absent, perhaps estranged children,
are with them still in mind as in the old days. The past
is with them more than the present, to give an undying
interest to life; for they share it, and it is only when
one goes, when the old wife gets the tea ready and goes
mechanically to the door to gaze out, knowing that her
tired man will come in no more to take his customary
place and listen to all the things she has stored up in
her mind during the day to tell him; and when the tired
labourer comes in at dusk to find no old wife waiting to
give him his tea and talk to him while he refreshes
himself, he all at once realizes his position; he finds him-
self cut off from the entire world, from all of his kind.

58 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

Where are they all? The enduring sympathy of that one
soul that was with him till now had kept him in touch
with life, had made it seem unchanged and unchangeable,
and with that soul has vanished the old, sweet illusion
as well as all ties, all common, human affection. He is
desolate, indeed, alone in a desert world, and it is not
strange that in many and many a case, even in that of
a man still strong, untouched by disease and good for
another decade or two, the loss, the awful solitude, has
proved too much for him.

Such cases; I have said, are common, but they are
not recorded, though it is possible with labour to pick
them out in the church registers; but in the churchyards
you do not find them, since the farm-labourer has only
a green mound to mark the spot where he lies. Never-
theless, he is sometimes honoured with a gravestone, and
last August I came by chance on one on which was
recorded a case like that of Isaac Bawcombe and his
life-mate.

The churchyard is in one of the prettiest and most
secluded villages in the downland country described in
this book. The church is ancient and beautiful and inter-
esting in many ways, and the churchyard, too, is one of
the most interesting I know, a beautiful green, tree-
shaded spot, with an extraordinary number of tombs and
gravestones, many of them dated in the eighteenth and
seventeenth centuries, inscribed with names of families
which have long died out.

I went on that afternoon to pass an hour in the church-
yard, and finding an old man in labourer’s clothes resting
ona tomb, I sat down and entered into conversation with
him. He was seventy-nine, he told me, and past work,

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS _ 59

and he had three shillings a week from the parish; but
he was very deaf and it fatigued me to talk to him, and
seeing the church open I went in. On previous visits
I had had a good deal of trouble to get the key, and to
find it open now was a pleasant surprise. An old woman
was there dusting the seats, and by and by, while I was
talking with her, the old labourer came stumping in with
his ponderous, iron-shod boots and without taking off his
old, rusty hat, and began shouting at the church-cleaner
about a pair of trousers he had given her to mend, which
he wanted badly. Leaving them to their arguing I went
out and began studying the inscriptions on the stones,
so hard to make out in some instances; the old man fol-
lowed and went his way; then the church-cleaner came
out to where I was standing. “A tiresome old man!”
she said. ‘“He’s that deaf he has to shout to hear himself
speak, then you’ve got to shout back—and all about his
old trousers!”

“T suppose he wants them,” I returned, “and you
promised to do them, so he has some reason for going
at you about it.”

“Oh, no, he hasn’t,” she replied. “The girl brought
them for me to mend, and I said, ‘Leave them and I'll
do them when I’ve time’—how did I know he wanted
them ina hurry? A troublesome old man!”

By and by, taking a pair of spectacles out of her pocket,
she put them on, and going down on her knees she began
industriously picking the old, brown, dead moss out of the
lettering on one side of the tomb. “I'd like to know
what it says on this stone,” she said.

“Well, you can read it for yourself, now you’ve got
your glasses on.”

60 ‘A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

“I can’t read. You see, I’m old—seventy-six years,
and when I were little we were very poor and I couldn’t
get no schooling. I’ve got these glasses to do my sewing,
and only put them on to get this stuff out so’s you could
read it. I'd like to hear you read it.”

I began to get interested in the old dame who talked
to me so freely. She was small and weak-looking, and
appeared very thin in her limp, old, faded gown; she
had a meek, patient expression on her face, and her
voice, too, like her face, expressed weariness and resigna-
tion.

“But if you have always lived here you must know
what is said on this stone?”

“No, I don’t ; nobody never read it to me, and I couldn’t
read it because I wasn’t taught to read. But I’d like to
hear you read it.”

It was a long inscription to a person named Ash,
gentleman, of this parish, who departed this life over
a century ago, and was a man of a noble and generous
disposition, good as a husband, a father, a friend, and
charitable to the poor. Under all were some lines of
verse, scarcely legible in spite of the trouble she had
taken to remove the old moss from the letters.

She listened with profound interest, then said, “I never
heard all that before; I didn’t know the name, though
I’ve known this stone since I was a child. I used to
climb on to it then. Can you read me another?”

I read her another and several more, then came to
one which she said she knew—every word of it, for this
was the grave of the sweetest, kindest woman that ever
tived. Oh, how good this dear woman had been to her
in her young married life more’n fifty years ago! If

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 61

that dear lady had only lived it would not have been so
hard for her when her trouble come!

“And what was your trouble?”

“It was the loss of my poor man. He was such a
good man, a thatcher; and he fell from a rick and injured
his spine, and he died, poor fellow, and left me with our
five little children.” Then, having told me her own
tragedy, to my surprise she brightened up and begged
me to read other inscriptions to her.

I went on reading, and presently she said, “‘No, that’s
wrong. ‘There wasn’t ever a Lampard in this parish.
That I know.”

“You don’t know! There certainly was a Lampard
or it would not be stated here, cut in deep letters on
this stone.”

“No, there wasn’t a Lampard. I’ve never known such
a name and I’ve lived here all my life.”

“But there were people living here before you came
on the scene. He died a long time ago, this Lampard—
in 1714, it says. And you are only seventy-six, you tell
me; that is to say, you were born in 1835, and that would
be one hundred and twenty-one years after he died.”

“That’s a long time! It must be very old, this stone.
And the church too. I’ve heard say it was once a Roman
Catholic church. Is that true?”

“Why, of course, it’s true—all the old churches were,
and we were a!l of that faith until a King of England
had a quarrel with the Pope and determined he would
be Pope himself as well as king in his own country. So
he turned all the priests and monks out, and took their
property and churches and had his own men put in. That
was Henry VIII.”

62 ‘A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

“T’ve heard something about that king and his wives.
But about Lampard, it do seem strange I’ve never heard
that name before.”

“Not strange at all; it was a common name in this
part of Wiltshire in former days; you find it in dozens
of churchyards, but you'll find very few Lampards living
in the villages. Why, I could tell you a dozen or twenty
surnames, some queer, funny names, that were common
in these parts not more than a century ago which seem
to have quite died out.”

“T should like to hear some of them if you'll tell me.”

“Tet me think a moment: there was Thorr, Pizzie,
Gee, Every, Pottle, Kiddle, Toomer, Shergold, and i

Here she interrupted to say that she knew three of
the names I had mentioned. Then, pointing to a small,
upright gravestone about twenty feet away, she added,
“And there’s one.”

“Very well,” I said, “but don’t keep putting me out—
I’ve got more names in my mind to tell you. Maid-
ment, Marchmont, Velvin, Burpitt, Winzur, Rideout,
Cullurne.”

Of these she only knew one—Rideout.

Then I went over to the stone she had pointed to and
read the inscription to John Toomer and his wife Re-
becca. She died first, in March, 1877, aged 72; he in
July the same year, aged 75.

“You knew them, I suppose?”

“Yes, they belonged here, both of them.”

“Tell me about them.”

“There’s nothing to tell: he was only a labourer and
worked on the same farm all his life.”

“Who put a stone over them—their children?”

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 63

“No, they’re all poor and live away. I think it was
a lady who lived here; she’d been good to them, and
she came and stood here when they put old John in the
ground,”

“But I want to hear more.”

“There’s no more, I’ve said; he was a labourer, and
after she died he died.”

“Yes? go on.”

“How can I go on? There’s no more. I knew them
so well; they lived in the little, thatched cottage over
there, where the Millards live now.”

“Did they fall ill at the same time?”

“Oh, no, he was as well as could be, still at work, till
she died, then he went on in a strange way. He would
come in of an evening and call his wife. ‘Mother!
Mother, where are you?’ you’d hear him call, ‘Mother,
be you upstairs? Mother, ain’t you coming down for a
bit of bread and cheese before you go to bed?’ And
then in a little while he just died.”

“And you said there was nothing to tell!”

“No, there wasn’t anything. He was just one of us,
a labourer on the farm.”

I then gave her something, and to my surprise after
taking it she made me an elaborate curtsy. It rather
upset me, for I had thought we had got on very well
together and were quite free and easy in our talk, very
much on a level. But she was not done with me yet.
She followed to the gate, and holding out her open hand
with that small gift in it, she said in a pathetic voice, “Did
you think, sir, I was expecting this? I had no such
thought and didn’t want it.”

And I had no thought of saying or writing a word

64 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

about her. But since that day she has haunted me—
she and her old John Toomer, and it has just now
occurred to me that by putting her in my book I may
be able to get her out of my mind.

CHAPTER V

Early Memories

A child shepherd—Isaac and his children—Shepherding
in boyhood — Two notable sheep-dogs — Jack, the
adder-killer—Sitting on an adder—Rough and the
drovers—The Salisbury coach—A sheep-dog suck-
ling a lamb

Caes’s shepherding began in childhood; at all events
he had had his first experience of it at that time. Many
an old shepherd, whose father was shepherd before him,
has told me that he began to go with the flock very early
in life, when he was no more than ten to twelve years
of age. Caleb remembered being put in charge of his
father’s flock at the tender age of six. It was a new and
wonderful experience, and made so vivid and lasting
65

66 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

an impression on his mind that now, when he is past
eighty, he speaks of it very feelingly as of something
which happened yesterday.

It was harvesting time, and Isaac, who was a good
reaper, was wanted in the field, but he could find no
one, not even a boy, to take charge of his flock in the
meantime, and so to be able to reap and keep an eye on
the flock at the same time he brought his sheep down
to the part of the down adjoining the field. It was on
his “liberty,” or that part of the down where he was
entitled to have his flock. He then took his very small
boy, Caleb, and placing him with the sheep told him they
were now in his charge; that he was not to lose sight of
them, and at the same time not to run about among the
furze-bushes for fear of treading on an adder. By and
by the sheep began straying off among the furze-bushes,
and no sooner would they disappear from sight than he
imagined they were lost for ever, or would be unless
he quickly found them, and to find them he had to run
about among the bushes with the terror of adders in
his mind, and the two troubles together kept him crying
with misery all the time. Then, at intervals, Isaac would
leave his reaping and come to see how he was getting
on, and the tears would vanish from his eyes, and he
would feel very brave again, and to his father’s question
he would reply that he was getting on very well.

Finally his father came and took him to the field, to
his great relief; but he did not carry him in his arms;
he strode along at his usual pace and let the little fellow
run after him, stumbling and falling and picking himself
up again and running on. And by and by one of the
women in the field cried out, “Be you not ashamed, Isaac,

a

EARLY MEMORIES 67

to go that pace and not bide for the little child! I do
b’lieve he’s no more’n seven year—poor mite!”

“No more’n six,” answered Isaac proudly, with a laugh.

But though not soft or tender with his children he
was very fond of them, and when he came home early
in the evening he would get them round him and talk
to them, and sing old songs and ballads he had learnt in
his young years—“Down in the Village,” “The Days of
Queen Elizabeth,” “The Blacksmith,” “The Gown of
Green,” “The Dawning of the Day,” and many others,
which Caleb in the end got by heart and used to sing,
too, when he was grown up.

Caleb was about nine when he began to help regularly
with the flock; that was in the summertime, when the
flock was put every day on the down and when Isaac’s
services were required for the hay-making and later for
harvesting and other work. His best memories of this
period relate to his mother and to two sheep-dogs, Jack
at first and afterwards Rough, both animals of original
character. Jack was a great favourite of his master,
who considered him a “tarrable good dog.” He was
rather short-haired, like the old Welsh sheep-dog once
common in Wiltshire, but entirely black instead of the
usual colour—blue with a sprinkling of black spots. This
dog had an intense hatred of adders and never failed to
kill every one he discovered. At the same time he knew
that they were dangerous enemies to tackle, and on catch-
ing sight of one his hair would instantly bristle up, and
he would stand as if paralysed for some moments, glaring
at it and gnashing his teeth, then springing like a cat
upon it he would seize it in his mouth, only to hurl it
from him to a distance. This action he would repeat

68 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

until the adder was dead, and Isaac would then put it
under a furze-bush to take it home and hang it on a
certain gate. The farmer, too, like the dog, hated adders,
and paid his shepherd sixpence for every one his dog
killed. :
One day Caleb, with one of his brothers, was out with
the flock, amusing themselves in their usual way on
the turf with nine morris-men and the shepherd’s puzzle,
when all at once their mother appeared unexpectedly on
the scene. It was her custom, when the boys were sent
out with the flock, to make expeditions to the down just
to see what they were up to; and hiding her approach
by keeping to a hedge-side or by means of the furze-
bushes, she would sometimes come upon them with dis-
concerting suddenness. On this occasion just where the
boys had been playing there was a low, stout furze-bush,
so dense and flat-topped that one could use it as a seat,
and his mother taking off and folding her shawl placed
it on the bush, and sat down on it to rest herself after
her long walk. “I can see her now,” said Caleb, “sitting
on that furze-bush, in her smock and leggings, with a
big hat like a man’s on her head—for that’s how she
dressed.” But in a few moments she jumped up, crying
out that she felt a snake under her, and snatched off the
shawl, and there, sure enough, out of the middle of the
flat bush-top appeared the head of an adder, flicking
out its tongue. The dog, too, saw it, dashed at the
bush, forcing his muzzle and head into the middle of it,
seized the serpent by its body and plucked it out and
threw it from him, only to follow it up and kill it in the
usual way.

Rough was a large, shaggy, grey-blue bobtail bitch

EARLY MEMORIES 69

with a white collar. She was a clever, good all-round
dog, but had originally been trained for the road, and
one of the shepherd’s stories about her relates to her
intelligence in her own special line—the driving of sheep.

One day he and his smaller brother were in charge
of the flock on the down, and were on the side where it
dips down to the turnpike-road about a mile and a half

SHEPHERD AND FLOCK

from the village, when a large flock, driven by two men
and two dogs, came by. They were going to the Britford
-sheep-fair and were behind time; Isaac had started at
daylight that morning with sheep for the same fair, and
that was the reason of the boys being with the flock.
As the flock on the down was feeding quietly the boys
determined to go to the road to watch the sheep and men
pass, and arriving at the roadside they saw that the dogs
were too tired to work and the men were getting on
with great difficulty. One of them, looking intently at

70 ‘A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

Rough, asked if she would work. “Oh, yes, she’ll work,”
said the boy proudly, and calling Rough he pointed to
the flock moving very slowly along the road and over
the turf on either side of it. Rough knew what was
wanted; she had been looking on and had taken the
situation in with her professional eye; away she dashed,
and running up and down, first on one side then on the
other, quickly put the whole flock, numbering 800 into
the road and gave them a-good start.

“Why, she be a road dog!” exclaimed the drover de-
lightedly. “She’s better for me on the road than for
you on the down; I'll buy her of you.”

“No, I mustn’t sell her,’ said Caleb.

“Look here, boy,” said the other, “I'll give ’ee a
sovran and this young dog, an’ he’ll be a good one with
a little more training.”

“No, I mustn’t,” said Caleb, distressed at the other’s
persistence.

“Well, will you come a little way on the road with
us?” asked the drover.

This the boys agreed to and went on for about a quar-
ter of a mile, when all at once the Salisbury coach
appeared on the road, coming to meet them. This new
trouble was pointed out to Rough, and at once when
her little master had given the order she dashed barking
into the midst of the mass of sheep and drove them
furiously to the side from end to end of the extended
flock, making a clear passage for the coach, which was
not delayed a minute. And no sooner was the coach gone
than the sheep were put back into the road.

Then the drover pulled out his sovereign once more
and tried to make the boy take it.

ee a _

EARLY MEMORIES 71

“T mustn’t,” he repeated, almost in tears. “What
would father say?”

“Say! He won’t say nothing. He'll think you’ve
done well.”

But Caleb thought that perhaps his father would say
something, and when he remembered certain whippings
he had experienced in the past he had an uncomfortable
sensation about his back. ‘“‘No, I mustn’t,” was all he
could say, and then the drovers with a laugh went on
with their sheep.

When Isaac came home and the adventure was told
to him he laughed and said that he meant to sell Rough
some day. He used to say this occasionally to tease his
wife because of the dog’s intense devotion to her; and
she, being without a sense of humour and half thinking
that he meant it, would get up out of her seat and sol-
emnly declare that if he ever sold Rough she would never
again go out to the down to see what the boys were
up to.

One day she visited the boys when they had the flock
near the turnpike, and seating herself on the turf a few
yards from the road got out her work and began sewing.
Presently they spied a big, singular-looking man coming
at a swinging pace along the road. He was in shirt-
sleeves, barefooted, and wore a straw hat without a rim.
Rough eyed the strange being’s approach with suspicion,
and going to her mistress placed herself at her side. The
man came up and sat down at a distance of three or four
yards from the group, and Rough, looking dangerous,
started up and put her forepaws on her mistress’s lap
and began uttering a low growl.

“Will that dog bite, missus?” said the man.

72 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

“Maybe he will,” said she. “I won’t answer for he
if you come any nearer.”

The two boys had been occupied cutting a faggot from
a furze-bush with a bill-hook, and now held a whispered
consultation as to what they would do if the man tried
to. “hurt mother,” and agreed that as soon as Rough
had got her teeth in his leg they would attack him about
the head with the bill-hook. They were not required to
go into action; the stranger could not long endure
Rough’s savage aspect, and very soon he got up and
resumed his travels.

The shepherd remembered another curious incident in
Rough’s career. At one time when she had a litter of
pups at home she was yet compelled to be a great part
of the day with the flock of ewes as they could not do
without her. The boys just then were bringing up a
motherless lamb by hand and they would put it with the
sheep, and to feed it during the day were obliged to catch
a ewe with milk. The lamb trotted at Caleb’s heels like
a dog, and one day when it was hungry and crying to
be fed, when Rough happened to be sitting on her
haunches close by, it occurred to him that Rough’s milk
might serve as well as a sheep’s. The lamb was put to
her and took very kindly to its canine foster-mother,
wriggling its tail and pushing vigorously with its nose.
Rough submitted patiently to the trial, and the result was
that the lamb adopted the sheep-dog as its mother and
sucked her milk several times every day, to the great
admiration of all who witnessed it.

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CHAPTER VI

Shepherd Isaac Bawcombe

A noble shepherd—A fighting village blacksmith—Old
Joe the collier—A story of his strength—Donkeys
poisoned by yew—The shepherd without his sheep
—How the shepherd killed a deer

To me the most interesting of Caleb’s old memories were
those relating to his father, partly on account of the
man’s fine character, and partly because they went so
far back, beginning in the early years of the last century.

Altogether he must have been a very fine specimen of
a man, both physically and morally. In Caleb’s mind
he was undoubtedly the first among men morally, but
there were two other men supposed to be his equals in
bodily strength, one a native of the village, the other a
periodical visitor. The first was Jarvis the blacksmith,
a man of an immense chest and big arms, one of Isaac’s
greatest friends, and very good-tempered except when

73

74 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

in his cups, for he did occasionally get drunk and then
he quarrelled with anyone and everyone.

One afternoon he had made himself quite tipsy at
the inn, and when going home, swaying about and
walking all over that road, he all at once caught sight of
the big shepherd coming soberly on behind. No sooner
did he see him than it occurred to his wild and muddled
mind that he had a quarrel with this very man, Shepherd
Isaac, a quarrel of so pressing a nature that there was
nothing to do but to fight it out there and then. He
planted himself before the shepherd and challenged him
to fight. Isaac smiled and said nothing.

“Tll fight thee about this,” he repeated, and began
tugging at his coat, and after getting it off again made
up to Isaac, who still smiled and said no word. Then
he pulled his waistcoat off, and finally his shirt, and with
nothing but his boots and breeches on once more squared
up to Isaac and threw himself into his best fighting atti-
tude.

“T doan’t want to fight thee,” said Isaac at length, “but
I be thinking ’twould be best to take thee home.” And
suddenly dashing in he seized Jarvis round the waist
with one arm, grasped him around the legs with the
other, and flung the big man across his shoulder, and
carried him off, struggling and shouting, to his cottage.
There at the door, pale and distressed, stood the poor
wife waiting for her lord, when Isaac arrived, and going
straight in dropped the smith down on his own floor,
and with the remark, “Here be your man,” walked off to
his cottage and his tea.

The other powerful man was Old Joe the collier, who
flourished and was known in every village in the Salis-

SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 75

bury Plain district during the first thirty-five years of
the last century. I first heard of this once famous man
from Caleb, whose boyish imagination had been affected
by his gigantic figure, mighty voice, and his wandering
life over all that wide world of Salisbury Plain. After-
wards when I became acquainted with a good many old
men, aged from 75 to 90 and upwards, I found that Old
Joe’s memory is still green in a good many villages of the

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fMenr ROLLESTONPE on SALISBURY PLAIN

district, from the upper waters of the Avon to the borders
of Dorset. But it is only these ancients who knew him
that keep it green; by and by when they are gone Old
Joe and his neddies will be remembered no more.

In those days—down to about 1840—it was customary
to burn peat in the cottages, the first cost of which was
about four and sixpence the wagon-load—as much as I
should require to keep me warm for a month in winter;
but the cost of its conveyance to the villages of the Plain
was about five to six shillings per load, as it came from
a considerable distance, mostly from the New Forest.
How the labourers at that time, when they were paid

76 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

seven or eight shillings a week, could afford to buy fuel
at such prices to bake their rye bread and to keep the
frost out of their bones is a marvel to us. Isaac was a
good deal better off than most of the villagers in this
respect, as his master—for he never had but one—allowed
him the use of a wagon and the driver’s services for the
conveyance of one load of peat each year. The wagon-
load of peat and another of faggots lasted him the year
with the furze obtained from his “liberty” on the down.
Coal at that time was only used by the blacksmiths in the
villages, and was conveyed in sacks on ponies or donkeys,
and of those who were engaged in this business the best
known was Old Joe. He appeared periodically in the
villages with his eight donkeys, or neddies as he called
them, with jingling bells on their headstalls and their
burdens of two sacks of small coal on each. In stature
he was a giant of about six feet three, very broad-chested,
and invariably wore a broad-brimmed hat, a slate-coloured
smock-frock, and blue worsted stockings to his knees.
He walked behind the donkeys, a very long staff in his
hand, shouting at them from time to time, and occasionally
swinging his long staff and bringing it down on the back
of a donkey who was not keeping up the pace. In this
way he wandered from village to village from end to
end of the Plain, getting rid of his small coal and load-
ing his animals with scrap iron which the blacksmiths
would keep for him, and as he continued his rounds for
nearly forty years he was a familiar figure to every
inhabitant throughout the district.

There are some stories still told of his great strength,
one of which is worth giving. He wasa man of iron con-
stitution and gave himself a hard life, and he was hard

a a

SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 77

on his neddies, but he had to feed them well, and this
he often contrived to do at some one else’s expense. One
night at a village on the Wylye it was discovered that he
had put his eight donkeys in a meadow in which the grass
was just ripe for mowing. The enraged farmer took
them to the village pound and locked them up, but in the
morning the donkeys and Joe with them had vanished
and the whole village wondered how he had done it. The
stone wall of the pound was four feet and a half high
and the iron gate was locked, yet he had lifted the don-
keys up and put them over and had loaded them and gone
before anyone was up.

Once Joe met with a very great misfortune. He
arrived late at a village, and finding there was good feed
in the churchyard and that everybody was in bed, he put
his donkeys in and stretched himself out among the grave-
stones to sleep. He had no nerves and no imagination;
and was tired, and slept very soundly until it was light
and time to put his neddies out before any person came
by and discovered that he had been making free with the
rector’s grass. Glancing round he could see no donkeys,
and only when he stood up he found they had not made
their escape but were there all about him, lying among
the gravestones, stone dead every one! He had for-
gotten that a churchyard was a dangerous place to put
hungry animals in. They had browsed on the luxuriant
yew that grew there, and this was the result.

In time he recovered from his loss and replaced his
dead neddies with others, and continued for many years
longer on his rounds.

To return to Isaac Bawcombe. He was born, we have
seen, in 1800, and began following a flock as a boy and

78 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

continued as shepherd on the same farm for a period
of fifty-five years. The care of sheep was the one all-
absorbing occupation of his life, and how much it was to
him appears in this anecdote of his state of mind when
he was deprived of it for a time. The flock was sold and
Isaac was left without sheep, and with little to do except
to wait from Michaelmas to Candlemas, when there would
be sheep again at the farm. It was a long time to Isaac,
and he found his enforced holiday so tedious that he
made himself a nuisance to his wife in the house. Forty
times a day he would throw off his hat and sit down,
resolved to be happy at his own fireside, but after a few
minutes the desire to be up and doing would return, and
up he would get and out he would go again. One dark
cloudy evening a man from the farm put his head in at
the door. “Isaac,” he said, “There be sheep for ’ee up
’t the farm—two hundred ewes and a hundred more to
come in dree days. Master, he sent I to say you be
wanted.”” And away the man went.

Isaac jumped up and hurried forth without taking his
crook from the corner and actually without putting on
his hat! His wife called out after him, and getting no
response sent the boy with his hat to overtake him. But
the little fellow soon returned with the hat—he could not
overtake his father!

He was away three or four hours at the farm, then
returned, his hair very wet, his face beaming, and sat
down with a great sigh of pleasure. “Two hundred
ewes,” he said, “and a hundred more to come—what d’you
think of that?”

“Well, Isaac,” said she, “I hope thee’ll be happy now
and let I alone.”

SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 79

After all that had been told to me about the elder
Bawcombe’s life and character, it came somewhat as a
shock to learn that at one period during his early man-
hood he had indulged in one form of poaching—a sport
which had a marvellous fascination for the people of
England in former times, but was pretty well extinguished
during the first quarter of the last century. Deer he had

HURDLE PITCHING

taken; and the whole tale of the deer-stealing, which was
a common offence in that part of Wiltshire down to about
1834, sounds strange at the present day.

Large herds of deer were kept at that time at an estate
a few miles from Winterbourne Bishop, and it often
happened that many of the animals broke bounds and
roamed singly and in small bands over the hills. When
deer were observed in the open, certain of the villagers
would settle on some plan of action; watchers would be
sent out not only to keep an eye on the deer but on the

80 [A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

keepers too. Much depended on the state of the weather
and the moon, as some light was necessary; then, when
the conditions were favourable and the keepers had been
watched to their cottages, the gang would go out fora
night’s hunting. But it was a dangerous sport, as the
keepers also knew that deer were out of bounds, and
they would form some counter-plan, and one peculiarly
nasty plan they had was to go out about three of four
o'clock in the morning and secrete themselves somewhere
close to the village to intercept the poachers on their
return.

Bawcombe, who never in his life associated with the
village idlers and frequenters of the ale-house, had no
connexion with these men. His expeditions were made
alone on some dark, unpromising night, when the regular
poachers were in bed and asleep. He would steal away
after bedtime, or would go out ostensibly to look after the
sheep, and, if fortunate, would return in the small hours
with a deer on his back. Then, helped by his mother,
with whom he lived (for this was when he was a young
unmarried man, about 1820), he would quickly skin and
cut up the carcass, stow the meat away in some secret
place, and bury the head, hide, and offal deep in the earth;
and when morning came it would find Isaac out following
his flock as usual, with no trace of guilt or fatigue in his
rosy cheeks and clear, honest eyes.

This was a very astonishing story to hear from Caleb,
but to suspect him of inventing or of exaggerating was
impossible to anyone who knew him. And we have seen
that Isaac Bawcombe was an exceptional man—physically
a kind of Alexander Selkirk of the Wiltshire Downs.

SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 81

And he, moreover, had a dog to help him—one as superior
in speed and strength to the ordinary sheep-dog as he him-
self was to the ruck of his fellow-men. It was only after
much questioning on my part that Caleb brought himself
to tell me of these ancient adventures, and finally to give
a detailed account of how his father came to take his
first deer. It was in the depth of winter—bitterly cold,
with a strong north wind blowing on the snow-covered
downs—when one evening Isaac caught sight of two deer
out on his sheep-walk. In that part of Wiltshire there is
a famous monument of antiquity, a vast mound-like wall,
with a deep depression or fosse running at its side. Now
it happened that on the highest part of the down, where
the wall or mound was most exposed to the blast, the snow
had been blown clean off the top, and the deer were feed-
ing here on the short turf, keeping to the ridge, so that,
outlined against the sky, they had become visible to Isaac
at a great distance.

He saw and pondered. These deer, just now, while
out of bonds, were no man’s property, and it would be no
sin to kill and eat one—if he could catch it!—and it was
a season of bitter want. For many many days he had
eaten his barley bread, and on some days barley-flour
dumplings, and had been content with this poor fare; but
now the sight of these animals made him crave for meat
with an intolerable craving, and he determined to do some-
thing to satisfy it.

He went home and had his poor supper, and when it
was dark set forth again with his dog. He found the
deer still feeding on the mound. Stealing softly along
among the furze-bushes, he got the black line of the

82 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

mound against the starry sky, and by and by, as he moved
along, the black figures of the deer, with their heads down,
came into view. He then doubled back and, proceeding
some distance, got down into the fosse and stole forward
to them again under the wall. His idea was that on taking
alarm they would immediately make for the forest which
was their home, and would probably pass near him. They
did not hear him until he was within sixty yards, and
then bounded down from the wall, over the dyke, and
away, but in almost opposite directions—one alone mak-
ing for the forest; and on this one the dog was set. Out
he shot like an arrow from the bow, and after him ran
Isaac “as he had never runned afore in all his life”. For
a short space deer and dog in hot pursuit were visible on
the snow, then the darkness swallowed them up as they
rushed down the slope; but in less than half a minute
a sound came back to Isaac, flying, too, down the incline
—the long, wailing cry of a deer in distress. The dog had
seized his quarry by one of the front legs, a little above the
hoof, and held it fast, and they were struggling on the
snow when Isaac came up and flung himself upon his
victim, then thrust his knife through its windpipe “to
stop its noise”. Having killed it, he threw it on his back
and went home, not by the turnpike, nor by any road or
path, but over fields and through copses until he got to
the back of his mother’s cottage. There was no door on
that side, but there was a window, and when he had
rapped at it and his mother opened it, without speaking a
word he thrust the dead deer through, then made his way
round to the front.

That was how he killed his first deer. How the others
were taken I do not know; I wish I did, since this one

SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 83

exploit of a Wiltshire shepherd has more interest for me
than I find in fifty narratives of elephants slaughtered
wholesale with explosive bullets, written for the delight
and astonishment of the reading public by our most
glorious Nimrods.

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CHAPTER VII
The Deer-Stealers

Deer-stealing on Salisbury Plain—The head-keeper Har-
butt—Strange story of a baby—Found as a surname
—John Barter, the village carpenter— How the
keeper was fooled—A poaching attack planned—
The fight — Head-keeper and carpenter — The car-
penter hides his son—The arrest—Barter’s sons for-
sake the village

THERE were other memories of deer-taking handed down
to Caleb by his parents, and the one best worth preserving
relates to the head-keeper of the preserves, or chase, and
to a great fight in which he was engaged with two brothers
of the girl who was afterwards to be Isaac’s wife.
Here it may be necessary to explain that formerly the
owner of Cranbourne Chase, at that time Lord Rivers,
claimed the deer and the right to preserve and hunt over
a considerable extent of country outside of his own lands.
84

THE DEER-STEALERS 85

On the Wiltshire side these rights extended from Cran-
bourne Chase over the South Wiltshire Downs to Salis-
bury, and the whole territory, about thirty miles broad,
was divided into beats or walks, six or eight in number,
each beat provided with a keeper’s lodge. This state of
things continued to the year 1834, when the chase was
“disfranchised” by Act of Parliament.

The incident I am going to relate occurred about 1815
or perhaps two or three years later. The border of one
of the deer walks was at a spot known as Three Downs
Place, two miles and a half from Winterbourne Bishop.
Here in a hollow of the downs there was an extensive
wood, and just within the wood a large stone house, said
to be centuries old but long pulled down, called Rollston
House, in which the head-keeper lived with two under-
keepers. He had a wife but no children, and was a
middle-aged, thick-set, very dark man, powerful and
vigilant, a “tarrable” hater and persecutor of poachers,
feared and hated by them in turn, and his name was
Harbutt.

It happened that one morning, when he had unbarred
the front door to go out, he found a great difficulty in
opening it, caused by a heavy object having been fastened
to the door-handle. It proved to be a basket or box, in
which a well-nourished, nice-looking boy baby was sleep-
ing, well wrapped up and covered with a cloth. On the
cloth a scrap of paper was pinned with the following lines
written on it:

Take me in and treat me well,
For in this house my father dwell.

Harbutt read the lines and didn’t even smile at the gram-
mar; on the contrary, he appeared very much upset, and

86 A. SHEPHERD'S. LIFE

was still standing holding the paper, staring stupidly at
it, when his wife came on the scene. “What be this?”
she exclaimed, and looked first at the paper, then at him,
then at the rosy child fast asleep in its cradle; and in-
stantly, with a great cry, she fell on it and snatched it
up in her arms, and holding it clasped to her bosom, began
lavishing caresses and endearing expressions on it, tears

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of rapture in her eyes! Not one word of inquiry or
bitter, jealous reproach—all that part of her was swal-
lowed up and annihilated in the joy of a woman who had
been denied a child of her own to love and nourish and
worship. And now one had come to her and it mattered
little how. Two or three days later the infant was
baptized at the village church with the quaint name of
Moses Found.

Caleb was a little surprised at my thinking it a laugh-
able name. It was to his mind a singularly appropriate
one; he assured me it was not the only case he knew of

THE DEER-STEALERS 87

in which the surname Found had been bestowed on a child
of unknown parentage, and he told me the story of one of
the Founds who had gone to Salisbury as a boy and
worked and saved and eventually become quite a prosper-
ous and important person. There was really nothing
funny in it.

The story of Moses Found had been told him by his
old mother ; she, he remarked significantly, had good cause
to remember it. She was herself a native of the village,
born two or three years later than the mysterious Moses;
her father, John Barter by name, was a carpenter and
lived in an old, thatched house which still exists and is
very familiar to me. He had five sons; then, after an
interval of some years, a daughter was born, who in due
time was to be Isaac’s wife. When she was a little girl
her brothers were all grown up or on the verge of man-
hood, and Moses, too, was a young man—“the spit of his
father,” people said, meaning the head-keeper—and he
was now one of Harbutt’s under-keepers.

About this time some of the more ardent spirits in the
village, not satisfied with an occasional hunt when a deer
broke out and roamed over the downs, took to poaching
them in the woods. One night, a hunt having been ar-
ranged, one of the most daring of the men secreted him-
self close to the keeper’s house, and having watched the
keepers go in and the light put out, he actually succeeded
in fastening up the doors from the outside with screws
and pieces of wood without creating an alarm. He then
met his confederates at an agreed spot and the hunting
began, during which one deer was chased to the house and
actually pulled down and killed on the lawn.

Meanwhile the inmates were in a state of great excite-

88 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

ment; the under-keepers feared that a force it would be
dangerous to oppose had taken possession of the woods,
while Harbutt raved and roared like a maddened wild
beast in a cage, and put forth all his strength to pull the
doors open. Finally he smashed a window and leaped out,
gun in hand, and calling the others to follow rushed into
the wood. But he was too late; the hunt was over and
the poachers had made good their escape, taking the
carcasses of two or three deer they had succeeded in
killing.

The keeper was not to be fooled in the same way a
second time, and before very long he had his revenge.
A fresh raid was planned, and on this occasion two of
the five brothers were in it, and there were four more,
the blacksmith of Winterbourne Bishop, their best man,
two famous shearers, father and son, from a neighbouring
village, and a young farm labourer.

They knew very well that with the head-keeper in his
present frame of mind it was a risky affair, and they
made a solemn compact that if caught they would stand
by one another to the end. And caught they were, and
on this occasion the keepers were four.

At the very beginning the blacksmith, their ablest man
and virtual leader, was knocked down senseless with a
blow on his head with the butt end of a gun. Immediately
on seeing this the two famous shearers took to their heels
and the young labourer followed their example. The
brothers were left but refused to be taken, although
Harbutt roared at them in his bull’s voice that he would
shoot them unless they surrendered. They made light
of his threats and fought against the four, and eventually
were separated. By and by the younger of the two was

THE DEER-STEALERS 89

driven into a brambly thicket where his opponents im-
agined that it would be impossible for him to escape. But
he was a youth of indomitable spirit, strong and agile as
a wild cat; and returning blow for blow he succeeded in
tearing himself from them, then after a running fight
through the darkest part of the wood for a distance of
two or three hundred yards they at length lost him or
gave him up and went back to assist Harbutt and Moses
against the other man. Left to himself he got out of the
wood and made his way back to the village. It was long
past midnight when he turned up at his father’s cottage, a
pitiable object covered with mud and blood, hatless, his
clothes torn to shreds, his face and whole body covered
with bruises and bleeding wounds.

The old man was in a great state of distress about his
other son, and early in the morning went to examine the
ground where the fight had been. It was only too easily
found; the sod was trampled down and branches broken
as though a score of men had been engaged. Then he
found his eldest son’s cap, and a little farther away a
sleeve of his coat; shreds and rags were numerous on the
bramble bushes, and by and by he came on a pool of
blood. “They’ve kill ’n!” he cried in despair, “they’ve
killed my poor boy!” and straight to Rollston House he
went to inquire, and was met by Harbutt himself, who
came out limping, one boot on, the other foot bound up
with rags, one arm in a sling and a cloth tied round his
head. He was told that his son was alive and safe indoors
and that he would be taken to Salisbury later in the day.
“His clothes be all torn to pieces,” added the keeper.
“You can just go home at once and git him others before
the constable comes to take him.”

90 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

“You've tored them to pieces yourself and you can
git him others,” retorted the old man in a rage.

“Very well,” said the keeper. “But bide a moment—
I’ve something more to say to you. When your son
comes out of jail in a year or so you tell him from me
that if he’ll just step up this way I’ll give him five shillings
and as much beer as he likes to drink. I never see’d a
better fighter !”

It was a great compliment to his son, but the old man
was troubled in his mind. “What dost mean, keeper, by
a year or so?” he asked.

“When I said that,” returned the other with a grin,
“T was just thinking what ’twould be he deserves to git.”

“And you'd agot your deserts, by God,” cried the angry
father, “if that boy of mine hadn’t a-been left alone to
fight ye!”

Harbutt regarded him with a smile of gratified malice.
“You can go home now,” he said. “If you’d see your son
you'll find ’n in Salisbury jail. Maybe you'll be wanting
new locks on your doors; you can git they in Salisbury
too—you'’ve no blacksmith in your village now. No, your
boy weren’t alone and you know that damned well.”

““T know naught about that,” he returned, and started
to walk home with a heavy heart. Until now he had been
clinging to the hope that the other son had not been
identified in the dark wood. And now what could he do
to save one of the two from hateful imprisonment? The
boy was not in a fit condition to make his escape; he could
hardly get across the room and could not sit or lie down
without groaning. He could only try to hide him in the
cottage and pray that they would not discover him. The
cottage was in the middle of the village and had but little

THE DEER-STEALERS 91

ground to it, but there was a small, boarded-up cavity or
cell at one end of an attic, and it might be possible to
save him by putting him in there. Here, then, in a bed
placed for him on the floor, his bruised son was obliged
to lie, in the close, dark hole, for some days.

One day, about a week later, when he was recovering
from his hurts, he crawled out of his box and climbed
down the narrow stairs to the ground floor to see the light
and breathe a better air for a short time, and while down
he was tempted to take a peep at the street through the
small, latticed window. But he quickly withdrew his
head and by and by said to his father, “I’m feared Moses
has seen me. Just now when I was at the window he came
by and looked up and see’d me with my head all tied up,
and I’m feared he knew ’twas I.”

After that they could only wait in fear and trembling,
and on the next day quite early there came a loud rap at
the door, and on itstbeing opened by the old man the con-
stable and two keepers appeared standing before him.

“T’ve come to take your son,” said the constable.

The old man stepped back without a word and took
down his gun from its place on the wall, then spoke: “If
you’ve got a search-warrant you may come in; if you
haven’t got’n I'll blow the brains out of the first man
that puts a foot inside my door”.

They hesitated a few moments then silently withdrew.
After consulting together the constable went off to the
nearest magistrate, leaving the two keepers to keep watch
on the house: Moses Found was one of them. Later in
the day the constable returned armed with a warrant and
was thereupon admitted, with the result that the poor
youth was soon discovered in his hiding-place and carried

92 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

off. And that was the last he saw of his home, his
young sister crying bitterly and his old father white and
trembling with grief and impotent rage.

A month or two later the two brothers were tried and
sentenced each to six months’ imprisonment. They never
came home. On their release they went to Woolwich,
where men were wanted and the pay was good. And by
and by the accounts they sent home induced first one then
the other brother to go and join them, and the poor old
father, who had been very proud of his five sons, was left
alone with his young daughter—Isaac’s destined wife.

CHAPTER VIII

Shepherds and Poaching

General remarks on poaching—Farmer, shepherd, and
dog—A sheep-dog that would not hunt—Taking a
partridge from a hawk—Old Gaarge and Young
Gaarge—Partridge-poaching—The shepherd robbed
of his rabbits—Wisdom of Shepherd Gathergood—
Hare-trapping on the down — Hare-taking with a
crook

WueEn Caleb was at length free from his father’s tutelage,
and as an under-shepherd practically independent, he did
not follow Isaac’s strict example with regard to wild
animals, good for the pot, which came by chance in his
way ; he even allowed himself to go a little out of his way
on occasion to get them.

We know that about this matter the law of the land
does not square with the moral law as it is written in the
heart of the peasant. A wounded partridge or other bird
which he finds in his walks abroad or which comes by

93

94 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

chance to him is his by a natural right, and he will take
and eat or dispose of it without scruple. With rabbits
he is very free—he doesn’t wait to find a distressed one
with a stoat on its track—stoats are not sufficiently abun-
dant; and a hare, too, may be picked up at any moment;
only in this case he must be very sure that no one is
looking. Knowing the law, and being perhaps a respect-
able, religious person, he is anxious to abstain from all
appearance of evil. This taking a hare or rabbit or
wounded partridge is in his mind a very different thing
from systematic poaching; but he is aware that to the
classes above him it is not so—the law has made them one.
It is a hard, arbitrary, unnatural law, made by and for
them, his betters, and outwardly he must conform to it.
Thus you will find the best of men among the shepherds
and labourers freely helping themselves to any wild
creature that falls in their way, yet sharing the game-
preserver’s hatred of the real poacher. The village
poacher as arule is an idle, dissolute fellow, and the sober,
industrious, righteous shepherd or ploughman or carter
does not like to be put on a level with such a person. But
there is no escape from the hard and fast rule in such
things, and however open and truthful he may be in every-
thing else, in this one matter he is obliged to practise a
certain amount of deception. Here is a case to serve as
an illustration; I have only just heard it, after putting to-
gether the material I had collected for this chapter, in
conversation with an old shepherd friend of mine.

He is a fine old man who has followed a flock these
fifty years, and will, I have no doubt, carry his crook
for yet another ten. Not only is he a “good shepherd,”
in the sense in which Caleb uses that phrase, with a more

SHEPHERDS AND POACHING 95

intimate knowledge of sheep and all the ailments they are
subject to than I have found in any other, but he is also
a truly religious man, one that “walks with God”. He
told me this story of a sheep-dog he owned when head-
shepherd on a large farm on the Dorsetshire border with
a master whose chief delight in life was in coursing hares.
They abounded on his land, and he naturally wanted the
men employed on the farm to regard them as sacred ani-
mals. One day he came out to the shepherd to complain
that some one had seen his dog hunting a hare.

The shepherd indignantly asked who had said such a
thing.

“Never mind about that,” said the farmer. “Is it
true?”

“Tt is a lie,”’ said the shepherd. ‘My dog never hunts
a hare or anything else. *Tis my belief the one that said
that has got a dog himself that hunts the hares and he
wants to put the blame on some one else.”

“May be so,” said the farmer, unconvinced.

Just then a hare made its appearance, coming across the
field directly towards them, and either because they never
moved or it did not smell them it came on and on, stopping
at intervals to sit for a minute or so on its haunches, then
on again until it was within forty yards of where they
were standing. The farmer watched it approach and at
the same time kept an eye on the dog sitting at their feet
and watching the hare too, very steadily. ‘Now, shep-
herd,” said the farmer, “don’t you say one word to the
dog and I’ll see for myself.” Not a word did he say, and
the hare came and sat for some seconds near them, then
limped away out of sight, and the dog made not the
slightest movement, “That’s all right,” said the farmer,

96 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

well pleased. “I know now ’twas a lie I heard about
your dog. I’ve seen for myself and I'll just keep a sharp
eye on the man that told me.”

My comment on this story was that the farmer had dis-
played an almost incredible ignorance of a sheep-dog—
and a shepherd. “How would it have been if you had
said, ‘Catch him, Bob,’ or whatever his name was?” I
asked.

He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and replied,
“T do b’lieve he’d ha’ got ’n, but he’d never move till I
told ’n”.

It comes to this: the shepherd refuses to believe tha: by
taking a hare he is robbing any man of his property, and
if he is obliged to tell a lie to save himself from the con-
sequences he does not consider that it is a lie.

When, he understood that I was on his side in this
question, he told me about a good sheep-dog he once
possessed which he had to get rid of because he would not
take a hare!

A dog when broken is made to distinguish between the
things he must and must not do. He is “feelingly per-
suaded” by kind words and caresses in one case and hard
words and hard blows in the other. He learns that if he
hunts hares and rabbits it will be very bad for him, and
in due time, after some suffering, he is able to overcome
this strongest instinct of a dog. He acquires an artificial
conscience. Then, when his education is finished, he
must be made to understand that it is not quite finished
after all—that he must partially unlearn one of the saddest
of the lessons instilled in him. He must hunt a hare or
rabbit when told by his master to do so. It is a compact
between man and dog. Thus, they have got a law which

SHEPHERDS ‘AND POACHING 97

the dog has sworn to obey; but the man who made it is
above the law and can when he thinks proper command
his servant to break it. The dog, as a rule, takes it all in
very readily and often allows himself more liberty than
his master gives him; the most highly accomplished ani-
mal is one that, like my shepherd’s dog in the former in-
stance, will not stir till he is told. In the other case the
poor brute could not rise to the position; it was too com-
plex for him, and when ordered to catch a rabbit he could
only put his tail between his legs and look in a puzzled
way at his master. “Why do you tell me to do a thing
for which I shall be thrashed ?”

It was only after Caleb had known me some time, when
we were fast friends, that he talked with perfect freedom
of these things and told me of his own small, illicit takings
without excuse or explanation.

One day he saw a sparrowhawk dash down upon a
running partridge and struggle with it on the ground. It
was in a grass field, divided from the one he was walking
in by a large, unkept hedge without a gap in it to let him
through. Presently the hawk rose up with the partridge
still violently struggling in its talons, and flew over the
hedge to Caleb’s side, but was no sooner over than it came
down again and the struggle went on once more on the
ground. On Caleb running to the spot the hawk flew off,
leaving his prey behind. He had grasped it in its sides,
driving his sharp claws well in, and the partridge, though
unable to fly, was still alive. The shepherd killed it and
put it in his pocket, and enjoyed it very much when he
came to eat it.

From this case, a most innocent form of poaching, he
went on to relate how he had once been able to deprive a

98 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

cunning poacher and a bad man, a human sparrowhawk,
of his quarry.

There were two persons in the village, father and son,
he very heartily detested, known respectively as Old
Gaarge and Young Gaarge, inveterate poachers both.
They were worse than the real reprobate who haunted the

WEEE’

SHEPHERDS AND THEIR DOGS.

public-house and did no work and was not ashamed of his
evil ways, for these two were hypocrites and were out-
wardly sober, righteous men, who kept themselves a
little apart from their neighbours and were very severe in
their condemnation of other people’s faults.

One Sunday morning Caleb was on his way to his ewes
folded at a distance from the village, walking by a hedge-
row at the foot of the down, when he heard a shot fired
some way ahead, and after a minute or two a second shot.

SHEPHERDS [AAND POACHING 99

This greatly excited his curiosity and caused him to keep
a sharp look-out in the direction the sounds had come
from, and by and by he caught sight of a man walking
towards him. It was Old Gaarge in his long smock-frock,
proceeding in a leisurely way towards the village, but
catching sight of the shepherd he turned aside through a
gap in the hedge and went off in another direction to avoid
meeting him. No doubt, thought Caleb, he has got his
gun in two pieces hidden under his smock. He went on
until he came to a small field of oats which had grown
badly and had only been half reaped, and here he dis-
covered that Old Gaarge had been lying in hiding to shoot
at the partridges that came to feed. He had been screened
from the sight of the birds by a couple of hurdles and
some straw, and there were feathers of the birds he had
shot scattered about. He had finished his Sunday morn-
ing’s sport and was going back, a little too late on this
occasion as it turned out.

Caleb went on to his flock, but before getting to it his
dog discovered a dead partridge in the hedge; it had flown
that far and then dropped, and there was fresh blood on
its feathers. He put it in his pocket and carried it about
most of the day while with his sheep on the down. Late
in the afternoon he spied two magpies pecking at some-
thing out in the middle of a field and went to see what
they had found. It was a second partridge which Old
Gaarge had shot in the morning and had lost, the bird
having flown to some distance before dropping. The
magpies had probably found it already dead, as it was
cold; they had begun tearing the skin at the neck and had
opened it down to the breast-bone. Caleb took this bird,
too, and by and by, sitting down to examine it, he thought

100 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

he would try to mend the torn skin with the needle and
thread he always carried inside his cap. He succeeded in
stitching it neatly up, and putting back the feathers in their
place the rent was quite concealed. That evening he took
the two birds to a man in the village who made a liveli-
hood by collecting bones, rags, and things of that kind;
the man took the birds in his hand, held them up, felt
their weight, examined them carefully, and pronounced
them to be two good, fat birds, and agreed to pay two
shillings for them.

Such a man may be found in most villages; he calls
himself a “general dealer,” and keeps a trap and pony—
in some cases he keeps the ale-house—and is a useful
member of the small, rural community—a sort of human
carrion-crow.

The two shillings were very welcome, but more than the
money was the pleasing thought that he had got the birds
shot by the hypocritical old poacher for his own profit.
Caleb had good cause to hate him. He, Caleb, was one
of the shepherds who had his master’s permission to take
rabbits on the land, and having found his snares broken
on many occasions he came to the conclusion that they
were visited in the night time by some very cunning per-
son who kept a watch on his movements. One evening he
set five snares in a turnip field and went just before day-
light next morning in a dense fog to visit them. Every
one was broken! He had just started on his way back,
feeling angry and much puzzled at such a thing, when the
fog at once passed away and revealed the figures of two
men walking hurriedly off over the down. They were at
a considerable distance, but the light was now strong
enough to enable him to identify Old Gaarge and Young

SHEPHERDS AND POACHING 10!

Gaarge. Ina few moments they vanished over the brow.
Caleb was mad at being deprived of his rabbits in this
mean way, but pleased at the same time in having discov-
ered who the culprits were; but what to do about it he
did not know.

On the following day he was with his flock on the down
and found himself near another shepherd, also with his
sheep, one he knew very well, a quiet but knowing old
man named Joseph Gathergood. He was known to be a
skilful rabbit-catcher, and Caleb thought he would go
over to him and tell him about how he was being tricked
by the two Gaarges and ask him what to do in the matter.

The old man was very friendly and at once told him
what to do. “Don’t you set no more snares by the hedges
and in the turmots,” he said. “Set them out on the open
down where no one would go after rabbits and they’ll
not find the snares.” And this was how it had to be done.
First he was to scrape the ground with the heel of his
boot until the fresh earth could be seen through the broken
turf; then he was to sprinkle a little rabbit scent on the
scraped spot, and plant his snare. The scent and smell of
the fresh earth combined would draw the rabbits to the
spot; they would go there to scratch and would inevitably
get caught if the snare was properly placed.

Caleb tried this plan with one snare, and on the follow-
ing morning found that he had a rabbit. He set it again
that evening, then again, until he had caught five rabbits
on five consecutive nights, all with the same snare. That
convinced him that he had been taught a valuable lesson
and that old Gathergood was a very wise man about
rabbits; and he was very happy to think that he had got
the better of his two sneaking enemies.

102 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

But Shepherd Gathergood was just as wise about hares,
and, as in the other case, he took them out on the down in
the most open places. His success was due to his knowl-
edge of the hare’s taste for blackthorn twigs. He would
take a good, strong blackthorn stem or shoot with twigs
on it, and stick it firmly down in the middle of a large
grass field or on the open down, and place the steel trap
tied to the stick at a distance of a foot or so from it, the
trap concealed under grass or moss and dead leaves. The
smell of the blackthorn would draw the hare to the spot,
and he would move round and round nibbling the twigs
until caught.

Caleb never tried this plan, but was convinced that
Gathergood was right about it.

He told me of another shepherd who was clever at
taking hares in another way, and who was often chaffed
by his acquaintances on account of the extraordinary
length of his shepherd’s crook. It was like a lance or
pole, being twice the usual length. But he had a use for it.
This shepherd used to make hares’ forms on the downs in
all suitable places, forming them so cunningly that no one
seeing them by chance would have believed they were the
work of human hands. The hares certainly made use of
them. When out with his flock he would visit these forms,
walking quietly past them at a distance of twenty to
thirty feet, his dog following at his heels. On catching
sight of a hare crouching in a form he would drop a word,
and the dog would instantly stand still and remain fixed
and motionless, while the shepherd went on but in a circle
so as gradually to approach the form. Meanwhile the
hare would keep his eyes fixed on the dog, paying no at-
tention to the man, until by and by the long staff would

SHEPHERDS AND POACHING 103

be swung round and a blow descend on the poor, silly
head from the opposite side, and if the blow was not
powerful enough to stun or disable the hare, the dog
would have it before it got many yards from the cosy nest
prepared for its destruction,

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CHAPTER IX
The Shepherd on Foxes

A fox-trapping shepherd—Gamekeepers and foxes—Fox
and stoat—A gamekeeper off his guard—Pheasants
and foxes—Caleb kills a fox—A fox-hunting sheep-
dog—Two varieties of foxes—Rabbits playing with
little foxes—How to expel foxes—A playful spirit
in the fox—Fox-hunting a danger to sheep

CALEB related that his friend Shepherd Gathergood was
a great fox-killer and, as with hares, he took them in a
way of his own. He said that the fox will always go to
a heap of ashes in any open place, and his plan was to
place a steel trap concealed among the ashes, made fast to
a stick about three feet high, firmly planted in the middle
of the heap, with a piece of strong-smelling cheese tied to
the top. The two attractions of an ash-heap and the smell
of strong cheese was more than any fox could resist.
When he caught a fox he killed and buried it on the down
104

THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES 105

and said “nothing to nobody” about it. He killed them to
protect himself from their depredations; foxes, like Old
Gaarge and his son in Caleb’s case, went around at night
to rob him of the rabbits he took in his snares.

Caleb never blamed him for this; on the contrary, he
greatly admired him for his courage, seeing that if it had
been found out he would have been a marked man. It
was perhaps intelligence or cunning rather than courage;
he did not believe that he would be found out, and he never
was; he told Caleb of these things because he was sure
of hisman. Those who were interested in the hunt never
suspected him, and as to gamekeepers, they hardly
counted. He was helping them; no one hates a fox more
than they do. The farmer gets compensation for damage,
and the hen-wife is paid for her stolen chickens by the
hunt. The keeper is required to look after the game,
and at the same time to spare his chief enemy, the fox.
Indeed, the keeper’s state of mind with regard to foxes
has always been a source of amusement to me, and by
long practice I am able to talk to him on that delicate sub-
ject in a way to make him uncomfortable and self-contra-
dictory. There are various, quite innocent questions
which the student of wild life may put to a keeper about
foxes which have a disturbing effect on his brain. How
to expel foxes from a covert, for example; and here is
another: Is it true that the fox listens for the distressed
cries of a rabbit pursued by a stoat and that he will de-
prive the stoat of his captive? Perhaps; Yes; No, I don’t
think so, because one hunts by night, the other by day,
he will answer, but you see that the question troubles him.
One keeper, off his guard, promptly answered, “I’ve no
doubt of it; I can always bring a fox to me by imitating

106 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

the cry of a rabbit hunted by a stoat.” But he did not
say what his object was in attracting the fox.

I say that the keeper was off his guard in this instance,
because the fiction that foxes were preserved on the estate
was kept up, though as a fact they were systematically
destroyed by the keepers. As the pheasant-breeding craze
appears to increase rather than diminish, notwithstanding
the disastrous effect it has had in alienating the people
from their lords and masters, the conflict of interest be-
tween fox-hunter and pheasant-breeder will tend to be-
come more and more acute, and the probable end will be
that fox-hunting will have to go. A melancholy outlook
to those who love the country and old country sports, and
who do not regard pheasant-shooting as now followed as
sport at all. It is a delusion of the landlords that the
country people think most highly of the great pheasant-
preserver who has two or three big shoots in a season,
during which vast numbers of birds are slaughtered—
every bird “costing a guinea,” as the saying is. It brings
money into the country, he or his apologist tells you, and
provides employment for the village poor in October and
November, when there is little doing. He does not know
the truth of the matter. A certain number of the poorer
people of the village are employed as beaters for the big
shoots at a shilling a day or so, and occasionally a la-
bourer, going to or from his work, finds a pheasant’s nest
and informs the keeper and receives some slight reward.
If he “keeps his eyes open” and shows himself anxious
at all times to serve the keeper he will sometimes get a
rabbit for his Sunday dinner.

This is not a sufficient return for the freedom to walk
on the land and in woods, which the villager possessed

THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES 107

formerly, even in his worst days of his oppression, a
liberty which has now been taken from him. The keeper
is there now to prevent him; he was there before, and
from of old, but the pheasant was not yet a sacred bird,
and it didn’t matter that a man walked on the turf or
picked up a few fallen sticks in a wood. The keeper is
there to tell him to keep to the road and sometimes to ask
him, even when he is on the road, what is he looking over
the hedge for. He slinks obediently away; he is only a

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poor labourer with his living to get, and he cannot afford
to offend the man who stands between him and the lord
and the lord’s tenant. And he is inarticulate; but the
insolence and injustice rankle in his heart, for he is not
altogether a helot in soul; and the result is that the sedi-
tion-mongers, the Socialists, the furious denouncers of all
landlords, who are now quartering the country, and whose
vans I meet in the remotest villages, are listened to, and
their words—wild and whirling words they may be—are
sinking into the hearts of the agricultural labourers of
the new generation.

To return to foxes and gamekeepers. There are other

108 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

estates where the fiction of fox-preserving is kept up
no longer, where it is notorious that the landlord is
devoted exclusively to the gun and to pheasant-breeding.
On one of the big estates I am familiar with in Wiltshire
the keepers openly say they will not suffer a fox, and
every villager knows it and will give information of a
fox to the keepers, and looks to be rewarded with a
rabbit. All this is undoubtedly known to the lord of the
manor; his servants are only carrying out his own wishes,
although he still subscribes to the hunt and occasionally
attends the meet. The entire hunt may unite in cursing
him, but they must do so below their breath; it would
have a disastrous effect to spread it abroad that he is
a persecutor of foxes.

Caleb disliked foxes, too, but not to the extent of
killing them. He did once actually kill one, when a
young under-shepherd, but it was accident rather than
intention.

One day he found a small gap in a hedge, which had
been made or was being used by a hare, and, thinking
to take it, he set a trap at the spot, tying it securely to
a root and covering it over with dead leaves. On going
to the place the next morning he could see nothing until
his feet were on the very edge of the ditch, when with
startling suddenness a big dog fox sprang up at him
with a savage snarl. It was caught by a hind-leg, and
had been lying concealed among the dead leaves close
under the bank. Caleb, angered at finding a fox when
he had looked for a hare, and at the attack the creature
had made on him, dealt it a blow on the head with his
heavy stick—just one blow given on the impulse of the
moment, but it killed the fox! He felt very bad at what

THE SHEPHERD ON: FOXES | 109

he had done and began to think of consequences. He
took it from the trap and hid it away under the dead
leaves beneath the hedge some yards from the gap, and
then went to his work. During the day one of the farm
hands went out to speak to him. He was a small, quiet
old man, a discreet friend, and Caleb confided to him
what he had done. ‘Leave it to me,” said his old friend,
and went back to the farm. In the afternoon Caleb was
standing on the top of the down looking towards the
village, when he spied at a great distance the old man
coming out to the hills, and by and by he could make out
that he had a sack on his back and a spade in his hand.
When half-way up the side of the hill he put his burden
down and set to work digging a deep pit. Into this he
put the dead fox, and threw in and trod down the earth,
then carefully put back the turf in its place, then, his
task done, shouldered the spade and departed. Caleb
felt greatly relieved, for now the fox was buried out on
the downs, and no one would ever know that he had
wickedly killed it.

Subsequently he had other foxes caught in traps set
for hares, but was always able to release them. About
one he had the following story. The dog he had at that
time, named Monk, hated foxes as Jack hated adders, and
would hunt them savagely whenever he got a chance.
One morning Caleb visited a trap he had set in a gap
in a hedge and found a fox in it. The fox jumped up,
snarling and displaying his teeth, ready to fight for dear
life, and it was hard to restrain Monk from flying at
him. So excited was he that only when his master
threatened him with his crook did he draw back and,
sitting on his haunches, left him to deal with the difficult

110 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

business in his own way. The difficulty was to open
the steel trap without putting himself in the way of a
bite from those “tarrable sharp teeth.” After a good
deal of manceuvring he managed to set the butt end
of his crook on the handle of the gin, and forcing it
down until the iron teeth relaxed their grip, the fox
pulled his foot out, and darting away along the hedge
side vanished into the adjoining copse. Away went
Monk after him, in spite of his master’s angry com-
mands to him to come back, and fox and dog disappeared
almost together among the trees. Sounds of yelping and
of crashing through the undergrowth came back fainter
and fainter, and then there was silence. Caleb waited
at the spot full twenty minutes before the disobedient
dog came back, looking very pleased. He had probably
succeeded in overtaking and killing his enemy.

About that same Monk a sad story will have to be
told in another chapter.

When speaking of foxes Caleb aways maintained that
in his part of the country there were two sorts: one small
and very red, the larger one of a lighter colour with
some grey in it. And it is possible that the hill foxes
differed somewhat in size and colour from those of the
lower country. He related that one year two vixens
littered at one spot, a deep bottom among the downs, so
near together that when the cubs were big enough to
come out they mixed and played in company; the vixens
happened to be of the different sorts, and the difference
in colour appeared in the little ones as well.

Caleb was so taken with the pretty sight of all these
little foxes, neighbours and playmates, that he went even-
ing after evening to sit for an hour or longer watching

ee —

THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES 111

them. One thing he witnessed which will perhaps be
disbelieved by those who have not closely observed ani-
mals for themselves, and who still hold to the fable that
all wild creatures are born with an inherited and instinc-
tive knowledge and dread of their enemies. Rabbits
swarmed at that spot, and he observed that when the old
foxes were not about, the young, half-grown rabbits

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would freely mix and play with the little foxes. He was so
surprised at this, never having heard of such a thing,
that he told his master of it, and the farmer went with
him on a moonlight night and the two sat for a long time
together, and saw rabbits and foxes playing, pursuing
one another round and round, the rabbits when pursued
often turning very suddenly and jumping clean over their
pursuer.

The rabbits at this place belonged to the tenant, and

1B A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

the farmer, after enjoying the sight of the little ones
playing together, determined to get rid of the foxes in
the usual way by exploding a small quantity of gun-
powder in the burrows. Four old foxes with nine cubs
were too many for him to have. The powder was duly
burned, and the very next day the foxes had vanished.

In Berkshire I once met with that rare being, an intel-
ligent gamekeeper who took an interest in wild animals
and knew from observation a great deal about their
habits. During an after-supper talk, kept up till past
midnight, we discussed the subject of strange, erratic
actions in animals, which in some cases appear contrary
to their own natures. He gave an instance of such be-
haviour in a fox that had its earth at a spot on the border
of a wood where rabbits were abundant. One evening
he was at this spot, standing among the trees and watch-
ing a number of rabbits feeding and gambolling on the
green turf, when the fox came trotting by and the rabbits
paid no attention. Suddenly he stopped and made a
dart at a rabbit; the rabbit ran from him a distance of
twenty to thirty yards, then suddenly turning round
went for the fox and chased it back some distance, after
which the fox again chased the rabbit, and so they went
on, turn and turn about, half a dozen times. It was
evident, he said, that the fox had no wish to catch and
kill a rabbit, that it was nothing but play on his part,
and that the rabbits responded in the same spirit, know-
ing that there was nothing to fear.

Another instance of this playful spirit of the fox with
an enemy, which I heard recently, is of a gentleman who
was out with his dog, a fox-terrier, for an evening walk
in some woods near his house. On his way back he

THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES 113

discovered on coming out of the woods that a fox was
following him, at a distance of about forty yards. When
he stood still the fox sat down and watched the dog.
The dog appeared indifferent to its presence until his
master ordered him to go for the fox, whereupon he
charged him and drove him back to the edge of the wood,
but at that point the fox turned and chased the dog right
back to its master, then once more sat down and appeared
very much at his ease. Again the dog was encouraged
to go for him and hunted him again back to the wood,
and was then in turn chased back to its master. After
several repetitions of this performance, the gentleman
went home, the fox still following, and on going in closed
the gate behind him, leaving the fox outside, sitting in
the road as if waiting for him to come out again to
have some more fun.

This incident serves to remind me of an experience
I had one evening in King’s Copse, an immense wood
of oak and pine in the New Forest near Exbury. It was
growing dark when I heard on or close to the ground,
some twenty to thirty yards before me, a low, wailing
cry, resembling the hunger-cry of the young, long-eared
owl. I began cautiously advancing, trying to see it, but
as I advanced the cry receded, as if the bird was flitting
from me. Now, just after I had begun following the
sound, a fox uttered his sudden, startling loud scream
about forty yards away on my right hand, and the next
moment a second fox screamed on my left, and from
that time I was accompanied, or shadowed, by the two
foxes, always keeping abreast of me, always at the same
distance, one screaming and the other replying about
every half minute. The distressful bird-sound ceased,

114 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

and I turned and went off in another direction, to get
out of the wood on the side nearest the place where I
was staying, the foxes keeping with me until I was out.

What moved them to act in such a way is a mystery,
but it was perhaps play to them.

Another curious instance of foxes playing was related
to me by a gentleman at the little village of Inkpen, near
the Beacon, in Berkshire. He told me that when it hap-
pened, a good many years ago, he sent an account of it
to the “Field.”” His game-keeper took him one day “to
see a strange thing,” to a spot in the woods where a fox
had a litter of four cubs, near a long, smooth, green
slope. A little distance from the edge of the slope three
round swedes were lying on the turf. ‘How do you
think these swedes came here?” said the keeper, and then
proceeded to say that the old fox must have brought
them there from the field a long distance away, for her
cubs to play with. He had watched them of an evening,
and wanted his master to come and see too. Accordingly
they went in the evening, and hiding themselves among
the bushes near waited till the young foxes came out and
began rolling the swedes about and jumping at and
tumbling over them. By and by one rolled down the
slope, and the young foxes went after it all the way
down, and then, when they had worried it sufficiently,
they returned to the top and played with another swede
until that was rolled down, then with the third one in
the same way. Every morning, the keeper said, the
swedes were found back on top of the ground, and he
had no doubt that they were taken up by the old fox
again and left there for her cubs to play with.

Caleb was not so eager after rabbits as Shepherd

THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES. 115°

Gathergood, but he disliked the fox for another reason.
He considered that the hunted fox was a great danger
to sheep when the ewes were heavy with lambs and when
the chase brought the animal near if not right into the
flock. He had one dreadful memory of a hunted fox
trying to lose itself in his flock of heavy-sided ewes and
the hounds following it and driving the poor sheep mad
with terror. The result was that a large number of
lambs were cast before their time and many others were
poor, sickly things; many of the sheep also suffered in
health. He had no extra money from the lambs that
year. He received but a shilling (half a crown is often
paid now) for every lamb above the number of ewes,
and as a rule received from three to six pounds a year
from this source.

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CHAPTER X
Bird Life on the Downs

Great bustard— Stone curlew— Big hawks — Former
abundance of the raven—Dogs fed on carrion—
Ravens fighting—Ravens’ breeding-places in Wilts
—Great Ridge Wood ravens—Field-fare breeding in
Wilts—Pewit—Mistle-thrush—Magpie and _turtle-
dove—Gamekeepers and magpies—Rooks and farm-
ers—Starling, the shepherd’s favourite bird—Spar-
rowhawk and “brown thrush”

WiLTsHIRE, like other places in England, has long been
deprived of its most interesting birds—the species that
were best worth preserving. Its great bustard, once our
greatest bird—even greater than the golden and sea eagles
and the “giant crane” with its “trumpet sound” once heard
in the land—is now but a memory. Or a place name:
Bustard Inn, no longer an inn, is well known to the
many thousands who now go to the mimic wars on Salis-
bury Plain; and there is a Trappist monastery in a village
on the southernmost border of the county, which was
116

BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS 117

once called, and is still known to old men, as “Bustard
Farm.” All that Caleb Bawcombe knew of this grandest
bird is what his father had told him; and Isaac knew
of it only from hearsay, although it was still met with
in South Wilts when he was a young man.

The stone curlew, our little bustard with the long
wings, big, yellow eyes, and wild voice, still frequents
the uncultivated downs, unhappily in diminishing num-
bers. For the private collector’s desire to possess British-
taken birds’ eggs does not diminish; I doubt if more than
one clutch in ten escapes the searching eyes of the poor
shepherds and labourers who are hired to supply the
cabinets. One pair haunted a flinty spot at Winterbourne
Bishop until a year or two ago; at other points a few
miles away I watched other pairs during the summer of
1909, but in every instance their eggs were taken.

The larger hawks and the raven, which bred in all the
woods and forests of Wiltshire, have, of course, been
extirpated by the gamekeepers. The biggest forest in
the county now affords no refuge to any hawk above
the size of a kestrel. Savernake is extensive enough,
one would imagine, for condors to hide in, but it is not
so. A few years ago a buzzard made its appearance there
—just a common buzzard, and the entire surrounding
population went mad with excitement about it, and every
man who possessed a gun flew to the forest to join in
the hunt until the wretched bird, after being blazed at
for two or three days, was brought down.

I heard of another case at Fonthill Abbey. Nobody
could say what this wandering hawk was—it was very
big, blue above with a white breast barred with black—
a “tarrable,” fierce-looking bird with fierce, yellow eyes.

118 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

All the gamekeepers and several other men with guns
were in hot pursuit of it for several days, until some one
fatally wounded it, but it could not be found where it
was supposed to have fallen. A fortnight later its carcass
was discovered by an old shepherd, who told me the
story. It was not in a fit state to be preserved, but he
described it to me, and I have no doubt that it was a
goshawk.

The raven survived longer, and the Shepherd Baw-
combe talks about its abundance when he was a boy,
seventy or more years ago. His way of accounting for
its numbers at that time and its subsequent, somewhat
rapid disappearance greatly interested me.

We have seen his account of deer-stealing by the vil-
lagers in those brave, old, starvation days when Lord
Rivers owned the deer and hunting rights over a large
part of Wiltshire, extending from Cranborne Chase to
Salisbury, and when even so righteous a man as Isaac
Bawcombe was tempted by hunger to take an occasional
deer, discovered out of bounds. At that time, Caleb said,
a good many dogs used for hunting the deer were kept
a few miles from Winterbourne Bishop and were fed
by the keepers in a very primitive manner. Old, worn-
out horses were bought and slaughtered for the dogs.
A horse would be killed and stripped of his hide some-
where away in the woods, and left for the hounds to
batten on its flesh, tearing at and fighting over it like so
many jackals. When only partially consumed the carcass
would become putrid; then another horse would be killed
and skinned at another spot perhaps a mile away, and
the pack would start feeding afresh there. The result
of so much carrion lying about was that ravens were

BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS 119

attracted in numbers to the place and were so numerous
as to be seen in scores together. Later, when the deer-
hunting sport declined in the neighbourhood, and dogs
were no longer fed on carrion, the birds decreased year
by year, and when Caleb was a boy of nine or ten their
former great abundance was but a memory. But he re-
members that they were still fairly common, and he had
much to say about the old belief that the raven “smells
death,”’ and when seen hovering over a flock, uttering its
croak, it is a sure sign that a sheep is in a bad way and
will shortly die.

One of his recollections of the bird may be given here.
It was one of those things seen in boyhood which had
very deeply impressed him. One fine day he was on
the down with an elder brother, when they heard the
familiar croak and spied three birds at a distance engaged
in a fight in the air. Two of the birds were in pursuit
of the third, and rose alternately to rush upon and strike
at their victim from above. They were coming down
from a considerable height, and at last were directly over
the boys, not more than forty or fifty feet from the
ground; and the youngsters were amazed at their fury,
the loud, rushing sound of their wings, as of a torrent,
and of their deep, hoarse croaks and savage, barking
cries. Then they began to rise again, the hunted bird
trying to keep above his enemies, they in their turn striv-
ing to rise higher still so as to rush down upon him from
overhead; and in this way they towered higher and
higher, their barking cries coming fainter and fainter
back to earth, until the boys, not to lose sight of them,
cast themselves down flat on their backs, and, continuing
to gaze up, saw them at last no bigger than three “‘leetle

120 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

blackbirds.” Then they vanished, but the boys, still
lying on their backs, kept their eyes fixed on the same
spot, and by and by first one black speck reappeared, then
a second, and they soon saw that two birds were swiftly
coming down to earth. They fell swiftly and silently,
and finally pitched upon the down not more than a couple
of hundred yards from the boys. The hunted bird had
evidently succeeded in throwing them off and escaping.
Probably it was one of their own young, for the ravens’
habit is when their young are fully grown to hunt them
out of the neighbourhood, or, when they cannot drive
them off, to kill them.

There is no doubt that the carrion did attract ravens
in numbers to this part of Wiltshire, but it is a fact that
up to that date—about 1830—the bird had many well-
known, old breeding-places in the county. The Rev. A.
C. Smith, in his “Birds of Wiltshire,” names twenty-
three breeding-places, no fewer than nine of them on
Salisbury Plain; but at the date of the publication of his
work, 1887, only three of all these nesting-places were
still in use: South Tidworth, Wilton Park, and Compton
Park, Compton Chamberlain. Doubtless there were other
ancient breeding-places which the author had not heard
of: one was at the Great Ridge Wood, overlooking the
Wylye valley, where ravens bred down to about thirty-
five or forty years ago. I have found many old men in
that neighbourhood who remember the birds, and they
tell that the raven tree was a great oak which was cut
down about sixty years ago, after which the birds built
their nest in another tree not far away. A London friend
of mine, who was born in the neighbourhood of the Great
Ridge Wood, remembers the ravens as one of the com-

BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS 121

mon sights of the place when he was a boy. He tells of
an unlucky farmer in those parts whose sheep fell sick
and died in numbers, year after year, bringing him down
to the brink of ruin, and how his old head-shepherd
would say, solemnly shaking his head, “’Tis not strange
—master, he shot a raven.”

There was no ravens’ breeding-place very near Winter-
bourne Bishop. Caleb had “never heared tell of a nestie”’ ;

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but he had once seen the nest of another species which
is supposed never to breed in this country. He was a
small boy at the time, when one day an old shepherd of
the place going out from the village saw Caleb, and calling
to him said, ““You’re the boy that likes birds; if you'll
come with me, I’ll show ’ee what no man ever seed afore” ;
and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to
a distance from home, out from the downs, into the
woods and to a place where he had never been, where
there was bracken and heath with birch- and thorn-trees
scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of

122 A SHEPHERD'S: LIFE

birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large
nest about ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree
close by, where it was joined by its mate. The old man
pointed out that it was a felt or fieldfare, a thrush nearly
as big as the mistle-thrush but different in colour, and
he said that it was a bird that came to England in flocks
in winter from no man knows where, far off in the north,
and always went away before breeding-time. This was
the only felt he had ever seen breeding in this country,
and he “didn’t believe that no man had ever seed such a
thing before.” He would not climb the tree to see the
eggs, or even go very near it, for fear of disturbing the
birds.

This man, Caleb said, was a great one for birds: he
knew them all, but seldom said anything about them;
he watched and found out a good deal about them just
for his private pleasure.

The characteristic species of this part of the down
country, comprising the parish of Winterbourne Bishop,
are the pewit, magpie, turtledove, mistle-thrush, and
starling. The pewit is universal on the hills, but will
inevitably be driven away from all that portion of
Salisbury Plain used for military purposes. The mistle-
thrush becomes common in summer after its early breed-
ing season is ended, when the birds in small flocks resort
to the downs, where they continue until cold weather
drives them away to the shelter of the wooded, low
country.

In this neighbourhood there are thickets of thorn,
holly, bramble, and birch growing over hundreds of
acres of down, and here the hill-magpie, as it is called,
has its chief breeding-ground, and is so common that

BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS. 123

you can always get a sight of at least twenty birds in
an afternoon’s walk. Here, too, is the metropolis of
the turtledove, and the low sound of its crooning is heard
all day in summer, the other most common sound being
that of magpies—their subdued, conversational chatter
and their solo-singing, the chant or call which a bird will
go on repeating for a hundred times. ‘The wonder is
how the doves succeed in such a place in hatching any
couple of chalk-white eggs, placed on a small platform
of sticks, or of rearing any pair of young, conspicuous
in their blue skins and bright yellow down!

The keepers tell me they get even with these kill-birds
later in the year, when they take to roosting in the woods,
a mile away in the valley. The birds are waited for at
some point where they are accustomed to slip in at dark,
and one keeper told me that on one evening alone assisted
by a friend he had succeeded in shooting thirty birds.

On Winterbourne Bishop Down and round the village
the magpies are not persecuted, probably because the
gamekeepers, the professional bird-killers, have lost heart
in this place. It is a curious and rather pretty story.
There is no squire, as we have seen; the farmers have
the rabbits, and for game the shooting is let, or to let,
by some one who claims to be lord of the manor, who
lives at a distance or abroad. At all events he is not
known personally to the people, and all they know about
the overlordship is that, whereas in years gone by every
villager had certain rights in the down—to cut furze and
keep a cow, or pony, or donkey, or half a dozen sheep
or goats—now they have none; but how and why and
when these rights were lost nobody knows. Naturally
there is no sympathy between the villagers and the keepers

124 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

sent from a distance to protect the game, so that the
shooting may be let to some other stranger. On the
contrary, they religiously destroy every nest they can
find, with the result that there are too few birds for any-
one to take the shooting, and it remains year after year
unlet.

This unsettled state of things is all to the advantage
of the black and white bird with the ornamental tail, and
he flourishes accordingly and builds his big, thorny nests
in the roadside trees about the village.

The one big bird on these downs, as in so many other
places in England, is the rook, and let us humbly thank
the gods who own this green earth and all the creatures
which inhabit it that they have in their goodness left us
this one. For it is something to have a rook, although
he is not a great bird compared with the great ones lost
—bustard and kite and raven and goshawk, and many
others. His abundance on the cultivated downs is rather
strange when one remembers the outcry made against
him in some parts on account of his injurious habits; but
here it appears the sentiment in his favour is just as
strong in the farmer, or in a good many farmers, as in
the great landlord. The biggest rookery I know on
Salisbury Plain is at a farm-house where the farmer
owns the land himself and cultivates about nine hundred
acres. One would imagine that he would keep his rooks
down in these days when a boy cannot be hired to scare
the birds from the crops.

One day, near West Knoyle, I came upon a vast com-
pany of rooks busily engaged on a ploughed field where
everything short of placing a bird-scarer on the ground
had been done to keep the birds off. A score of rooks

BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS. 125

had been shot and suspended to long sticks planted about
the field, and there were three formidable-looking men
of straw and rags with hats on their heads and wooden
guns under their arms. But the rooks were there all
the same; I counted seven at one spot, prodding the earth
close to the feet of one of the scarecrows. I went into
the field to see what they were doing, and found that
it was sown with vetches, just beginning to come up,
and the birds were digging the seed up.

Three months later, near the same spot, on Mere Down,
I found these birds feasting on the corn, when it had
been long cut but could not be carried on account of the
wet weather. It was a large field of fifty to sixty acres,
and as I walked by it the birds came flying leisurely over
my head to settle with loud cawings on the stooks. It
was a magnificent sight—the great, blue-black bird-forms
on the golden wheat, an animated group of three or four
to half a dozen on every stook, while others walked about
the ground to pick up the scattered grain, and others were
flying over them, for just then the sun was shining on
the field and beyond it the sky was blue. Never had I
witnessed birds so manifestly rejoicing at their good
fortune, with happy, loud caw-caw. Or rather haw-haw!
what a harvest, what abundance! was there ever a more
perfect August and September! Rain, rain, by night
and in the morning; then sun and wind to dry our feathers
and make us glad, but never enough to dry the corn to
enable them to carry it and build it up in stacks where
it would be so much harder to get at. Could anything
be better !

But the commonest bird, the one which vastly out-
numbers all the others I have named together, is the

126 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

starling. It was Caleb Bawcombe’s favourite bird, and
I believe it is regarded with peculiar affection by all
shepherds on the downs on account of its constant asso-
ciation with sheep in the pasture. The dog, the sheep,
and the crowd of starlings—these are the lonely man’s
companions during his long days on the hills from April
or May to November. And what a wise bird he is, and
how well he knows his friends and his enemies! There
was nothing more beautiful to see, Caleb would say, than
the behaviour of a flock of starlings when a hawk was
about. If it was a kestrel they took little or no notice
of it, but if a sparrowhawk made its appearance, instantly
the crowd of birds could be seen flying at furious speed
towards the nearest flock of sheep, and down into the
flock they would fall like a shower of stones and instantly
disappear from sight. There they would remain on the
ground, among the legs of the grazing sheep, until the
hawk had gone on his way and passed out of sight.

The sparrowhawk’s victims are mostly made among
the young birds that flock together in summer and live
apart from the adults during the summer months after
the breeding season is over.

When I find a dead starling on the downs ranged over
by sparrowhawks, it is almost always a young bird—a
“brown thrush” as it used to be called by the old natural-
ists. You may know that the slayer was a sparrowhawk
by the appearance of the bird, its body untouched, but
the flesh picked neatly from the neck and the head gone.
That was swallowed whole, after the beak had been cut
off. You will find the beak lying by the side of the body.
In summer-time, when birds are most abundant, after
the breeding season, the sparrowhawk is a fastidious
feeder.

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CHAPTER: XI
Starlings and Sheep-Bells

Starlings’ singing—Native and borrowed sounds—Imi-
tations of sheep-bells—The shepherd on sheep-bells
—The bells for pleasure, not use—A dog in charge
of the flock—Shepherd calling his sheep—Richard
Warner of Bath—Ploughmen singing to their oxen
in Cornwall—A shepherd’s loud singing

THE subject of starlings associating with sheep has served
to remind me of something I have often thought when
listening to their music. It happens that I am writing
this chapter in a small village on Salisbury Plain, the
time being mid-September, 1909, and that just outside
my door there is a group of old elder-bushes laden just
now with clusters of ripe berries on which the starlings
come to feed, filling the room all day with that never-
ending medley of sounds which is their song. They sing
in this way not only when they sing—that is to say, when
they make a serious business of it, standing motionless
127

128 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

and a-shiver on the tiles, wings drooping and open beak
pointing upwards, but also when they are feasting on
fruit—singing and talking and swallowing elder-berries
between whiles to wet their whistles. If the weather is
not too cold you will hear this music daily, wet or dry,
all the year round. We may say that of all singing birds
they are most vocal, yet have no set song. I doubt if they
have more than half a dozen to a dozen sounds or notes
which are the same in every individual and their very —
own. One of them is a clear, soft, musical whistle,
slightly inflected; another a kissing sound, usually re-
peated two or three times or oftener, a somewhat per-
cussive smack; still another, a sharp, prolonged hissing
or sibilant but at the same time metallic note, compared
by some one to the sound produced by milking a cow
into a tin pail—a very good description. There are other
lesser notes: a musical, thrush-like chirp, repeated slowly,
and sometimes rapidly till it runs to a bubbling sound;
also there is a horny sound, which is perhaps produced
by striking upon the edges of the lower mandible with
those of the upper. But it is quite unlike the loud, hard
noise made by the stork; the poor stork being a dumb
bird has made a sort of policeman’s rattle of his huge
beak. These sounds do not follow each other; they come
from time to time, the intervals being filled up with others
in such endless variety, each bird producing its own notes,
that one can but suppose that they are imitations. We
know, in fact, that the starling is our greatest mimic,
and that he often succeeds in recognizable reproductions
of single notes, of phrases, and occasionally of entire
songs, as, for instance, that of the blackbird. But in
listening to him we are conscious of his imitations; even

STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS 129

when at his best he amuses rather than delights—he is
not like the mocking-bird. His common starling pipe
cannot produce sounds of pure and beautiful quality, like
the blackbird’s “oboe-voice,” to quote Davidson’s apt
phrase; he emits this song in a strangely subdued tone,
producing the effect of a blackbird heard singing at a
considerable distance. And so with innumerable other
notes, calls, and songs—they are often to their originals
what a man’s voice heard on a telephone is to his natural
voice. He succeeds best, as a rule, in imitations of the
coarser, metallic sounds, and as his medley abounds in
a variety of little, measured, tinkling, and clinking notes,
as of tappings on a metal plate, it has struck me at times
that these are probably borrowed from the sheep-bells
of which the bird hears so much in his feeding-grounds.
It is, however, not necessary to suppose that every star-
ling gets these sounds directly from the bells; the birds
undoubtedly mimic one another, as is the case with
mocking-birds, and the young might easily acquire this
part of their song language from the old birds without
visiting the flocks in the pastures.

The sheep-bell, in its half-muffled strokes, as of a
small hammer tapping on an iron or copper plate, is, one
would imagine, a sound well within the starling’s range,
easily imitated, therefore specially attractive to him.

But—to pass to another subject—what does the shep-
herd himself think or feel about it; and why does he
have bells on his sheep?

He thinks a great deal of his bells. He pipes not like
the shepherd of fable or of the pastoral poets, nor plays
upon any musical instrument, and seldom sings, or even
whistles—that sorry substitute for song; he loves music

130 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

nevertheless, and gets it in his sheep-bells; and he likes
it in quantity. “How many bells have you got on your
sheep—it sounds as if you had a great many?” I asked
of a shepherd the other day, feeding his flock near Old
Sarum, andhe replied, “Just forty, and I wish there were
eighty.” Twenty-five or thirty is a more usual number,
but only because of their cost, for the shepherd has very
little money for bells or anything else. Another told

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me that he had “only thirty,” but he intended getting
more. The sound cheers him; it is not exactly monoto-
nous, owing to the bells being of various sizes and also
greatly varying in thickness, so that they produce different
tones, from the sharp tinkle-tinkle of the smallest to the
sonorous klonk-klonk of the big, copper bell. Then, too,
they are differently agitated, some quietly when the sheep
are grazing with heads down, others rapidly as the animal
walks or trots on; and there are little bursts or peals when
a sheep shakes its head, all together producing a kind of

STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS 131

rude harmony—a music which, like that of bagpipes or
of chiming church bells, heard from a distance, is akin
to natural music and accords with rural scenes.

As to use, there is little or none. A shepherd will
sometimes say, when questioned on the subject, that the
bells tell him just where the flock is or in which direction
they are travelling; but he knows better. The one who
is not afraid to confess the simple truth of the matter
to a stranger will tell you that he does not need the bells
to tell him where the sheep are or in which direction they
are grazing. His eyes are good enough for that. The
bells are for his solace or pleasure alone. It may be
that the sheep like the tinkling too—it is his belief that
they do like it. A shepherd said to me a few days ago:
“Tt is lonesome with the flock on the downs; more so
in cold, wet weather, when you perhaps don’t see a person
all day—on some days not even at a distance, much less
to speak to. The bells keep us from feeling it too much.
We know what we have them for, and the more we have
the better we like it. They are company to us.”

Even in fair weather he seldom has anyone to speak
to. A visit from an idle man who will sit down and have
a pipe and talk with him is a day to be long remembered
and even to date events from. “’Twas the month—
May, June, or October—when the stranger came out to
the down and talked to I.”

One day, in September, when sauntering over Mere
Down, one of the most extensive and loneliest-looking
sheep-walks in South Wilts—a vast, elevated plain or
table-land, a portion of which is known as White Sheet
Hill—I passed three flocks of sheep, all with many bells,
and noticed that each flock produced a distinctly different

132 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

sound or effect, owing doubtless to a different number
of big and little bells in each; and it struck me that any
shepherd on a dark night, or if taken blindfolded over
the downs, would be able to identify his own flock by
the sound. At the last of the three flocks a curious thing
occurred. There was no shepherd with it or anywhere
in sight, but a dog was in charge; I found him lying
apparently asleep in a hollow, by the side of a stick and
an old sack. I called to him, but instead of jumping up
and coming to me, as he would have done if his master
had been there, he only raised his head, looked at me,
then put his nose down on his paws again. I am on duty
—in sole charge—and you must not speak to me, was
what he said. After walking a little distance on, I spied
the shepherd with a second dog at his heels, coming over
the down straight to the flock, and I stayed to watch.
When still over a hundred yards from the hollow the
dog flew ahead, and the other jumping up ran to meet
him, and they stood together, wagging their tails as if
conversing. When the shepherd had got up to them
he stood and began uttering a curious call, a somewhat
musical cry in two notes, and instantly the sheep, now
at a considerable distance, stopped feeding and turned,
then all together began running towards him, and when
within thirty yards stood still, massed together, and all
gazing at him. He then uttered a different call, and turn-
ing walked away, the dogs keeping with him and the
sheep closely following. It was late in the day, and he
was going to fold them down at the foot of the slope in
some fields half a mile away.

As the scene I had witnessed appeared unusual I related
it to the very next shepherd I talked with.

STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS 133

“Oh, there was nothing in that,” he said. “Of course
the dog was behind the flock.”

I said, “No, the peculiar thing was that both dogs
were with their master, and the flock followed.”

“Well, my sheep would do the same,” he returned.
“That is, they'll do it if they know there’s something
good for them—something they like in the fold. They
are very knowing.” And other shepherds to whom I
related the incident said pretty much the same, but they
apparently did not quite like to hear that any shepherd
could control his sheep with his voice alone; their way
of receiving the story confirmed me in the belief that I
had witnessed something unusual.

Before concluding this short chapter I will leave the
subject of the Wiltshire shepherd and his sheep to quote
a remarkable passage about men singing to their cattle
in Cornwall, from a work on that county by Richard
Warner of Bath, once a well-known and prolific writer
of topographical and other books. They are little known
now, I fancy, but he was great in his day, which lasted
from about the middle of the eighteenth to about the
middle of the nineteenth century—at all events, he died
in 1857, aged 94. But he was not great at first, and
finding when nearing middle age that he was not pros-
pering, he took to the Church and had several livings,
some of them running concurrently, as was the fashion
in those dark days. His topographical work included
Walks in Wales, in Somerset, in Devon, Walks in many
places, usually taken in a stage-coach or on horseback,
containing nothing worth remembering except perhaps
the one passage I have mentioned, which is as follows:—

“We had scarcely entered Cornwall before our atten-

134 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

tion was agreeably arrested by a practice connected with
the agriculture of the people, which to us was entirely
novel. The farmers judiciously employ the fine oxen
of the country in ploughing, and other processes of hus-
bandry, to which the strength of this useful animal can
be employed’’—the Rev. Richard Warner is tedious, but
let us be patient and see what follows—‘‘to which the
strength of this useful animal can be employed; and
while the hinds are thus driving their patient slaves along
the furrows, they continually cheer them with conver-
sation, denoting approbation and pleasure. This encour-
agement is conveyed to them in a sort of chaunt, of very
agreeable modulation, which, floating through the air
from different distances, produces a striking effect both
on the ear and imagination. The notes are few and
simple, and when delivered by a clear, melodious voice,
have something expressive of that tenderness and affec-
tion which man naturally entertains for the companions
of his labours, in a pastoral state of society, when, feeling
more forcibly his dependence upon domesticated animals
for support, he gladly reciprocates with them kindness
and protection for comfort and subsistence. This wild
melody was to me, I confess, peculiarly affecting. It
seemed to draw more closely the link of friendship
between man and the humbler tribes of fellow mortals.
It solaced my heart with the appearance of humanity,
in a world of violence and in times of universal hostile
rage; and it gladdened my fancy with the contemplation
of those days of heavenly harmony, promised in the
predictions of eternal truth, when man, freed at length
from prejudice and passion, shall seek his happiness in
cultivating the mild, the benevolent, and the merciful

STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS 135

sensibilities of his nature; and when the animal world,
catching the virtues of its lord and master, shall soften
into gentleness and love; when the wolf”. . .

And so on, clause after clause, with others to be added,
until the whole sentence becomes as long as a fishing-rod.
But apart from the fiddlededee, is the thing he states
believable? It is a charming picture, and one would like
to know more about that “chaunt,’’ that “wild melody.”
The passage aroused my curiosity when in Cornwall, as
it had appeared to me that in no part of England are
the domestic animals so little considered by their masters.
The R.S.P.C.A. is practically unknown there, and when
watching the doings of shepherds or drovers with their
sheep the question has occurred to me, What would my
Wiltshire shepherd friends say of such a scene if they
had witnessed it? There is nothing in print which I can
find to confirm Warner’s observations, and if you inquire
of very old men who have been all their lives on the soil
they will tell you that there has never been such a custom
in their time, nor have they ever heard of it as existing
formerly. Warner’s Tour through Cornwall is dated
1808.

I take it that he described a scene he actually witnessed,
and that he jumped to the conclusion that it was a com-
mon custom for the ploughman to sing to his oxen. It is
not unusual to find a man anywhere singing to his oxen,
or horses, or sheep, if he has a voice and is fond of exer-
cising it. I remember that in a former book—“Nature
in Downland”—lI described the sweet singing of a cow-
boy when tending his cows on a heath near Trotton, in
West Sussex; and here in Wiltshire it amused me to

136 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

listen, at a vast distance, to the robust singing of a shep-
herd while following his flock on the great lonely downs
above Chitterne. He was a sort of Tamagno of the
downs, with a tremendous voice audible a mile away.

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CHAPTER XII
The Shepherd and the Bible

Dan’l Burdon, the treasure-seeker—The shepherd’s feel-
ing for the Bible—Effect of the pastoral life—The
shepherd’s story of Isaac’s boyhood—tThe village on
the Wylye

One of the shepherd’s early memories was of Dan’l
Burdon, a labourer on the farm where Isaac Bawcombe
was head-shepherd. He retained a vivid recollection of
this person, who had a profound gravity and was the
most silent man in the parish. He was always thinking
about hidden treasure, and all his spare time was spent
in seeking for it. On a Sunday morning, or in the
evening after working hours, he would take a spade or
pick and go away over the hills on his endless search
after “something he could not find.” He opened some
of the largest barrows, making trenches six to ten feet
deep through them, but found nothing to reward him.
One day he took Caleb with him, and they went to a
part of the down where there were certain depressions
137

138 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

in the turf of a circular form and six to seven feet in
circumference. Burdon had observed these basin-like
depressions and had thought it possible they marked the
place where things of value had been buried in long-past
ages. To begin he cut the turf all round and carefully
removed it, then dug and found a thick layer of flints.
These removed, he came upon a deposit of ashes and
charred wood. And that was all. Burdon without a
word set to work to put it all back in its place again—
ashes and wood, and earth and flints—and having trod
it firmly down he carefully replaced the turf, then leaning
on his spade gazed silently at the spot for a space of
several minutes. At last he spoke. ‘Maybe, Caleb,
you've heard tell about what the Bible says of burnt
sacrifice. Well now, I be of opinion that it were here.
They people the Bible says about, they come up here
to sacrifice on White Bustard Down, and these be the
places where they made their fires.”

Then he shouldered his spade and started home, the
boy following. Caleb’s comment was: “I didn’t say
nothing to un because I were only a leetel boy and he
were a old man; but I knowed better than that all the
time, because them people in the Bible they was never
in England at all, so how could they sacrifice on White
Bustard Down in Wiltsheer ?”

It was no idle boast on his part. Caleb and his brothers
had been taught their letters when small, and the Bible
was their one book, which they read not only in the
evenings at home but out on the downs during the day
when they were with the flock. His extreme familiarity
with the whole Scripture narrative was a marvel to me;
it was also strange, considering how intelligent a man

THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLE 139

he was, that his lifelong reading of that one book had
made no change in his rude “Wiltsheer’’ speech.

Apart from the feeling which old, religious country
people, who know nothing about the Higher Criticism,
have for the Bible, taken literally as the Word of God,
there is that in the old Scriptures which appeals in a
special way to the solitary man who feeds his flock on
the downs. JI remember well in the days of my boyhood
and youth, when living in a purely pastoral country
among a semi-civilized and very simple people, how
understandable and eloquent many of the ancient stories
were to me. The life, the outlook, the rude customs,
and the vivid faith in the Unseen, were much the same
in that different race in a far-distant age, in a remote
region of the earth, and in the people I mixed with in
my own home. That country has been changed now;
it has been improved and civilized and brought up to the
European standard; I remember it when it was as it had
existed for upwards of two centuries before it had caught
the contagion. The people I knew were the descendants
of the Spanish colonists of the seventeenth century, who
had taken kindly to the life of the plains, and had easily
shed the traditions and ways of thought of Europe and
of towns. Their philosophy of life, their ideals, their
morality, were the result of the conditions they existed
in, and wholly unlike ours; and the conditions were like
those of the ancient people of which the Bible tells us.
Their very phraseology was strongly reminiscent of that
of the sacred writings, and their character in the best
specimens was like that of the men of the far past who
lived nearer to God, as we say, and certainly nearer to
nature than it is possible for us in this artificial state.

140 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

Among these sometimes grand old men who were large
land-owners, rich in flocks and herds, these fine old,
dignified “natives,” the substantial and leading men of
the district who could not spell their own names, there
were those who reminded you of Abraham and Isaac and
Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brethren, and even

CARTING WATER
FOR THE FLOCK.

of David the passionate psalmist, with perhaps a guitar
for a harp.

No doubt the Scripture lessons read in the thousand
churches on every Sunday of the year are practically
meaningless to the hearers. These old men, with their
sheep and goats and wives, and their talk about God, are
altogether out of our ways of thought, in fact as far
from us—as incredible or unimaginable, we may say—
as the neolithic men or the inhabitants of another planet.
They are of the order of mythical heroes and the giants
of antiquity. To read about them is an ancient custom,
but we do not listen.

Even to myself the memories of my young days came

THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLE 141

to be regarded as very little more than mere imaginations,
and I almost ceased to believe in them until, after years
of mixing with modern men, mostly in towns, I fell in
with the downland shepherds, and discovered that even
here, in densely populated and ultra-civilized England,
something of the ancient spirit had survived. In Caleb,
and a dozen old men more or less like him, I seemed to
find myself among the people of the past, and sometimes
they were so much like some of the remembered, old,
sober, and slow-minded herders of the plains that I could
not help saying to myself, Why, how this man reminds
me of Tio Isidoro, or of Don Pascual of the “Three
Poplar Trees,’ or of Marcos who would always have
three black sheep in a flock. And just as they reminded
me of these men I had actually known, so did they bring
back the older men of the Bible history—Abraham and
Jacob and the rest.

The point here is that these old Bible stories have a
reality and significance for the shepherd of the down
country which they have lost for modern minds; that
they recognize their own spiritual lineaments in these
antique portraits, and that all these strange events might
have happened a few years ago and not far away.

One day I said to Caleb Bawcombe that his knowledge
of the Bible, especially of the old part, was greater than
that of the other shepherds I knew on the downs, and
I would like to hear why it was so. This led to the
telling of a fresh story about his father’s boyhood, which
he had heard in later years from his mother. Isaac was
an only child and not the son of a shepherd; his father
was a rather worthless if not a wholly bad man; he was
idle and dissolute, and being remarkably dextrous with

142 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

his fists he was persuaded by certain sporting persons to
make a business of fighting—quite a common thing in
those days. He wanted nothing better and spent the
greater part of the time in wandering about the country;
the money he made was spent away from home, mostly
in drink, while his wife was left to keep herself and
child in the best way she could at home or in the fields.
By and by a poor stranger came to the village in search
of work and was engaged for very little pay by a small
farmer, for the stranger confessed that he was without
experience of farm work of any description. The cheap-
est lodging he could find was in the poor woman’s cottage,
and then Isaac’s mother, who pitied him because he was
so poor and a stranger alone in the world, a very silent,
melancholy man, formed the opinion that he had belonged
to another rank in life. His speech and hands and per-
sonal habits betrayed it. Undoubtedly he was a gentle-
man; and then from something in his manner, his voice,
and his words whenever he addressed her, and his atten-
tion to religion, she further concluded that he had been
in the Church; that, owing to some trouble or disaster,
he had abandoned his place in the world to live away
from all who had known him, as a labourer.

One day he spoke to her about Isaac: he said he had
been observing him and thought it a great pity that such
a fine, intelligent boy should be allowed to grow up
without learning his letters. She agreed that it was, but
what could she do? The village school was kept by an
old woman, and though she taught the children very little
it had to be paid for, and she could not afford it. He
then offered to teach Isaac himself and she gladly con-
sented, and from that day he taught Isaac for a couple

THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLE 143

of hours every evening until the boy was able to read
very well, after which they read the Bible through to-
gether, the poor man explaining everything, especially
the historical parts, so clearly and beautifully, with such
an intimate knowledge of the countries and peoples and
customs of the remote East, that it was all more interest-
ing than a fairy-tale. Finally he gave his copy of the
Bible to Isaac, and told him to carry it in his pocket every

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day when he went out on the downs, and when he sat
down to take it out and read in it. For by this time
Isaac, who was now ten years old, had been engaged
as a shepherd-boy to his great happiness, for to be a
shepherd was his ambition,

Then one day the stranger rolled up his few belongings
in a bundle and put them on a stick which he placed on
his shoulder, said good-bye, and went away, never to
return, taking his sad secret with him.

Isaac followed the stranger’s counsel, and when he

144 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

had sons of his own made them do as he had done from
early boyhood. Caleb had never gone with his flock on
the down without the book, and had never passed a day
without reading a portion.

The incidents and observations gathered in many talks
with the old shepherd, which I have woven into the fore-
going chapters, relate mainly to the earlier part of his
life, up to the time when, a married man and father of
three small children, he migrated to Warminster. There
he was in, to him, a strange land, far away from friends
and home and the old, familiar surroundings, amid new
scenes and new people. But the few years he spent at that
place had furnished him with many interesting memories,
some of which will be narrated in the following chapters.

I have told in the account of Winterbourne Bishop
how I first went to that village just to see his native
place, and later I visited Doveton for no other reason
than that he had lived there, to find it one of the most
charming of the numerous pretty villages in the vale. I
looked for the cottage in which he had lived and thought
it as perfect a home as a quiet, contemplative man who
loved nature could have had: a small, thatched cottage,
very old looking, perhaps inconvenient to live in, but
situated in the prettiest spot, away from other houses,
near and within sight of the old church with old elms
and beech trees growing close to it, and the land about
it green meadow. The clear river, fringed with a luxuri-
ant growth of sedges, flag, and reeds, was less than a
stone’s-throw away.

So much did I like the vale of the Wylye when I grew
to know it well that I wish to describe it fully in the
chapter that follows.

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CHAPTER. XIIT
Vale of the Wylye

Warminster—Vale of the Wylye—Counting the villages
—A lost church—Character of the villages—Tyther-
ington church—Story of the dog—Lord Lovell—
Monuments in churches—Manor-houses—Knook—
The cottages—Yellow stonecrop—Cottage gardens
— Marigolds — Golden-rod — Wild flowers of the
water-side—Seeking for the characteristic expression

THE prettily-named Wylye is a little river not above
twenty miles in length from its rise to Salisbury, where,
after mixing with the Nadder at Wilton, it joins the
Avon. At or near its source stands Warminster, a small,
unimportant town with a nobler-sounding name than any
other in Wiltshire. Trowbridge, Devizes, Marlborough,
Salisbury, do not stir the mind in the same degree; and
as for Chippenham, Melksham, Mere, Calne, and Cor-
145

146 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

sham, these all are of no more account than so many
villages in comparison. Yet Warminster has no associa-
tions—no place in our mental geography; at all events
one remembers nothing about it. Its name, which after
all may mean nothing more than the monastery on the
Were—one of the three streamlets which flow into the
Wylye at its source—is its only glory. It is not sur-
prising that Caleb Bawcombe invariably speaks of his
migration to, and of the time he passed at Warminster,
when, as a fact, he was not there at all, but at Doveton,
a little village on the Wylye a few miles below the town
with the great name.

It is a green valley—the greenness strikes one sharply
on account of the pale colour of the smooth, high downs
on either side—half a mile to a mile in width, its crystal
current showing like a bright serpent for a brief space
in the green, flat meadows, then vanishing again among
the trees. So many are the great shade trees, beeches
and ashes and elms, that from some points the valley has
the appearance of a continuous wood—a contiguity of
shade. And the wood hides the villages, at some points
so effectually that looking down from the hills you may
not catch a glimpse of one and imagine it to be a valley
where no man dwells. As a rule you do see something
of human occupancy—the red or yellow roofs of two or
three cottages, a half-hidden, grey church tower, or
column of blue smoke, but to see the villages you must
go down and look closely, and even so you will find it
difficult to count them all. I have tried, going up and
down the valley several times, walking or cycling, and
have never succeeded in getting the same number on two
occasions. There are certainly more than twenty, without

VALE OF THE WYLYE 147

counting the hamlets, and the right number is probably
something between twenty-five and thirty, but I do not
want to find out by studying books and maps. I prefer
to let the matter remain unsettled so as to have the
pleasure of counting or trying to count them again at
some future time. But I doubt that I shall ever succeed.
On one occasion I caught sight of a quaint, pretty little
church standing by itself in the middle of a green meadow,
where it looked very solitary with no houses in sight
and not even a cow grazing near it. The river was
between me and the church, so I went up-stream, a mile
and a half, to cross by the bridge, then doubled back to
look for the church, and couldn’t find it! Yet it was no
illusory church; I have seen it again on two occasions,
but again from the other side of the river, and I must
certainly go back some day in search of that lost church,
where there may be effigies, brasses, sad, eloquent inscrip-
tions, and other memorials of ancient tragedies and great
families now extinct in the land.

This is perhaps one of the principal charms of the
Wylye—the sense of beautiful human things hidden from
sight among the masses of foliage. Yet another lies in
the character of the villages. Twenty-five or twenty-eight
of them in a space of twenty miles; yet the impression
left on the mind is that these small centres of population
are really few and far between. For not only are they
small, but of the old, quiet, now almost obsolete type of
village, so unobtrusive as to affect the mind soothingly,
like the sight of trees and flowery banks and grazing
cattle. The churches, too, as is fit, are mostly small and
ancient and beautiful, half-hidden in their tree-shaded
churchyards, rich in associations which go back to a time

148 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

when history fades into myth and legend. Not all, how-
ever, are of this description; a few are naked, dreary
little buildings, and of these I will mention one which,
albeit ancient, has no monuments and no burial-ground.
This is the church of Tytherington, a small, rustic village,
which has for neighbours Codford St. Peter on one side
and Sutton Veny and Norton Bavant on the other. To
get into this church, where there was nothing but naked
walls to look at, I had to procure the key from the clerk,
a nearly blind old man of eighty. He told me that he
was a shoemaker but could no longer see to make or
mend shoes; that as a boy he was a weak, sickly creature,
and his father, a farm bailiff, made him learn shoemaking
because he was unfit to work out of doors. “I remember
this church,” he said, “when there was only one service
each quarter,” but, strange to say, he forgot to tell
me the story of the dog! “What, didn’t he tell you
about the dog?” exclaimed everybody. There was really
nothing else to tell.

It happened about a hundred years ago that once,
after the quarterly service had been held, a dog was
missed, a small terrier owned by the young wife of a
farmer of Tytherington named Case. She was fond
of her dog, and lamented its loss for a little while, then
forgot all about it. But after three months, when the
key was once more put into the rusty lock and the door
thrown open, there was the dog, a living “skelington” it
was said, dazed by the light of day, but still able to walk!
It was supposed that he had kept himself alive by “licking
the moisture from the walls.” The walls, they said,
were dripping with wet and covered with a thick growth
of mould. I went back to interrogate the ancient clerk,

VALE OF THE WYLYE 149

and he said that the dog died shortly after its deliverance ;
Mrs. Case herself told him all about it. She was an old
woman then, but was always willing to relate the sad
story of her pet.

That picture of the starving dog coming out, a living
skeleton, from the wet, mouldy church, reminds us sharp-
ly of the changed times we live in and of the days when
the Church was still sleeping very peacefully, not yet

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turning uneasily in its bed before opening its eyes; and
when a comfortable rector of Codford thought it quite
enough that the people of Tytherington, a mile away,
should have one service every three months.

As a fact, the Tytherington dog interested me as
much as the story of the last Lord Lovell’s self-incar-
ceration in his own house in the neighbouring little village
of Upton Lovell. He took refuge there from his enemies
who were seeking his life, and concealed himself so
effectually that he was never seen again. Centuries later,

150 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

when excavations were made on the site of the ruined
mansion, a secret chamber was discovered, containing
a human skeleton seated in a chair at a table, on which
were books and papers crumbling into dust.

A volume might be filled with such strange and ro-
mantic happenings in the little villages of the Wylye, and
for the natural man they have a lasting fascination; but
they invariably relate to great people of their day—
warriors and statesmen and landowners of old and noble
lineage, the smallest and meanest you will find being
clothiers, or merchants, who amassed large fortunes and
built mansions for themselves and almshouses for the
aged poor, and, when dead, had memorials placed to them
in the churches. But of the humble cottagers, the true
people of the vale who were rooted in the soil, and
flourished and died like trees in the same place—of these
no memory exists. We only know that they lived and
laboured; that when they died, three or four a year,
three or four hundred in a century, they were buried in
the little shady churchyard, each with a green mound
over him to mark the spot. But in time these “mould-
ering heaps” subsided, the bodies turned to dust, and
another and yet other generations were laid in the same
place among the forgotten dead, to be themselves in turn
forgotten. Yet I would rather know the histories of these
humble, unremembered lives than of the great ones of
the vale who have left us a memory.

It may be for this reason that I was little interested
in the manor-houses of the vale. They are plentiful
enough, some gone to decay or put to various uses;
others still the homes of luxury, beauty, culture: stately
rooms, rich fabrics; pictures, books, and manuscripts,

VALE OF THE WYLYE 151

gold and silver ware, china and glass, expensive curios,
suits of armour, ivory and antlers, tiger-skins, stuffed
goshawks and peacocks’ feathers. Houses, in some cases
built centuries ago, standing half-hidden in beautiful
wooded grounds, isolated from the village; and even as
they thus stand apart, sacred from intrusion, so the life
that is in them does not mix with or form part of the
true native life. They are to the cottagers of to-day
what the Roman villas were to the native population of
some eighteen centuries ago. This will seem incredible
to some: to me, an untrammelled person, familiar in
both hall and cottage, the distance between them appears
immense.

A reader well acquainted with the valley will probably
laugh to be told that the manor-house which most inter-
ested me was that of Knook, a poor little village between
Heytesbury and Upton Lovell. Its ancient and towerless
little church with rough, grey walls is, if possible, even
more desolate-looking than that of Tytherington. In my
hunt for the key to open it I disturbed a quaint old man,
another octogenarian, picturesque in a vast white beard,
who told me he was a thatcher, or had been one before
the evil days came when he could work no more and was
compelled to seek parish relief. “You must go to the
manor-house for the key,” he told me. A strange place
in which to look for the key, and it was stranger still to
see the house, close to the church, and so like it that but
for the small cross on the roof of the latter one could
not have known which was the sacred. building. First a
monks’ house, it fell at the Reformation to some greedy
gentleman who made it his dwelling, and doubtless in
later times it was used as a farm-house. Now a house

152 IA SHEPHERD'S LIFE

most desolate, dirty, and neglected, with cracks in the
walls which threaten ruin, standing in a wilderness of
weeds, tenanted by a poor working-man whose wages
are twelve shillings a week, and his wife and eight small
children. The rent is eighteen-pence a week—probably
the lowest-rented manor-house in England, though it is
not very rare to find such places tenanted by labourers.
But let us look at the true cottages. There are, I
imagine, few places in England where the humble homes

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of the people have so great a charm. Undoubtedly they
are darker inside, and not so convenient to live in as
the modern box-shaped, red-brick, slate-roofed cottages,
which have spread a wave of ugliness over the country;
but they do not offend—they please the eye. They are
smaller than the modern-built habitations; they are
weathered and coloured by sun and wind and rain and
many lowly vegetable forms to a harmony with nature.
They appear related to the trees amid which they stand,
to the river and meadows, to the sloping downs at the
side, and to the sky and clouds over all. And, most
delightful feature, they stand among, and are wrapped

VALE OF THE WYLYE 153

in, flowers as in a garment—rose and vine and creeper .
and clematis. They are mostly thatched, but some have
tiled roofs, their deep, dark red clouded and stained with
lichen and moss; and these roofs, too, have their flowers
in summer. They are grown over with yellow stonecrop,
that bright cheerful flower that smiles down at you from
the lowly roof above the door, with such an inviting
expression, so delighted to see you no matter how poor
and worthless a person you may be or what mischief you
may have been at, that you begin to understand the sig-
nificance of a strange vernacular name of this plant—
Welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk.

But its garden flowers, clustering and nestling round
it, amid which its feet are set—they are to me the best
of all flowers. These are the flowers we know and
remember for ever. The old, homely, cottage-garden
blooms, so old that they have entered the soul. The big
house garden, or gardener’s garden, with everything
growing in it I hate, but these I love—fragrant gilly-
flower and pink and clove-smelling carnation ; wallflower,
abundant periwinkle, sweet-william, larkspur, love-in-a-
mist, and love-lies-bleeding, old-woman’s-nightcap, and
kiss-me-John-at-the-garden-gate, sometimes called pansy.
And best of all and in greatest profusion, that flower of
flowers, the marigold.

How the townsman, town born and bred, regards this
flower, I do not know. He is, in spite of all the time
I have spent in his company, a comparative stranger to
me—the one living creature on the earth who does not
greatly interest me. Some over-populated planet in our
system discovered a way to relieve itself by discharging
its superfluous millions on our globe—a pale people with

154 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

hurrying feet and eager, restless minds, who live apart
in monstrous, crowded camps, like wood ants that go
not out to forage for themselves—six millions of them
crowded together in one camp alone! I have lived in
these colonies, years and years, never losing the sense of
captivity, of exile, ever conscious of my burden, taking
no interest in the doings of that innumerable multitude,
its manifold interests, its ideals and philosophy, its arts
and pleasures. What, then, does it matter how they
regard this common orange-coloured flower with a strong
smell? For me it has an atmosphere, a sense or sugges-
tion of something immeasurably remote and very beau-
tiful—an évent, a place, a dream perhaps, which has left
no distinct image, but only this feeling unlike all others,
imperishable, and not to be described except by the one
word Marigold.

But when my sight wanders away from the flower
to others blooming with it—to all those which I have
named and to the taller ones, so tall that they reach
half-way up, and some even quite up, to the eaves of
the lowly houses they stand against—Hollyhocks and
peonies and crystalline white lilies with powdery gold
inside, and the common sunflower—I begin to perceive
that they all possess something of that same magical
quality.

These taller blooms remind me that the evening prim-
rose, long naturalized in our hearts, is another common
and very delightful cottage-garden flower ; also that here,
on the Wylye, there is yet another stranger from the same
western world which is fast winning our affections. This
is the golden-rod, grandly beautiful in its great, yellow,
plume-like tufts. But it is not quite right to call the tufts

VALE OF THE WYLYE 155

yellow: they are green, thickly powdered with the minute
golden florets. There is no flower in England like it,
and it is a happiness to know that it promises to establish
itself with us as a wild flower.

Where the village lies low in the valley and the cottage
is near the water, there are wild blooms, too, which
almost rival those of the garden in beauty—water agri-
mony and comfrey with ivory-white and dim purple blos-
soms, purple and yellow loosestrife and gem-like, water

ti
{] i Wey AK } ‘\
i Th is
HH ie
i we

forget-me-not ; all these mixed with reeds and sedges and
water-grasses, forming a fringe or border to the potato
or cabbage patch, dividing it from the stream.

But now I have exhausted the subject of the flowers,
and enumerated and dwelt upon the various other com-
ponents of the scene, it comes to me that I have not yet
said the right thing and given the Wylye its characteristic
expression. In considering the flowers we lose sight of
the downs, and so in occupying ourselves with the details
we miss the general effect. Let me then, once more,

156 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

before concluding this chapter, try to capture the secret
of this little river.

There are other chalk streams in Wiltshire and Hamp-
shire and Dorset—swift crystal currents that play all
summer long with the floating poa grass fast held in their
pebbly beds, flowing through smooth downs, with small
ancient churches in their green villages, and pretty
thatched cottages smothered in flowers—which yet do not
produce the same effect as the Wylye. Not Avon for
all its beauty, nor Itchen, nor Test. Wherein, then,
does the “Wylye bourne” differ from these others, and
what is its special attraction? It was only when I set
myself to think about it, to analyse the feeling in my
own mind, that I discovered the secret—that is, in my
own case, for of its effect on others I cannot say any-
thing. What I discovered was that the various elements
of interest, all of which may be found in other chalk-
stream valleys, are here concentrated, or comprised in a
limited space, and seen together produce a combined
effect on the mind. It is the narrowness of the valley and
the nearness of the high downs standing over it on either
side, with, at some points, the memorials of antiquity
carved on their smooth surfaces, the barrows and
lynchetts or terraces, and the vast green earth-works
crowning their summit. Up here on the turf, even with
the lark singing his shrill music in the blue heavens, you
are with the prehistoric dead, yourself for the time one
of that innumerable, unsubstantial multitude, invisible
in the sun, so that the sheep travelling as they graze, and
the shepherd following them, pass through their ranks
without suspecting their presence. And from that eleva-
tion you look down upon the life of to-day—the visible

VALE OF THE WYLYE 157

life, so brief in the individual, which, like the swift silver
stream beneath, yet flows on continuously from age to
age and for ever.. And even as you look down you hear,
at that distance, the bell of the little hidden church tower
telling the hour of noon, and quickly following, a shout
of freedom and joy from many shrill voices of children
just released from school. Woke to life by those sounds,
and drawn down by them, you may sit to rest or sun
yourself on the stone table of a tomb overgrown on its
sides with moss, the two-century-old inscription well-
nigh obliterated, in the little grass-grown, flowery church-
yard which serves as village green and playground in
that small centre of life, where the living and the dead
exist in a neighbourly way together. For it is not here
as in towns, where the dead are away and out of mind
and the past cut off. And if after basking too long in
the sun in that tree-sheltered spot you go into the little
church to cool yourself, you will probably find in a dim
corner not far from the altar a stone effigy of one of
an older time; a knight in armour, perhaps a crusader
with legs crossed, lying on his back, dimly seen in the
dim light, with perhaps a coloured sunbeam on his up-
turned face. For this little church where the villagers
worship is very old; Norman on Saxon foundations; and
before they were ever laid there may have been a temple
to some ancient god at that spot, or a Roman villa per-
haps. For older than Saxon foundations are found in
the vale, and mosaic floors, still beautiful after lying
buried so long.

All this—the far-removed events and periods in time
—are not in the conscious mind when we are in the vale
or when we are looking down on it from above: the

158 iA SHEPHERD’S LIFE

mind is occupied with nothing but visible nature. Thus,
when I am sitting on the tomb, listening to the various
sounds of life about me, attentive to the flowers and bees
and butterflies, to man or woman or child taking a short
cut through the churchyard, exchanging a few words
with them; or when I am by the water close by, watching
a little company of graylings, their delicately-shaded,
silver-grey scales distinctly seen as they lie in the crystal
current watching for flies; or when I listen to the per-
petual musical talk and song combined of a family of
green-finches in the alders or willows, my mind is engaged
with these things. But if one is familiar with the vale;
if one has looked with interest and been deeply impressed
with the signs and memorials of past life and of antiquity
everywhere present and forming part of the scene, some-
thing of it and of all that it represents remains in the
subconscious mind to give a significance and feeling to
the scene, which affects us here more than in most places;
and that, I take it, is the special charm of this little valley.

CHITTERNE

CHAPTER’ XIV.
A Sheep-Dog’s Life

Watch—His visits to a dew-pond—David and his dog
Monk—Watch goes to David’s assistance—Caleb’s
new master objects to his dog—Watch and the corn-
crake—Watch plays with rabbits and guinea-pigs—
Old Nance the rook-scarer—The lost pair of specta-
cles—Watch in decline—Grey hairs in animals—A
grey mole—Last days of Watch—A shepherd on old
sheep-dogs

PERHAPS the most interesting of the many sheep-dog
histories the shepherd related was that of Watch, a dog
he had at Winterbourne Bishop for three years before
he migrated to Warminster. Watch, he said, was more
“like a Christian,” otherwise a reasonable being, than
any other dog he had owned. He was exceedingly active,
and in hot weather suffered more from heat than most
dogs. Now the only accessible water when they were
out on the down was in the mist-pond about a quarter
of a mile from his “liberty,” as he called that portion
159

160 'A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

of the down on which he was entitled to pasture his sheep.
When Watch could stand his sufferings no longer, he
would run to his master, and sitting at his feet look up
at his face and emit a low, pleading whine.

“What be you wanting, Watch—a drink or a swim?”
the shepherd would say, and Watch, cocking up his ears,
would repeat the whine.

“Very well, go to the pond,” Bawcombe would say,
and off Watch would rush, never pausing until he got
to the water, and dashing in he would swim round and
round, lapping the water as he bathed.

At the side of the pond there was a large, round sarsen-
stone, and invariably on coming out of his bath Watch
would jump upon it, and with his four feet drawn up
close together would turn round and round, surveying
the country from that elevation; then jumping down he
would return in all haste to his duties.

Another anecdote, which relates to the Winterbourne
Bishop period, is a somewhat painful one, and is partly
about Monk, the sheep-dog already described as a hunter
of foxes, and his tragic end. Caleb had worked him for
a time, but when he came into possession of Watch he
gave Monk to his young brother David, who was under-
shepherd on the same farm.

One morning Caleb was with the ewes in a field, when
David, who was in charge of the lambs two or three
fields away, came to him looking very strange—very
much put out.

“What are you here for—what’s wrong with ’ee?”
demanded Caleb.

“Nothing’s wrong,” returned the other.

“Where’s Monk then?” asked Caleb.

A SHEEP-DOG’S LIFE 161

“Dead,” said David.

“Dead! How’s he dead?”

“T killed ’n. He wouldn’t mind me and made me
mad, and I up with my stick and gave him one crack on
the head and it killed ’n.”

“You killed ’n!” exclaimed Caleb. “An’ you come
here an’ tell I nothing’s wrong! Is that a right way to
speak of such a thing as that? What be you thinking
of? And what be you going to do with the lambs?”

“T’m just going back to them—I’m going to do without
a dog. I’m going to put them in the rape and they’ll
be all right.”

“What! put them in the rape and no dog to help ’ee?”
cried the other. “You are not doing things right, but
master mustn’t pay for it. Take Watch to help ’ee—I
must do without ’n this morning.”

“No, Ill not take ’n,” he said, for he was angry be-
cause he had done an evil thing and he would have no
one, man or dog, to help him. “T’ll do better without a
dog,” he said, and marched off.

Caleb cried after him: “If you won’t have the dog
don’t let the lambs suffer but do as J tell ’ee. Don’t you
let ’em bide in the rape more ’n ten minutes; then chase
them out, and let ’em stand twenty minutes to half an
hour; then let them in another ten minutes and out again
for twenty minutes, then let them go back and feed in
it quietly, for the danger "Il be over. If you don’t do as
I tell ’ee you’ll have many blown.”

David listened, then without a word went his way.
But Caleb was still much troubled in his mind. How
would he get that flock of hungry lambs out of the rape
without a dog? And presently he determined to send

162 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

Watch, or try to send him, to save the situation. David
had been gone half an hour when he called the dog, and
pointing in the direction he had taken he cried, “David
wants ’ee—go to Dave.”

Watch looked at him and listened, then bounded away,
and after running full speed about fifty yards stopped
to look back to make sure he was doing the right thing.
“Go to Dave,” shouted Caleb once more; and away went
Watch again, and arriving at a very high gate at the
end of the field dashed at and tried two or three times
to get over it, first by jumping, then by climbing, and
falling back each time. But by and by he managed to
force his way through the thick hedge and was gone
from sight.

When David came back that evening he was in a
different mood, and said that Watch had saved him
from a great misfortune: he could never have got the
lambs out by himself, as they were mad for the rape.
For some days after this Watch served two masters.
Caleb would take him to his ewes, and after a while
would say, “Go—Dave wants ’ee,” and away Watch
would go to the other shepherd and flock.

When Bawcombe had taken up his new place at Dove-
ton, his master, Mr. Ellerby, watched him for a while
with sharp eyes, but he was soon convinced that he had
not made a mistake in engaging a head-shepherd twenty-
five miles away without making the usual inquiries but
merely on the strength of something heard casually in
conversation about this man. But while more than satis-
fied with the man he remained suspicious of the dog.
“I’m afraid that dog of yours must hurt the sheep,” he
would say, and he even advised him to change him for

A SHEEP-DOG’S LIFE 163

one that worked in a quieter manner. Watch was too
excitable, too impetuous—he could not go after the sheep
in that violent way and grab them as he did without
injuring them with his teeth.

“He did never bite a sheep in his life,” Bawcombe
assured him, and eventually he was able to convince his
master that Watch could make a great show of biting

the sheep without doing them the least hurt—that it was
actually against his nature to bite or injure anything.

One day in the late summer, when the corn had been
cut but not carried, Bawcombe was with his flock on
the edge of a newly reaped cornfield in a continuous,
heavy rain, when he spied his master coming to him.
He was in a very light summer suit and straw hat, and
had no umbrella or other protection from the pouring
rain. ‘What be wrong with master to-day?” said Baw-
combe. ‘“He’s tarrably upset to be out like this in such
a rain in a straw hat and no coat.”

Mr. Ellerby had by that time got into the habit when
troubled in his mind of going out to his shepherd to
have a long talk with him. Not a talk about his trouble

164 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

—that was some secret bitterness in his heart—but just
about the sheep and other ordinary topics, and the talk,
Caleb said, would seem to do him good. But this habit
he had got into was observed by others, and the farm-
men would say, “Something’s wrong to-day—the mas-
ter’s gone off to the head-shepherd.”

When he came to where Bawcombe was standing, in
a poor shelter by the side of a fence, he at once started
talking on indifferent subjects, standing there quite un-
concerned, as if he didn’t even know that it was raining,
though his thin clothes were wet through, and the water
coming through his straw hat was running in streaks
down his face. By and by he became interested in the
dog’s movements, playing about in the rain among the
stooks. “What has he got in his mouth?” he asked
presently.

“Come here, Watch,” the shepherd called, and when
Watch came in bent down and took a corn-crake from
his mouth. He had found the bird hiding in one of the
stooks and had captured without injuring it.

“Why, it’s alive—the dog hasn’t hurt it,” said the
farmer, taking it in his hands to examine it.

“Watch never hurted any creature yet,” said Baw-
combe. He caught things just for his own amusement,
but never injured them—he always let them go again.
He would hunt mice in the fields, and when he captured
one he would play with it like a cat, tossing it from him,
then dashing after and recapturing it. Finally he would
let it go. He played with rabbits in the same way, and
if you took a rabbit from him and examined it you would
find it quite uninjured.

The farmer said it was wonderful—he had never

A SHEEP-DOG’S LIFE 165

heard of a case like it before; and talking of Watch he
succeeded in forgetting the trouble in his mind which
had sent him out in the rain in his thin clothes and straw
hat, and he went away in a cheerful mood.

Caleb probably forgot to mention during this conver-
sation with his master that in most cases when Watch
captured a rabbit he took it to his master and gave it
into his hands, as much as to say, Here is a very big
sort of field-mouse I have caught, rather difficult to
manage—perhaps you can do something with it?

The shepherd had many other stories about this curious
disposition of his dog. When he had been some months
in his new place his brother David followed him to the
Wylye, having obtained a place as shepherd on a farm
adjoining Mr. Ellerby’s. His cottage was a little out
of the village and had some ground to it, with a nice
lawn or green patch. David was fond of keeping animal
pets—birds in cages, and rabbits and guinea-pigs in
hutches, the last so tame that he would release them on
the grass to see them play with one another. When
Watch first saw these pets he was very much attracted,
and wanted to get to them, and after a good deal of
persuasion on the part of Caleb, David one day consented
to take them out and put them on the grass in the dog’s
presence. They were a little alarmed at first, but in a
surprisingly short time made the discovery that this
particular dog was not their enemy but a playmate. He
rolled on the grass among them, and chased them round
and round, and sometimes caught and pretended to
worry them, and they appeared to think it very good
fun.

“Watch,” said Bawcombe, “in the fifteen years I had

166 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

’n, never killed and never hurt a creature, no, not even
a leetel mouse, and when he caught anything ’twere only
to play with it.”

Watch comes into a story of an old woman employed
at the farm at this period. She had been in the War-
minster workhouse for a short time, and had there heard
that a daughter of a former mistress in another part
of the county had long been married and was now the
mistress of Doveton Farm, close by. Old Nance there-
upon obtained her release and trudged to Doveton, and
one very rough, cold day presented herself at the farm
to beg for something to do which would enable her to
keep herself. If there was nothing for her she must,
she said, go back and end her days in the Warminster
workhouse. Mrs. Ellerby remembered and pitied her,
and going in to her husband begged him earnestly to
find some place on the farm for the forlorn old creature.
He did not see what could be done for her; they already
had one old woman on their hands, who mended sacks
and did a few other trifling things, but for another old
woman there would be nothing to do. Then he went in
and had a good long look at her, revolving the matter
in his mind, anxious to please his wife, and finally, he
asked her if she could scare the crows. He could think
of nothing else. Of course she could scare crows—it
was the very thing for her! Well, he said, she could
go and look after the swedes; the rooks had just taken
a liking to them, and even if she was not very active
perhaps she would be able to keep them off.

Old Nance got up to go and begin her duties at once.
Then the farmer, looking at her clothes, said he would
give her something more to protect her from the weather

A SHEEP-DOG’S LIFE 167

on such a bleak day. He got her an old felt hat, a big
old, frieze overcoat, and a pair of old leather leggings.
When she had put on these somewhat cumbrous things,
and had tied her hat firmly on with a strip of cloth, and
fastened the coat at the waist with a cord, she was told
to go to the head-shepherd and ask him to direct her to
the field where the rooks were troublesome. Then when
she was setting out the farmer called her back and gave
her an ancient, rusty gun to scare the birds. “It isn’t
loaded,” he said, with a grim smile. “I don’t allow
powder and shot, but if you'll point it at them they’ll
fly fast enough.”

Thus arrayed and armed she set forth, and Caleb
seeing her approach at a distance was amazed at her
grotesque appearance, and even more amazed still when
she explained who and what she was and asked him to
direct her to the field of swedes.

Some hours later the farmer came to him and asked
him casually if he had seen an old gallus-crow about.

“Well,” replied the shepherd, “I seen an old woman
in man’s coat and things, with an old gun, and I did tell
she where to bide.”

“T think it will be rather cold for the old body in that
field,” said the farmer. “I’d like you to get a couple
of padded hurdles and put them up for a shelter for
her,”

And in the shelter of the padded or thatched hurdles,
by the hedge-side, old Nance spent her days keeping
guard over the turnips, and afterwards something else
was found for her to do, and in the meanwhile she lodged
in Caleb’s cottage and became like one of the family.
She was fond of the children and of the dog, and Watch

168 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

became so much attached to her that had it not been for
his duties with the flock he would have attended her all
day in the fields to help her with the crows.

Old Nance had two possessions she greatly prized—
a book and a pair of spectacles, and it was her custom
to spend the day sitting, spectacles on nose and book in
hand, reading among the turnips. Her spectacles were
so “tarrable” good that they suited all old eyes, and when
this was discovered they were in great request in the
village, and every person who wanted to do a bit of fine
sewing or anything requiring young vision in old eyes
would borrow them for the purpose. One day the old
woman returned full of trouble from the fields—she had
lost her spectacles; she must, she thought, have lent them
to some one in the village on the previous evening and
then forgotten all about it. But no one had them, and
the mysterious loss of the spectacles was discussed and
lamented by everybody. A day or two later Caleb came
through the turnips on his way home, the dog at his
heels, and when he got to his cottage Watch came round
and placed himself square before his master and deposited
the lost spectacles at his feet. He had found them in
the turnip-field over a mile from home, and though but
a dog he remembered that he had seen them on people’s
noses and in their hands, and knew that they must there-
fore be valuable—not to himself, but to that larger and
more important kind of dog that goes about on its hind
legs.

There is always a sad chapter in the life-history of a
dog; it is the last one, which tells of his decline; and
it is ever saddest in the case of the sheep-dog, because he
has lived closer to man and has served him every day of

A SHEEP-DOG’S LIFE 169

his life with all his powers, all his intelligence, in the
one useful and necessary work he is fitted for or which
we have found for him to do. The hunting and the pet,
or parasite, dogs—the “dogs for sport and pleasure’—-.
though one in species with him are not like beings of
the same order; they are like professional athletes and
performers, and smart or fashionable people compared
to those who do the work of the world—who feed us
and clothe us. We are accustomed to speak of dogs
generally as the servants and the friends of man; it is
only of the sheep-dog that this can be said with absolute
truth. Not only is he the faithful servant of the solitary
man who shepherds his flock, but the dog’s companion-
ship is as much to him as that of a fellow-being would be.
Before his long and strenuous life was finished, Watch,
originally jet-black without a spot, became quite grey,
the greyness being most marked on the head, which
became at last almost white.

It is undoubtedly the case that some animals, like
men, turn grey with age, and Watch when 15 was rela-
tively as old as a man at 65 or 70. But grey hairs do
not invariably come with age, even in our domestic
animals, which are more subject to this change than
those in a state of nature. But we are never so well
able to judge of this in the case of wild animals, as in
most cases their lives end prematurely.

The shepherd related a curious instance in a mole.
He once noticed mole-heaps of a peculiar kind in a field
of sainfoin, and it looked to him as if this mole worked
in a way of his own, quite unlike the others. The hills
he threw up were a good distance apart, and so large
that you could fill a bushel measure with the mould

170 | A SHEPHERD'S |LIFE

from any one of them. He noticed that this mole went
on burrowing every day in the same manner; every
morning there were new chains or ranges of the huge
mounds. ‘The runs were very deep, as he found when
setting a mole-trap—over two feet beneath the surface.
He set his trap, filling the deep hole he had made with
sods, and on opening it next day he found his mole and
was astonished at its great size. He took no measure-
ments, but it was bigger, he affirmed, than he could have
believed it possible for a mole to be. And it was grey
instead of black, the grey hairs being so abundant on
the head as to make it almost white, as in the case of
old Watch. He supposed that it was a very old mole,
that it was a more powerful digger than most of its
kind, and had perhaps escaped death so long on account
of its strength and of its habit of feeding deeper in the
earth than the others.

To return to Watch. His hearing and eyesight failed
as he grew older until he was practically blind and too
deaf to hear any word given in the ordinary way. But
he continued strong as ever on his legs, and his mind
was not decayed, nor was he in the least tired. On the
contrary, he was always eager to work, and as his blind-
ness and deafness had made him sharper in other ways
he was still able to make himself useful with the sheep.
Whenever the hurdles were shifted to a fresh place and
the sheep had to be kept in a corner of the enclosure
until the new place was ready for them, it was old Watch’s
duty to keep them from breaking away. He could not
see nor hear, but in some mysterious way he knew when
they tried to get out, even if it was but one. Possibly
the slight vibration of the ground informed him of the

A SHEEP-DOG’S LIFE 171

movement and the direction as well. He would make a
dash and drive the sheep back, then run up and down
before the flock until all was quiet again. But at last
it became painful to witness his efforts, especially when
the sheep were very restless, and incessantly trying to
break away; and Watch finding them so hard to restrain
would grow angry and rush at them with such fury
that he would come violently against the hurdles at one
side, then getting up, howling with pain, he would dash
to the other side, when he would strike the hurdles there
and cry out with pain once more.

It could not be allowed to go on; yet Watch could not
endure to be deprived of his work; if left at home he
would spend the time whining and moaning, praying to
be allowed to go to the flock, until at last his master
with a very heavy heart was compelled to have him put
to death.

This is indeed almost invariably the end of a sheep-
dog; however zealous and faithful he may have been,
and however much valued and loved, he must at last
be put to death. I related the story of this dog to a
shepherd in the very district where Watch had lived and
served his master so well—one who has been head-
shepherd for upwards of forty years at Imber Court,
the principal farm at the small downland village of
Imber. He told me that during all his shepherding years
he had never owned a dog which had passed out of his
hands to another; every dog had been acquired as a pup
and trained by himself; and he had been very fond of
his dogs, but had always been compelled to have them
shot in the end. Not because he would have found them
too great a burden when they had become too old and

172 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

their senses decayed, but because it was painful to see
them in their decline, perpetually craving to be at their
old work with the sheep, incapable of doing it any longer,
yet miserable if kept from it.

ip
J

a

CHAPTER XV

Concerning Cats

A cat that caught trout—Cat killed by a passing train—
— Gip’s history and wildness — Gipsies’ cats — Sir
Three cats—A cat’s disposition—A notable rat-killer
Henry Wyatt’s cat—A partridge-hunting cat—A cat
that brought in rabbits—Story of a Fonthill Bishop
cat— An eccentric farmer and his eleven cats—A
child and her kittens—The cat’s fatal weakness—
Anecdotes

One of the shepherd’s most interesting memories of his
Doveton period was of a cat they possessed, which was
greatly admired. He was a very large, handsome, finely
marked tabby, with a thick coat, and always appeared
very well nourished but never wanted to be fed. He
was a nice-tempered, friendly animal, and whenever he
came in he appeared pleased at seeing the inmates of
the house, and would go from one to another, rubbing his
173 ;

174 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

sides against their legs and purring aloud with satisfac-
tion. Then they would give him food, and he would
take a morsel or two or lap up as much milk as would
fill a teaspoon and leave the rest. He was not hungry,
and it always appeared, they said, as if he smelt at or
tasted the food they put down for him just to please
them. Everybody in the village admired their cat for
his great size, his beauty, and gentle, friendly disposition,
but how he fed himself was a mystery to all, since no
one had ever detected him trying to catch anything out
of doors. In that part of the Wylye valley there were
no woods for him to hunt in; they also noticed that when,
out of doors, the small birds, anxious and angered at
his presence, would flit, uttering their cries, close to him,
he paid no attention. The only thing they discovered
about his outdoor life by watching him was that he had
the habit of going to the railway track, then recently
constructed, from Westbury to Salisbury, which ran
near their cottage, and would there seat himself on one
of the rails and remain for a long time gazing fixedly
before him as if he found it a pleasure to keep his eyes
on the long, glittering metal line.

At the back of the cottage there was a piece of waste
ground extending to the river, with a small, old, ruinous
barn standing on it a few yards from the bank. Between
the barn and the stream the ground was overgrown with
rank weeds, and here one day Caleb came by chance upon
his cat eating something among the weeds—a good-sized
fresh-caught trout! On examining the ground he found
it littered with the heads, fins, and portions of backbones
of the trout their cat had been feeding on every day since
they had been in possession of him. They did not destroy

CONCERNING CATS 175

their favourite, nor tell anyone of their discovery, but
they watched him and found that it was his habit to
bring a trout every day to that spot, but how he caught
his fish was never known.

Eventually their cat came to a tragic end, as all Wylye
anglers will be pleased to hear. He was found on the
railway track, at the spot where he had the habit of
sitting, crushed as flat as a pancake. It was thought
that while sitting on the rail in his usual way he had
become so absorbed at the sight of the straight, shining
line that the noise and vibration of the approaching train
failed to arouse him in time to save himself. It seemed
strange to them that a creature so very much alive and
quick to escape danger should have met its death in this
way; and what added to the wonder was that another
cat of the village was found on the line crushed by a
train shortly afterwards. Probably the sight of the shin-
ing rail gazed at too long and fixedly had produced a
hypnotic effect on the animal’s brain and made it power-
less to escape.

It is rather an odd coincidence that in the village inn
where I am writing a portion of this book, including the
present chapter, there should be three cats, unlike one
another in appearance and habits as three animals of
different and widely separated species, one of them with
a great resemblance to the shepherd’s picture of his
Doveton animal. All three were strays, which the land-
lady, who has a tender heart, took in when they were
starving, and made pets of; and all are beautiful. One
has Persian blood in him; a long-haired, black and brown
animal with gold-coloured eyes; playful as a kitten,
incessantly active, fond of going for a walk with some

176 A SHEPHERD'S "LIFE

inmate of the house, and when no one—cat or human
being—will have any more of him you will see him in
the garden stalking a fly, or lying on his back on the
ground under a beech-tree striking with his claws or
catching at something invisible in the air—motes in the
sunbeam. The second is a large, black cat with white

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collar and muzzle and sea-green eyes, and is of an indo-
lent, luxurious disposition, lying coiled up by the hour
on the most comfortable cushion it can find. ‘The last
is Gip, a magnificent creature a third bigger than an
averaged-sized cat—as large and powerfully built as the
British wild cat, a tabby with opaline eyes, which show
a pale green colour in some lights. These singular eyes,
when I first saw this animal, almost startled me with
their wild, savage expression; nor was it a mere decep-
tive appearance, as I soon found. I never looked at this
animal without finding these panther or lynx eyes fixed

CONCERNING CATS 177

with a fierce intensity on me, and no sooner would I
look towards him than he would crouch down, flatten
his ears, and continue to watch my every movement as
if apprehending a sudden attack on his life. It was
many days before he allowed me to come near him with-
out bounding away and vanishing, and not for two or
three weeks would he suffer me to put a hand on him.

But the native wildness and suspicion in him could
never be wholly overcome; it continued to show itself
on occasions even after I had known him for months,
and had won his confidence, and when it seemed that,
in his wild cat, conditional way, he had accepted my
friendship. He became lame, having injured one of his
forelegs while hunting, and as the weather was cold
he was pleased to spend his inactive and suffering time
on the hearth-rug in my sitting-room. I found that
rubbing warm, melted butter on his injured leg appeared
to give him relief, and after the massaging and buttering
he would lick the leg vigorously for ten or fifteen minutes,
occasionally purring with satisfaction. Yet if I made
any sudden movement, or rustled the paper in my hand,
he would instantly spring up from his cushion at my feet
and dart away to the door to make his escape; then,
finding the door closed, he would sit down, recover his
domesticity and return to my feet.

Yet this cat had been taken in as a kitten and had
already lived some two or three years in the house, seeing
many people and fed regularly with the others every day.
It is not, however, very rare to meet with a cat of this
disposition—the cat pure and simple, as nature made
it, without that little tameness on the surface, or veneer
of domesticity which life with man has laid on it.

178 ‘AY SHEPHERD’S LIFE

Gip is the most inveterate rat-killer I have ever known.
He is never seen hunting other creatures, not even mice,
although it is probable that he does kill and devour them
on the spot, but he has the habit of bringing in the rats
he captures; and as a day seldom passes on which he is
not seen with one, and as sometimes two or three are
brought in during the night, he cannot destroy fewer
than three hundred to four hundred rats in the year.

Let anyone who knows the destructive powers of the
rat consider what that means in an agricultural village,
and what an advantage it is to the farmers to have their
rickyards and barns policed day and night by such an
animal. For the whole village is his hunting-ground.
His owner says that he is “worth his weight in gold.”
I should say that he is worth much more; that the
equivalent in cash of his weight in purest gold, though
he is big and heavy, would not be more than the value
of the grain and other foodstuffs he saves from destruc-
tion in a single year.

He invariably brings in his rats alive to release and
play with them in an old, stone-paved yard, and after
a little play he kills them, and if they are full-grown
he leaves them; but when young he devours them or
allows the other cats to have them.

Gip has a somewhat remarkable history. The village
has always been a favourite resort of gipsies, and it
happened that once when a party of gipsies had gone
away it was discovered that they had left a litter of six
kittens behind, and it greatly troubled the village mind
to know what was to be done with them. “Why didn’t
we drown them? Oh, no, we couldn’t do that,” they
said, “they were several weeks old and past the time for

CONCERNING CATS 179

drowning.” However, some one who kept ferrets turned
up and kindly said he would take them to give to his
ferrets, and everybody was satisfied to have the matter
disposed of in that way. But it was a rather disgusting
way, for although it seems quite natural to give little,
living rodents to ferrets to be sucked of their warm
blood, it goes against one’s feelings to cast young cats
to the pink-eyed beast; for the cat is a carnivorous crea-
ture, too, and not only so but is infinitely more beautiful
and intelligent than the ferret and higher in the organic
scale. However, these ideas did not prevail in the village,
and the six kittens were taken; but they proved to be
exceedingly vigorous and fierce for kittens, as if they
knew what was going to be done to them: they fought
and scratched, and eventually two, the biggest and fiercest
of them, succeeded in making their escape, and by and
by one of them was found on the premises at the inn—
a refuge for all creatures in distress—which thereupon
became its home.

Gipsies, I was told, are fond of keeping cats, and
their cats are supposed to be the best ratters. As this
was news to me I inquired of some gipsies in the neigh-
bourhood, and they told me that it was true—they lovéd
cats. They love lurchers, too, and no doubt they find
cats with a genius for hunting very profitable pets. But
how curiously varied hunting cats are in their tastes!
You seldom find two quite alike. I have described one
that was an accomplished trout-catcher, in spite of the
ancient Gaelic proverb and universal saying that the
cat loves fish but fears to wet its feet; also another who
is exclusively a rat-killer. And here I recall an old story
of a cat (an immortal puss) who only hunted pigeons.

180 IA SHEPHERD'S LIFE

This tells that Sir Henry Wyatt was imprisoned in the
Tower of London by Richard III, and was cruelly treated,
having no bed to sleep on in his cell and scarcely food
enough to keep him alive. One winter night, when he
was half dead with cold, a cat appeared in his cell, having
come down the chimney, and was very friendly, and
slept curled up on his chest, thus keeping him warm all
night. In the morning it vanished up the chimney, but

-
WOODFORD on mE AVON

appeared later with a pigeon, which it gave to Sir Henry,
and then again departed. When the jailer appeared and
repeated that he durst not bring more than the few mor-
sels of food provided, Sir Henry then asked, “Wilt thou
dress any I provide?” This the jailer promised to do,
for he pitied his prisoner, and taking the pigeon had
it dressed and cooked for him. The cat continued bring- ©
ing pigeons every day, and the jailer, thinking they were
sent miraculously, continued to cook them, so that Sir
Henry fared well, despite the order which Richard gave
later, that no food at all was to be provided. He was

CONCERNING CATS 181

getting impatient of his prisoner’s power to keep alive
on very little food, and he didn’t want to behead him—
he wanted him to die naturally. Thus in the end Sir
Henry outlived the tyrant and was set free, and the
family preserve the story to this day. It is classed as
folk-lore, but there is no reason to prevent one from
accepting it as literal truth.

It is a well-known habit of some hunting, or poaching,
cats to bring their captives to their master or mistress.
I have met with scores—I might say with hundreds—
of such cases. I remember an old gaucho, a neighbour
of mine in South America, who used to boast that he
usually had a spotted tinamou—the partridge of the
pampas—for his dinner every day, brought in by his
cat. Even in England, where partridges are not so
abundant or easily taken, there are clever partridge-
hunting cats. I remember one, a very fine white cat,
owned by a woodman I once lodged with in Savernake
Forest, who was in the habit of bringing in a partridge
and would place it on the kitchen floor and keep guard
over it until the woodman’s wife came to take it up and
put it away for the Sunday’s dinner. A lady friend
told me of a cat at a farm-house where she was staying
during the summer months, which became attached to
her and was constantly bringing her young rabbits. They
were never injured but held firmly by the skin of the
neck. The lady would take the rabbit gently into her
hands and deposit it on her lap, and cover it over with
a handkerchief or a cloth, and pussy, seeing it safe in
her power, would then go away. The lady would then
walk away to a distance from the house to liberate the
little trembler, devoutly wishing that this too affectionate

182 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

cat would get over the delusion that such gifts were
acceptable to her. One day pussy came trotting into the
drawing-room with a stoat in his mouth, and depositing
it on the carpet by the side of her chair immediately
turned round and hastily left the room. The stoat was
dead, not being a creature that could easily be carried
about alive, and pussy, having other matters to attend

+ FOVANT >
on THE NADDER

to, did not think it necessary to wait to see her present
taken up and carefully deposited in her mistress’s lap.
Cases of this kind are exceedingly common, and the
simple explanation is, that the cat is not quite so unsocial
a creature as some naturalists would have us believe. We
may say that in this respect he compares badly with ele-
phants, whales, pigs, seals, cattle, apes, wolves, dogs,
and other large-brained social mammals; but he does
not live wholly for himself. He is able to take thought
for other cats and for his human companion—master
hardly seems the right word in the case of such an animal

CONCERNING CATS 183

—who is doubtless to him only a very big cat that walks
erect on his hind legs. I must, however, relate one more
instance of -a cat who hunted for others, told to me by
a very aged friend of mine, a native of Fonthill Bishop,
and some of whose early memories will be given later in
the chapter entitled “Old Wiltshire Days.”

When she was a young motherless girl and they were
very poor indeed, her father being incapacitated, they
had a cat that was a great help to them; a large black
and white animal who spent a greater part of his time
hunting in Fonthill Abbey woods, and who was always
bringing in something for the pot. The cat was attached
to her, and whatever was brought in was for her exclu-
sively, and I imagine it is so in all cases in which a cat
has the custom of bringing anything it catches into the
house. The cat mind cannot understand a division of
food. It does not and cannot share a mouse or bird with
another cat, and when it gives it gives the whole animal,
and to one person alone. When the cat brought a rabbit
home he would not come into the kitchen with it if he
saw her little brother or any other person there, lest
they should take it into their hands; he would steal off
and conceal it among the weeds at the back of the cot-
tage, then come back to make little mewing sounds under-
stood by its young mistress, and she would thereupon
follow it out to where the rabbit was hidden and take
it up, and the cat would then be satisfied.

The cat brought her rabbits and di-dappers, as she
called the moorhen, caught in the sedges by the lake in
the park. This was the first occasion of my meeting
with this name for a bird, but it comes no doubt from
dive-dapper, an old English vernacular name (found in

184 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

Shakespeare) of the dabchick, or little grebe. Moorhens
were not the only birds it captured: on two or three
occasions it brought in a partridge and on one occasion
a fish. Whether it was a trout or not she could not say;
she only knew that she cooked and ate it and that it was
very good.

One day, looking out, she spied her cat coming home
with something very big, something it had caught larger
than itself; and it was holding its head very high, drag-
ging its burden along with great labour. It was a hare,
and she ran out to receive it, and when she got to the
cat and stooped down to take it from him he released it
too soon, for it was uninjured, and away it bounded and
vanished into the woods, leaving them both very much
astonished and disgusted.

For a long time her cat managed to escape the poach-
ing animal’s usual fate in the woods, which were strictly
preserved then, in the famous Squire Beckford’s day,
as they are now; but a day arrived when it came hobbling
in with a broken leg. It had been caught in a steel trap,
and some person who was not a keeper had found and
released it. She washed the blood off, and taking it on
her lap put the bones together and bound up the broken
limb as well as she was able, and the bones joined, and
before very long the cat was well again. And no sooner
was it well than it resumed its hunting in the woods and
bringing in rabbits and di-dappers.

But alas, it had but nine lives, and having generously
spent them all in the service of its young mistress it
came to its end; at all events it finally disappeared,
and it was conjectured that a keeper had succeeded in
killing it.

CONCERNING CATS 185

One of my old shepherd’s stories about strange or
eccentric persons he had known during his long life was
of a gentleman farmer, an old bachelor, in the parish of
Winterbourne Bishop, who had (for a man) an excessive
fondness for cats and who always kept eleven of these
animals as pets. For some mysterious reason that num-
ber was religiously adhered to. The farmer was fond
of riding on the downs, and was invariably attended by
a groom in livery—a crusty old fellow; and one of this
man’s duties was to attend to his master’s eleven cats.
They had to be fed at their proper time, in their own
dining-room, eating their meals from a row of eleven
plates on a long, low table made expressly for them.
They were taught to go each one to his own place and
plate, and not to get on to the table, but to eat “like Chris-
tians,” without quarrelling or interfering with their
neighbours on either side. And, as a rule, they all be-
haved properly, except one big tom-cat, who developed
so greedy, spiteful, and tyrannical a disposition that there
was never a meal but he upset the harmony and brought
it to a disorderly end, with spittings, snarlings, and
scratchings. Day after day the old groom went to his
master with a long, dolorous plaint of this cat’s intoler-
able behaviour, but the farmer would not consent to its
removal, or to any strong measures being taken; kind-
ness combined with patience and firmness, he maintained,
would at last win even this troublesome animal to a better
mind. But in the end he, too, grew tired of this incor-
rigible cat, who was now making the others spiteful and
quarrelsome by his example; and one day, hearing a
worse account than usual, he got into a passion, and
taking a loaded gun handed it to the groom with orders

186: A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

to shoot the cat on the spot on the very next occasion
of it misbehaving, so that not only would they be rid of
it but its death in that way would serve as a warning
to the others. At the very next meal the bad cat got up
the usual row, and by and by they were all fighting and
tearing each other on the table, and the groom, seizing
the gun, sent a charge of shot into the thickest of the
fight, shooting three of the cats dead. But the author
of all the mischief escaped without so much as a pellet!
The farmer was in a great rage at this disastrous blun-
dering, and gave notice to his groom on the spot; but the
man was an old and valued servant, and by and by he
forgave him, and the quarrelsome animal having been
got rid of, and four fresh cats obtained to fill up the gaps,
peace was restored.

I must now return to the subject of the cat tragedy
related in the early part of this chapter—Bawcombe’s
cat at Doveton, who had the habit of sitting on a rail
of the line which runs through the vale, and was even-
tually killed by a train. So strange a story—for how
strange it seems that an animal of so cautious and well-
balanced a mind, so capable above all others of saving
itself in difficult and dangerous emergencies, should have
met its end in such a way!—might very well have sug-
gested something behind the mere fact, some mysterious
weakness in the animal similar to that which Herodotus
relates of the Egyptian cat in its propensity of rushing
into the fire when a house was burning and thus destroying
itself. Yet no such idea came into my mind: it was just
a “strange fact,” an accident in the life of an individual,
and after telling it I passed on, thinking no more about

CONCERNING CATS 187

the subject, only to find long months afterwards, by the
merest chance, that I had been very near to a discovery
of the greatest significance and interest in the life-history
of the animal.

It came about in the following way. I was on the
platform of a station on the South-Western line from
Salisbury to Yeovil, waiting for my train, when a pretty
little kitten came out of the stationmaster’s house at the
end of the platform, and I picked it up. Then a child,
a wee girlie of about five, came out to claim her pet, and
we got into a talk about the kitten. She was pleased at
its being admired, and saying she would show me the
other one, ran in and came out with a black kitten in her
arms. I duly admired this one too. “But,” I said, “they
won’t let you keep both, because then there would be too
many cats.”

“No—only two,” she returned.

“Three, with their mother.”

“No, they haven’t got a mother—she was killed on
the line.”

I remembered the shepherd’s cat, and by and by finding
the stationmaster I questioned him about the cat that
had been killed.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “cats are always getting killed
on the line—we can never keep one long. I don’t know
if they try to cross the line or how it is. One of the
porters saw the last one get killed and will tell you just
how it happened.”

I found the porter, and his account was that he saw
the cat on the line, standing with its forepaws on a rail
when an express train was coming. He called to the
cat two or three times, then yelled at it to frighten it off,

188 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

but it never moved; it stared as if dazed at the coming
train, and was struck on the head and knocked dead.

' This story set me making inquiries at other village
stations, and at other villages where there are no stations,
but close to which the line runs in the Wylye vale and
where there is a pointsman. I was told that cats are
very often found killed on the line, in some instances
crushed as if they had been lying or sitting on a rail when
the train went over them. They get dazed, the men said,
and could not save themselves.

I was also told that rabbits were sometimes killed and,
more frequently, hares. “I’ve had several hares from
the line,” one man told me. He said that he had seen
a hare running before a train, and thought that in most
cases the hare kept straight on until it was run down
and killed. But not in every case, as he had actually
seen one hare killed, and in this case the hare sat up
and remained staring at the coming train until it was
struck.

It cannot be doubted, I think, that the cat is subject
to this strange weakness. It is not a case of “losing its
head”’ like a cyclist amidst the traffic in a thoroughfare,
or of miscalculating the speed of a coming train and
attempting too late to cross the line. The sight of the
coming train paralyses its will, or hypnotizes it, and it
cannot save itself.

Now the dog, a less well-balanced animal than the
cat and inferior in many ways, has no such failing and
is killed by a train purely through blundering. While
engaged in making these inquiries, a Wiltshire woman
told me of an adventure she had with her dog, a fox-
terrier. She had just got over the line at a level crossing

CONCERNING CATS 189

when the gates swung to, and looking for her dog she
saw him absorbed in a smell he had discovered on the.
other side of the line. An express train was just coming,
and screaming to her dog she saw him make a dash to
get across just as the engine came abreast of her. The
dog had vanished from sight, but when the whole train
had passed up he jumped from between the rails where
he had been crouching and bounded across to her, quite
unhurt. He had dived under the train behind the engine,
and waited there till it had gone by!

It is, however, a fact that not all the cats killed on
the line have been hypnotized or dazed at the sight of
the coming train; undoubtedly some do meet their death
through attempting to cross the line before a coming
train. At all events, I heard of one such case from a
person who had witnessed it. It was at a spot where a
small group of workmen’s cottages stands close to the
line at a village; here I was told that “several cats” got
killed on the line every year, and as the man who gave
me the information had seen a cat running across the
line before a train and getting killed it was assumed by
the cottagers that it was so in all cases.

aD os

_ DW Nees
US ee DEH AS Bo

CHAPTER XVI
The Ellerbys of Doveton

The Bawcombes at Doveton Farm—Caleb finds favour
with his master—Mrs. Ellerby and the shepherd’s
wife—The passion of a childless wife—The curse—
A story of the “mob”—The attack on the farm—A
man transported for life—The hundred and ninth
‘Psalm—The end of the Ellerbys

Cates and his wife invariably spoke of their time at
Doveton Farm in a way which gave one the idea that
they regarded it as the most important period of their
lives. It had deeply impressed them, and doubtless it
was a great change for them to leave their native village
for the first time in their lives and go long miles from
home among strangers to serve a new master. Above
everything they felt leaving the old father who was angry
with them, and had gone to the length of disowning them
190

THE ELLERBYS OF DOVETON 191

for taking such a step. But there was something besides
all this which had served to give Doveton an enduring
place in their memories, and after many talks with the
old couple about their Warminster days I formed the idea
that it was more to them than any other place where they
had lived, because of a personal feeling they cherished
for their master and mistress there.

Hitherto Caleb had been in the service of men who
were but a little way removed in thought and feeling
from those they employed. They were mostly small men,
born and bred in the parish, some wholly self-made, with
no interest or knowledge of anything outside their own
affairs, and almost as far removed as the labourers them-
selves from the ranks above. The Ellerbys were of
another stamp, or a different class. If not a gentleman,
Mr. Ellerby was very like one and was accustomed to
associate with gentlemen. He was a farmer, descended
from a long line of farmers; but he owned his own
land, and was an educated and travelled man, considered
wealthy for a farmer; at all events he was able to keep
his carriage and riding and hunting horses in his stables,
and he was regarded as the best breeder of sheep in the
district. He lived in a good house, which with its pic-
tures and books and beautiful decorations and furni-
ture appeared to their simple minds extremely luxurious.
This atmosphere was somewhat disconcerting to them
at first, for although he knew his own value, priding
himself on being a “good shepherd,” Caleb had up till
now served with farmers who were in a sense on an
equality with him, and they understood him and he them.
But in a short time the feeling of strangeness vanished:
personally, as a fellow-man, his master soon grew to be

192 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

more to him than any farmer he had yet been with. And
he saw a good deal of his master. Mr. Ellerby cultivated
his acquaintance, and, as we have seen, got into the
habit of seeking him out and talking to him even when
he was at a distance out on the down with his flock.
And Caleb could not but see that in this respect he was
preferred above the other men employed on the farm—
that he had “found favour’ in his master’s eyes.

When he had told me that story about Watch and
the corn-crake, it stuck in my mind, and on the first
opportunity I went back to that subject to ask what it
really was that made his master act in such an extraor-
dinary manner—to go out on a pouring wet day in a
summer suit and straw hat, and walk a mile or two just
to stand there in the rain talking to him about nothing
in particular. What secret trouble had he—was it that
his affairs were in a bad way, or was he quarrelling with
his wife? No, nothing of the kind, it was a long story
—this secret trouble of the Ellerbys, and with his uncon-
querable reticence in regard to other people’s private
affairs he would have passed it off with a few general
remarks.

But there was his old wife listening to us, and, woman-
like, eager to discuss such a subject, she would not let it
pass. She would tell it and would not be silenced by
him: they were all dead and gone—why should I not
be told if I wanted to hear it? And so with a word
put in here and there by him when she talked, and with
a good many words interposed by her when he took up
the tale, they unfolded the story, which was very long
as they told it and must be given briefly here.

It happened that when the Bawcombes settled at Dove-

THE ELLERBYS OF DOVETON 193

ton, just as Mr. Ellerby had taken to the shepherd, making
a friend of him, so Mrs. Ellerby took to the shepherd’s
wife, and fell into the habit of paying frequent visits to
her in her cottage. She was a very handsome woman,
of a somewhat stately presence, dignified in manner, and
she wore her abundant hair in curls hanging on each side
to her shoulders—a fashion common at that time. From
the first she appeared to take a particular interest in the
Bawcombes, and they could not but notice that she was
more gracious and friendly towards them than to the
others of their station on the farm. - The Bawcombes
had three children then, aged 6, 4, and 2 years respec-
tively, all remarkably healthy, with rosy cheeks and black
eyes, and they were merry-tempered little things. Mrs.
Ellerby appeared much taken with the children; praised
their mother for always keeping them so clean and nicely
dressed, and wondered how she could manage it on their
small earnings. The carter and his wife lived in a cottage
close by, and they, too, had three little children, and next
to the carter’s was the bailiff’s cottage, and he, too, was
married and had children; but Mrs. Ellerby never went
into their cottages, and the shepherd and his wife con-
cluded that it was because in both cases the children
were rather puny, sickly-looking little things and were
never very clean. The carter’s wife, too, was a slatternly
woman. One day when Mrs. Ellerby came in to see
Mrs. Bawcombe the carter’s wife was just going aut
of the door, and Mrs. Ellerby appeared displeased, and
before leaving she said, “I hope, Mrs. Bawcombe, you
are not going to mix too freely with your neighbours
or let your children go too much with them and fall into
their ways.” They also observed that when she passed

194 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

their neighbours’ children in the lane she spoke no word
and appeared not to see them. Yet she was kind to them
too, and whenever she brought a big parcel of cakes,
fruit, and sweets for the children, which she often did,
she would tell the shepherd’s wife to divide it into three
lots, one for her own children and the others for those
of her two neighbours. It was clear to see that Mrs.
Ellerby had grown fond of her children, especially of
the eldest, the little rosy-cheeked six-year-old boy. Sitting
in the cottage she would call him to her side and would
hold his hand while conversing with his mother; she
would also bare the child’s arm just for the pleasure of
rubbing it with her hand and clasping it round with her
fingers, and sometimes when caressing the child in this
way she would turn her face aside to hide the tears that
dropped from her eyes.

She had no child of her own—the one happiness which
she and her husband desired above all things. Six times
in their ten married years they had hoped and rejoiced,
although with fear and trembling, that their prayer would
be answered, but in vain—every child born to them came
lifeless into the world. “And so ’twould always be, for
sure,” said the villagers, “because of the curse.”

For it was a cause of wonder to the shepherd and
his wife that this couple, so strong and healthy, so noble-
looking, so anxious to have children, should have been
so unfortunate, and still the villagers repeated that it
was the curse that was on them.

This made the shepherd angry. “What be you saying
about a curse that is on them?—a good man and a good
woman!”’ he would exclaim, and taking up his crook go
out and leave them to their gossip. He would not ask

THE ELLERBYS OF DOVETON 195

them what they meant; he refused to listen when they
tried to tell him; but in the end he could not help know-
ing, since the idea had become a fixed one in the minds
of all the villagers, and he could not keep it out. “Look
at them,” the gossipers would say, “as fine a couple as
you ever saw, and no child; and look at his two brothers,
fine, big, strong, well-set-up men, both married to fine
healthy women, and never a child living to any of them.
And the sisters unmarried! ’Tis the curse and nothing
else.””

The curse had been uttered against Mr. Ellerby’s
father, who was in his prime in the year 1831 at the
time of the “mob,” when the introduction of labour-
saving machinery in agriculture sent the poor farm-
labourers mad all over England. Wheat was at a high
price at that time, and the farmers were exceedingly
prosperous, but they paid no more than seven shillings
a week to their miserable labourers. And if they were
half-starved when there was work for all, when the corn
was reaped with sickles, what would their condition be
when reaping machines and other new implements of
husbandry came into use? They would not suffer it;
they would gather in bands everywhere and destroy the
machinery, and being united they would be irresistible ;
and so it came about that there were risings or “mobs”
all over the land.

Mr. Ellerby, the most prosperous and enterprising
farmer in the parish, had been the first to introduce the
new methods. He did not believe that the people would
rise against him, for he well knew that he was regarded
as a just and kind man and was even loved by his own
labourers, but even if it had not been so he would not

196 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

have hesitated to carry out his resolution, as he was a
high-spirited man. But one day the villagers got together
and came unexpectedly to his barns, where they set to
work to destroy his new threshing machine. When he
was told he rushed out and went in hot haste to the scene,
and as he drew near some person in the crowd threw
a heavy hammer at him, which struck him on the head
and brought him senseless to the ground.

He was not seriously injured, but when he recovered
the work of destruction had been done and the men
had gone back to their homes, and no one could say who
had led them and who had thrown the hammer. But
by and by the police discovered that the hammer was
the property of a shoemaker in the village, and he was
arrested and charged with injuring with intent to murder.
Tried with many others from other villages in the district
at the Salisbury Assizes, he was found guilty and sen-
tenced to transportation for life. Yet the Doveton shoe-
maker was known to every one as a quiet, inoffensive
young man, and to the last he protested his innocence,
for although he had gone with the others to the farm
he had not taken the hammer and was guiltless of having
thrown it.

Two years after he had been sent away Mr. Ellerby
received a letter with an Australian postmark on it, but
opening it found nothing but a long denunciatory passage
from the Bible enclosed, with no name or address. Mr.
Ellerby was much disturbed in his mind, and instead of
burning the paper and holding his peace, he kept it and
spoke about it to this person and that, and every one
went to his Bible to find out what message the poor
shoemaker had sent, for it had been discovered that it

THE ELLERBYS OF DOVETON 197

was the one hundred and ninth Psalm, or a great portion
of it, and this is what they read:—

“Hold not Thy peace, O God of my praise; for the
mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are
opened against me: they have spoken against me with
a lying tongue. They compassed me about also with
words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause.
And they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred
for my love.

“Set Thou a wicked man over him; and let Satan
stand at his right hand.

“When he shall be judged, let him be condemned; and
let his prayer become sin.

“Let his days be few; and another take his office.

“Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

“Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg;
let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

“Let there be none to extend mercy unto him; neither
let there be any to favour his fatherless children.

“Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation
following let their name be blotted out.

“Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with
the Lord; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted
out.

“Let them be before the Lord continually, that he may
cut off the memory of them from the earth.

“Because that he remembered not to show mercy, but
persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even
slay the broken in heart.

“As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him; as he
delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.

“As he clothed himself with cursing like as with a

198 A ‘SHEPHERD'S LIFE

garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and
like oil into his bones.

“Let it be unto him as a garment which covereth him,
and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually.

“But do Thou for me, O God the Lord, for Thy
name’s sake. For I am poor and needy, and my heart
is wounded within me.

“T am gone like the shadow when it declineth: I am
tossed up and down as the locust.

“My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh
faileth of fatness.

“Help me, O Lord my God; that they may know that
this is Thy hand; that Thou, Lord, hast done it.”

From that time the hundred and ninth Psalm became
familiar to the villagers, and there were probably not
many who did not get it by heart. There was no doubt
in their minds of the poor shoemaker’s innocence. Every
one knew that he was incapable of hurting a fly. The
crowd had gone into his shop and swept him away with
them—all were in it; and some person seeing the ham-
mer had taken it to help in smashing the machinery.
And Mr. Ellerby had known in his heart that he was
innocent, and if he had spoken a word for him in court
he would have got the benefit of the doubt and been
discharged. But no, he wanted to have his revenge on
some one, and he held his peace and allowed this poor
fellow to be made the victim. Then, when he died, and
his eldest son succeeded him at Doveton Farm, and he
and the other sons got married, and there were no chil-
dren, or none born alive, they went back to the Psalm
again and read and re-read and quoted the words: “Let
his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following

THE ELLERBYS OF DOVETON 199

let their name be blotted out.” Undoubtedly the curse
was on them!

Alas! it was; the curse was their belief in the curse,
and the dreadful effect of the knowledge of it on a
woman’s mind—all the result of Mr. Ellerby the father’s
fatal mistake in not having thrown the scrap of paper
that came to him from the other side of the world into
the fire. All the unhappiness of the “generation follow-
ing’ came about in this way, and the family came to an
end; for when the last of the Ellerbys died at a great
age there was not one person of the name left in that
part of Wiltshire.

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CHAPTER XVII
Old Wiltshire Days

Old memories—Hindon as a borough and as a village—
The Lamb Inn and its birds—The “mob” at Hindon
— The blind smuggler — Rawlings of Lower Pert-
wood Farm—Reed, the thresher and deer-stealer—
He leaves a fortune—Devotion to work—Old Father
Time—Groveley Wood and the people’s rights—
Grace Reed and the Earl of Pembroke—An illusion
of the very aged—Sedan-chairs in Bath—Stick-gath-
ering by the poor—Game-preserving

THE incident of the unhappy young man who was trans-

ported to Australia or Tasmania, which came out in the

shepherd’s history of the Ellerby family, put it in my

mind to look up some of the very aged people of the

downland villages, whose memories could go back to
200

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 201

the events of eighty years ago. I found a few, “still
lingering here,’ who were able to recall that miserable
and memorable year of 1830 and had witnessed the doings
of the “mobs.” One was a woman, my old friend of
Fonthill Bishop, now aged 94, who was in her teens
when the poor labourers, “a thousand strong,” some say,
armed with cudgels, hammers, and axes, visited her vil-
lage and broke up the threshing machines they found
there.

Another person who remembered that time was an
old but remarkably well-preserved man of 89 at Hindon,
a village a couple of miles distant from Fonthill Bishop.
Hindon is a delightful little village, so rustic and pretty
amidst its green, swelling downs, with great woods crown-
ing the heights beyond, that one can hardly credit the
fact that it was formerly an important market and session
town and a Parliamentary borough returning two mem-
bers; also that it boasted among other greatnesses thirteen
public-houses. Now it has two, and not flourishing in
these tea- and mineral-water drinking days. Naturally
it was an exceedingly corrupt little borough, where free
beer for all was the order of the day for a period of four
to six weeks before an election, and where every house-
holder with a vote looked to receive twenty guineas from
the candidate of his choice. It is still remembered that
when a householder in those days was very hard up,
owing, perhaps, to his too frequent visits to the thirteen
public-houses, he would go to some substantial tradesman
in the place and pledge his twenty guineas, due at the
next election! In due time, after the Reform Bill, it
was deprived of its glory, and later when the South-
Western Railway built their line from Salisbury to Yeovil

202 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

and left Hindon some miles away, making their station
at Tisbury, it fell into decay, dwindling to the small
village it now is; and its last state, sober and purified, is
very much better than the old. For although sober, it
is contented and even merry, and exhibits such a sweet
friendliness towards the stranger within its gates as to
make him remember it with pleasure and gratitude.
What a quiet little place Hindon has become, after
its old noisy period, the following little bird story will
show. For several weeks during the spring and summer
of 1909 my home was at the Lamb Inn, a famous posting-
house of the great old days, and we had three pairs of
birds—throstle, pied wagtail, and flycatcher—breeding
in the ivy covering the wall facing the village street, just
over my window. I watched them when building, incu-
bating, feeding their young, and bringing their young
off. The villagers, too, were interested in the sight, and
sometimes a dozen or more men and boys would gather
and stand for half an hour watching the birds flying in
and out of their nests when feeding their young. The
last to come off were the flycatchers, on 18 June. It
was on the morning of the day I left, and one of the
little things flitted into the room where I was having my
breakfast. I succeeded in capturing it before the cats
found out, and put it back on the ivy. There were three
young birds; I had watched them from the time they
hatched, and when I returned a fortnight later, there
were the three, still being fed by their parents in the
trees and on the roof, their favourite perching-place being
on the swinging sign of the “Lamb.” Whenever an old
bird darted at and captured a fly the three young would
flutter round it like three butterflies to get the fly. This

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 203

continued until 18 July, after which date I could not
detect their feeding the young, although the hunger-call
was occasionally heard.

If the flycatcher takes a month to teach its young to
catch their own flies, it is not strange that it breeds but
once in the year. It is a delicate art the bird practises
and takes long to learn, but how different with the martin,
which dismisses its young in a few days and begins
breeding again, even to the third time!

These three broods over my window were not the only
ones in the place; there were at least twenty other pairs
in the garden and outhouses of the inn — sparrows,
thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, starlings, and
swallows. Yet the inn was in the very centre of the
village, and being an inn was the most frequented and
noisiest spot.

To return to my old friend of 89. He was but a
small boy, attending the Hindon school, when the rioters
appeared on the scene, and he watched their entry from
the schoolhouse window. It was market-day, and the
market was stopped by the invaders, and the agricultural
machines brought for sale and exhibition were broken
up. The picture that remains in his mind is of a great
excited crowd in which men and cattle and sheep were
mixed together in the wide street, which was the market-
place, and of shouting and noise of smashing machinery,
and finally of the mob pouring forth over the down on
its way to the next village, he and other little boys fol-
lowing their march.

The smuggling trade flourished greatly at that period,
and there were receivers and distributors of smuggled
wine, spirits, and other commodities in every town and

204 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

"in very many villages throughout the county in spite of
its distance from the sea-coast. One of his memories is
of a blind man of the village, or town as it was then,
who was used as an assistant in this business. He had
lost his sight in childhood, one eye having been destroyed
by a ferret which got into his cradle; then, when he was
about six years old, he was running across the room one
day with a fork in his hand when he stumbled, and falling
on the floor had the other eye pierced by the prongs. But

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in spite of his blindness he became a good worker, and
could make a fence, reap, trim hedges, feed the animals,
and drive a horse as well as any man. His father had
a small farm and was a carrier as well, a quiet, sober,
industrious man who was never suspected by his neigh-
bours of being a smuggler, for he never left his house
and work, but from time to time he had little consign-
ments of rum and brandy in casks received on a dark
night and carefully stowed away in his manure heap and
in a pit under the floor of his pigsty. Then the blind son

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 205

would drive his old mother in the carrier’s cart to Bath
and call at a dozen or twenty private houses, leaving
parcels which had been already ordered and paid for—
a gallon of brandy in one, two or four gallons of rum
at another, and so on, until all was got rid of, and on
the following day they would return with goods to Hin-
don. This quiet little business went on satisfactorily for
some years, during which the officers of the excise had
stared a thousand times with their eagle’s eyes at the
quaint old woman in her poke bonnet and shawl, driven
by a blind man with a vacant face, and had suspected
nothing, when a little mistake was made and a jar of
brandy delivered at a wrong address. The recipient was
an honest gentleman, and in his anxiety to find the right-
ful owner of the brandy made extensive inquiries in his
neighbourhood, and eventually the excisemen got wind
of the affair, and on the very next visit of the old woman
and her son to Bath they were captured. After an
examination before a magistrate the son was discharged
on account of his blindness, but the cart and horses, as
well as the smuggled spirits, were confiscated, and the
poor blind man had to make his way on foot to Hindon.

Another of his recollections is of a family named
Rawlings, tenants of Lower Pertwood Farm, near Hin-
don, a lonely, desolate-looking house hidden away in a
deep hollow among the high downs. The Farmer Raw-
lings of seventy to eighty years ago was a man of
singular ideas, and that he was permitted to put them
in practice shows that severe as was the law in those days,
and dreadful the punishments inflicted on offenders, there
was a kind of liberty which does not exist now—the
liberty a man had of doing just what he thought proper

206 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

in his own house. This Rawlings had a numerous family,
and some died at home and others lived to grow up and
go out into the world under strange names—Faith, Hope,
and Charity were three of his daughters, and Justice,
Morality, and Fortitude three of his sons. Now, for
some reason Rawlings objected to the burial of his dead
in the churchyard of the nearest village — Monkton
Deverill, and the story is that he quarrelled with the
rector over the question of the church bell being tolled
for the funeral. He would have no bell tolled, he swore,
and the rector would bury no one without the bell. There-
upon Rawlings had the coffined corpse deposited on a
table in an outhouse and the door made fast. Later
there was another death, then a third, and all three were
kept in the same place for several years, and although
it was known to the whole countryside no action was
taken by the local authorities.

My old informant says that he was often at the farm
when he was a young man, and he used to steal round
to the “Dead House,” as it was called, to peep through
a crack in the door and see the three coffins resting on
the table in the dim interior.

Eventually the dead disappeared a little while before
the Rawlings gave up the farm, and it was supposed
that the old farmer had buried them in the night-time
in one of the neighbouring chalk-pits, but the spot has
never been discovered.

One of the stories of the old Wiltshire days I picked
up was from an old woman, aged 87, in the Wilton
workhouse. She has a vivid recollection of a labourer
named Reed, in Odstock, a village on the Ebble near Salis-
bury, a stern, silent man, who was a marvel of strength

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 207

and endurance. The work in which he most delighted
was precisely that which most labourers hated, before
threshing machines came in despite the action of the
“mobs’—threshing out corn with the flail. From earliest
dawn till after dark he would sit or stand in a dim, dusty
barn, monotonously pounding away, without an interval
to rest, and without dinner and with no food but a piece
of bread and a pinch of salt. Without the salt he would
not eat the bread. An hour after all others had ceased
from work he would put on his coat and trudge home to
his wife and family.

The woman in the workhouse remembers that once,
when Reed was a very old man past work, he came to
their cottage for something, and while he stood waiting
at the entrance, a little boy ran in and asked his mother
for a piece of bread and butter with sugar on it. Old
Reed glared at him, and shaking his big stick, exclaimed,
“I'd give you sugar with this if you were my boy!” and
so terrible did he look in his anger at the luxury of the
times, that the little boy burst out crying and ran away!

What chiefly interested me about this old man was
that he was a deer-stealer of the days when that offence
was common in the country. It was not so great a crime
as sheep-stealing, for which men were hanged; taking
a deer was punished with nothing worse than hard labour
as a rule. But Reed was never caught; he would labour
his full time and steal away after dark over the downs,
to return in the small hours with a deer on his back. It
was not for his own consumption; he wanted the money
for which he sold it in Salisbury; and it is probable that
he was in league with other poachers, as it is hard to
believe that he could capture the animals single-handed.

208 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

After his death it was found that old Reed had left
a hundred pounds to each of his two surviving daughters,
and it was a wonder to everybody how he had managed
not only to bring up a family and keep himself out of
the workhouse to the end of his long life but to leave so
large a sum of money. One can only suppose that he

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was a rigid economist and never had a week’s illness,
and that by abstaining from beer and tobacco he was
able to save a couple of shillings each week out of his
wages of seven or eight shillings; this, in forty years,
would make the two hundred pounds with something
over.

It is not a very rare thing to find a farm-labourer like
old Reed of Odstock, with not only a strong preference
for a particular kind of work, but a love of it as compel-

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 209

ling as that of an artist for his art. Some friends of mine
whom I went to visit over the border in Dorset told me
of an enthusiast of this description who had recently
died in the village. “What a pity you did not come
sooner,” they said. Alas! it is nearly always so; on first
coming to stay at a village one is told that it has but
just lost its oldest and most interesting inhabitant—a
relic of the olden time.

This man had taken to the scythe as Reed had to the
flail, and was never happy unless he had a field to mow.
He was a very tall old man, so lean that he looked like
a skeleton, the bones covered with a skin as brown as
old leather, and he wore his thin grey hair and snow-
white beard very long. He rode on a white donkey, and
was usually seen mounted galloping down the village
street, hatless, his old brown, bare feet and legs drawn
up to keep them from the ground, his scythe over his
shoulder. ‘Here comes Old Father Time,” they would
cry, as they called him, and run to the door to gaze with
ever fresh delight at the wonderful old man as he rushed
by, kicking and shouting at his donkey to make him
go faster. He was always in a hurry, hunting for work
with furious zeal, and when he got a field to mow so
eager was he that he would not sleep at home, even if
it was close by, but would lie down on the grass at the
side of the field and start working at dawn, between
two and three o’clock, quite three hours before the world
woke up to its daily toil.

The name of Reed, the zealous thresher with the flail,
serves to remind me of yet another Reed, a woman who
died a few years ago aged 94, and whose name should
be cherished in one of the downland villages. She was

210 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

a native of Barford St. Martin on the Nadder, one of
two villages, the other being Wishford, on the Wylye
river, the inhabitants of which have the right to go into
Groveley Wood, an immense forest on the Wilton estate,
to obtain wood for burning, each person being entitled
to take home as much wood as he or she can carry. The
people of Wishford take green wood, but those of Bar-
ford only dead, they having bartered their right at a
remote period to cut growing trees for a yearly sum of
five pounds, which the lord of the manor still pays to
the village, and, in addition, the right to take dead wood.

It will be readily understood that this right possessed
by the people of two villages, both situated within a
mile of the forest, has been a perpetual source of annoy-
ance to the noble owners in modern times, since the strict
preservation of game, especially of pheasants, has grown
to be almost a religion to the landowners. Now it came
to pass that about half a century or longer ago, the
Pembroke of that time made the happy discovery, as he
imagined, that there was nothing to show that the Bar-
ford people had any right to the dead wood. They had
been graciously allowed to take it, as was the case all
over the country at that time, and that was all. At once
he issued an edict prohibiting the taking of dead wood
from the forest by the villagers, and great as the loss
was to them they acquiesced; not a man of Barford St.
Martin dared to disobey the prohibition or raise his voice
against it. Grace Reed then determined to oppose the
mighty earl, and accompanied by four other women of
the village boldly went to the wood and gathered their
sticks and brought them home. They were summoned
before the magistrates and fined, and on their refusal

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 211

to pay were sent to prison; but the very next day they
were liberated and told that a mistake had been made,
that the matter had been inquired into, and it had been
found that the people of Barford did really have the
right they had exercised so long to take dead wood from
the forest.

As a result of the action of these women the right
has not been challenged since, and on my last visit to
Barford, a few days before writing this chapter, I saw
three women coming down from the forest with as much
dead wood as they could carry on their heads and backs.
But how near they came to losing their right! It was
a bold, an unheard-of thing which they did, and if there
had not been a poor cottage woman with the spirit to
do it at the proper moment the right could never have
been revived.

-Grace Reed’s children’s children are living at Barford
now; they say that to the very end of her long life she
preserved a very clear memory of the people and events
of the village in the old days early in the last century.
They say, too, that in recalling the far past, the old people
and scenes would present themselves so vividly to her
mind that she would speak of them as of recent things,
and would say to some one fifty years younger than
herself, “Can’t you remember it? Surely you haven’t
forgotten it when ’twas the talk of the village!”

It is a common illusion of the very aged, and I had
an amusing instance of it in my old Hindon friend when
he gave me his first impressions of Bath as he saw it
about the year 1835. What astonished him most were
the sedan-chairs, for he had never even heard of such a
conveyance, but here in this city of wonders you met

212 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

them in every street. Then he added, “But you’ve been
to Bath and of course you’ve seen them, and know all
about it.”

About firewood-gathering by the poor in woods and
forests, my old friend of Fonthill Bishop says that the
people of the villages adjacent to the Fonthill and Great
Ridge Woods were allowed to take as much dead wood
as they wanted from those places. She was accustomed
to go to the Great Ridge Wood which was even wilder
and more like a natural forest in those days than it is
now. It was fully two miles from her village, a longish
distance to carry a heavy load, and it was her custom
after getting the wood out to bind it firmly in a large
barrel-shaped bundle or faggot, as in that way she could
roll it down the smooth steep slopes of the down and
so get her burden home without so much groaning and
sweating. The great wood was then full of hazel-trees,
and produced such an abundance of nuts that from
mid-July to September people flocked to it for the nutting
from all the country round, coming even from Bath and
Bristol to load their carts with nuts in sacks for the
market. Later, when the wood began to be more strictly
preserved for sporting purposes, the rabbits were allowed
to increase excessively, and during the hard winters they
attacked the hazel-trees, gnawing off the bark, until this
most useful and profitable wood the forest produced—
the scrubby oaks having little value—was wellnigh extir-
pated. By and by pheasants as well as rabbits were
strictly preserved, and the firewood-gatherers were ex-
cluded altogether. At present you find dead wood lying
about all over the place, abundantly as in any primitive
forest, where trees die of old age or disease, or are blown

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 213

down or broken off by the winds and are left to rot on
the ground, overgrown with ivy and brambles. But of
all this dead wood not a stick to boil a kettle may be
taken by the neighbouring poor lest the pheasants should
be disturbed or a rabbit be picked up.

Some more of the old dame’s recollections will be
given in the next chapter, showing what the condition
of the people was in this district about the year 1830,
when the poor farm-labourers were driven by hunger
and misery to revolt against their masters—the farmers
who were everywhere breaking up the downs with the
plough to sow more and still more corn, who were grow-
ing very fat and paying higher and higher rents to their
fat landlords, while the wretched men that drove the
plough had hardly enough to satisfy their hunger.

CHAPTER XVIII

Old Wiltshire Days—Continued

An old Wiltshire woman’s memories—Her home—Work
on a farm —A little bird-scarer — Housekeeping —
The agricultural labourers’ rising—Villagers out of
work — Relief work — A game of ball with barley
bannocks—Sheep-stealing—A poor man hanged—
Temptations to steal—A sheep-stealing shepherd—
A sheep-stealing farmer—Story of Ebenezer Garlick
—A sheep-stealer at Chitterne — The law and the
judges—A “human devil” in a black cap—How the
revolting labourers were punished—A last scene at
Salisbury Court House —Inquest on a murdered
man—Policy of the farmers

THE story of her early life told by my old friend Joan,
aged 94, will serve to give some idea of the extreme
poverty and hard suffering life of the agricultural labour-
ers during the thirties of last century, at a time when
farmers were exceedingly prosperous and landlords draw-
ing high rents.

She was 3 years old when her mother died, after the
birth of a boy, the last of eleven children. There was

214

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 215

a dame’s school in their little village of Fonthill Abbey,
but the poverty of the family would have made it impos-
sible for Joan to attend had it not been for an unselfish
person residing there, a Mr. King, who was anxious
that every child should be taught its letters. He paid
for little Joan’s schooling from the age of 4 to 8; and
now, in the evening of her life, when she sits by the fire
with her book, she blesses the memory of the man, dead
these seventy or eighty years, who made this solace pos-
sible for her.

After the age of 8 there could be no more school, for
now all the older children had gone out into the world
to make their own poor living, the boys to work on
distant farms, the girls to service or to be wives, and
Joan was wanted at home to keep house for her father,
to do the washing, mending, cleaning, cooking, and to
be mother to her little brother as well.

Her father was a ploughman, at seven shillings a week;
but when Joan was 10 he met with a dreadful accident
when ploughing with a couple of young or intractable
oxen; in trying to stop them he got entangled in the
ropes and one of his legs badly broken by the plough.
As a result it was six months before he could leave his
cottage. The overseer of the parish, a prosperous farmer
who had a large farm a couple of miles away, came to
inquire into the matter and see what was to be done.
His decision was that the man would receive three shill-
ings a week until able to start work again, and as that
would just serve to keep him, the children must go out
to work. Meanwhile, one of the married daughters had
come to look after her father in the cottage, and that
set the little ones free.

216 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

The overseer said he would give them work on his
farm and pay them a few pence apiece and give them
their meals; so to his farm they went, returning each
evening home. That was her first place, and from that
time on she was a toiler, indoors and out, but mainly
in the fields, till she was past 85 ;—seventy-five years of
hard work—then less and less as her wonderful strength
diminished, and her sons and daughters were getting
grey, until now at the age of 94 she does very little—
practically nothing.

In that first place she had a very hard master in the
farmer and overseer. He was known in all the neigh-
bourhood as “Devil Turner,” and even at that time, when
farmers had their men under their heel as it were, he
was noted for his savage tyrannical disposition; also for
a curious sardonic humour, which displayed itself in
the forms of punishment he inflicted on the workmen
who had the ill-luck to offend him. The man had to
take the punishment, however painful or disgraceful,
without a murmur, or go and starve. Every morning
thereafter Joan and her little brother, aged 7, had to be
up in time to get to the farm at five o’clock in the morn-
ing, and if it was raining or snowing or bitterly cold, so
much the worse for them, but they had to be there, for
Devil Turner’s bad temper was harder to bear than bad
weather. Joan was a girl of all work, in and out of
doors, and, in severe weather, when there was nothing
else for her to do, she would be sent into the fields to
gather flints, the coldest of all tasks for her little hands.

“But what could your little brother, a child of 7, do
in such a place?” I asked.

She laughed when she told me of her little brother’s

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 217

very first day at the farm. The farmer was, for a devil,
considerate, and gave him something very light for a
beginning, which was to scare the birds from the ricks.
“And if they will come back you must catch them,” he
said, and left the little fellow to obey the difficult com-
mand as he could. The birds that worried him most
were the fowls, for however often he hunted them away
they would come back again. Eventually, he found some
string, with which he made some little loops fastened to
sticks, and these he arranged on a spot of ground he
had cleared, scattering a few grains of corn on it to
attract the “birds.” By this means he succeeded in
capturing three of the robbers, and when the farmer
came round at noon to see how he was getting on, the
little fellow showed him his captures. “These are not
birds,” said the farmer, “they are fowls, and don’t you
trouble yourself any more about them, but keep your
eye on the sparrows and little birds and rooks and jack-
daws that come to pull the straws out.”

That was how he started; then from the ricks to bird-
scaring in the fields and to other tasks suited to one of
his age, not without much suffering and many tears. The
worst experience was the punishment of standing motion-
less for long hours at a time on a chair placed out in
the yard, full in sight of the windows of the house, so
that he could be seen by the inmates; the hardest, the
cruellest task that could be imposed on him would come
as a relief after this. Joan suffered no punishment of
that kind; she was very anxious to please her master
and worked hard; but she was an intelligent and spirited
child, and as the sole result of her best efforts was that
more and more work was put on her, she revolted against

218 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

such injustice, and eventually, tried beyond endurance,
she ran away home and refused to go back to the farm
any more. She found some work in the village; for
now her sister had to go back to her husband, and Joan
had to take her place and look after her father and the

house as well as earn something to supplement the three
shillings a week they had to live on.

After about nine months her father was up and out
again and went back to the plough; for just then a great
deal of down was being broken up and brought under
cultivation on account of the high price of wheat and
good ploughmen were in request. He was lame, the
injured limb being now considerably shorter than the
other, and when ploughing he could only manage to
keep on his legs by walking with the longer one in the
furrow and the other on the higher ground. But after
struggling on for some months in this way, suffering
much pain and his strength declining, he met with a

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 219

fresh accident and was laid up once more in his cottage,
and from that time until his death he did no more farm
work. Joan and her little brother lived or slept at home
and worked to keep themselves and him.

Now in this, her own little story, and in her account
of the condition of the people at that time; also in the
histories of other old men and women whose memories
go back as far as hers, supplemented by a little reading
in the newspapers of that day, I can understand how it
came about that these poor labourers, poor, spiritless
slaves as they had been made by long years of extremest
poverty and systematic oppression, rose at last against
their hard masters and smashed the agricultural machines,
and burnt ricks and broke into houses to destroy and
plunder their contents. It was a desperate, a mad ad-
venture—these gatherings of half-starved yokels, armed
with sticks and axes, and they were quickly put down
and punished in a way that even William the Bastard
would not have considered as too lenient. But oppres-
sion had made them mad; the introduction of threshing
machines was but the last straw, the culminating act of
the hideous system followed by landlords and their ten-
ants—the former to get the highest possible rent for his
land, the other to get his labour at the lowest possible
rate. It was a compact between landlord and tenant
aimed against the labourer. It was not merely the fact
that the wages of a strong man were only seven shillings
a week at the outside, a sum barely sufficient to keep
him and his family from starvation and rags (as a fact
it was not enough, and but for a little poaching and
stealing he could not have lived), but it was customary,
especially on the small farms, to get rid of the men after

220 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

the harvest and leave them to exist the best way they
could during the bitter winter months. Thus every vil-
lage, as a rule, had its dozen or twenty or more men
thrown out each year—good steady men, with families
dependent on them; and besides these there were the
aged and weaklings and the lads who had not yet got
a place. The misery of these out-of-work labourers
was extreme. They would go to the woods and gather
faggots of dead wood, which they would try to sell in
the villages; but there were few who could afford to
buy of them; and at night they would skulk about the
fields to rob a swede or two to satisfy the cravings of
hunger.

In some parishes the farmer overseers were allowed
to give relief work—out of the rates, it goes without say-
ing—to these unemployed men of the village who had
been discharged in October or November and would be
wanted again when the winter was over. They would
be put to flint-gathering in the fields, their wages being
four shillings a week. Some of the very old people of
Winterbourne Bishop, when speaking of the principal
food of the labourers at that time, the barley bannock
and its exceeding toughness, gave me an amusing account
of a game of balls invented by the flint-gatherers, just for
the sake of a little fun during their long weary day in
the fields, especially in cold, frosty weather. The men
would take their dinners with them, consisting of a few
barley balls or cakes, in their coat pockets, and at noon
they would gather at one spot to enjoy their meal, and
seat themselves on the ground in a very wide circle, the
men about ten yards apart, then each one would produce
his bannocks and start throwing, aiming at some other

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 221

man’s face; there were hits and misses and great excite-
ment and hilarity for twenty or thirty minutes, after
which the earth and gravel adhering to the balls would
be wiped off, and they would set themselves to the hard
task of masticating and swallowing the heavy stuff.

At sunset they would go home to a supper of more
barley bannocks, washed down with hot water flavoured
with some aromatic herb or weed, and then straight to
bed to get warm, for there was little firing.

It was not strange that sheep-stealing was one of the
commonest offences against the law at that time, in spite
of the dreadful penalty. Hunger made the people reck-
less. My old friend Joan, and other old persons, have
said to me that it appeared in those days that the men
were strangely indifferent and did not seem to care
whether they were hanged or not. It is true they did
not hang very many of them—the judge as a rule, after
putting on his black cap and ordering them to the gallows,
would send in a recommendation to mercy for most of
them; but the mercy of that time was like that of the
wicked, exceedingly cruel. Instead of swinging, it was
transportation for life, or for fourteen, and, at the very
least, seven years. Those who have read Clarke’s terrible
book, “For the Term of His Natural Life,” know (in
a way) what these poor Wiltshire labourers, who in
most cases were never more heard of by their wives
and children, were sent to endure in Australia and Tas-
mania.

And some were hanged; my friend Joan named some
people she knows in the neighbourhood who are the
grandchildren of a young man with a wife and family
of small children who was hanged at Salisbury. She

Loe A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

had a vivid recollection of this case because it had seemed
so hard, the man having been maddened by want when
he took a sheep; also because when he was hanged his
poor young wife travelled to the place of slaughter to
beg for his body, and had it brought home and buried
decently in the village churchyard.

How great the temptation to steal sheep must have
been, anyone may know by merely walking about among
the fields in this part of the country to see how the sheep
are folded and left by night unguarded, often at long
distances from the village, in distant fields and on the
downs. Even in the worst times it was never customary,
never thought necessary, to guard the flock by night.
Many cases could be given to show how easy it was to
steal sheep. One quite recent, about twenty years ago,
is of a shepherd who was frequently sent with sheep to
the fairs, and who on his way to Wilton fair with a
flock one night turned aside to open a fold and let out
nineteen sheep. On arriving at the fair he took out
the stolen sheep and sold them to a butcher of his ac-
quaintance who sent them up to London. But he had
taken too many from one flock; they were quickly missed,
and by some lucky chance it was found out and the
shepherd arrested. He was sentenced to eight months’
hard labour, and it came out during the trial that this
poor shepherd, whose wages were fourteen shillings a
week, had a sum of £400 to his credit in a Salisbury bank.

Another case which dates far back is that of a farmer
named Day, who employed a shepherd or drover to take
sheep to the fairs and markets and steal sheep for him
on the way. It is said that he went on at this game for
years before it was discovered. Eventually master and

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 223

man quarrelled and the drover gave information, where-
upon Day was arrested and lodged in Fisherton Jail at
Salisbury. Later he was sent to take his trial at Devizes,
on horseback, accompanied by two constables. At the
“Druid’s Head,” a public house on the way, the three
travellers alighted for refreshments, and there Day suc-
ceeded in giving them the slip, and jumping on a fast
horse, standing ready saddled for him, made his escape.
Farmer Day never returned to the Plain and was never
heard of again.

There is an element of humour in some of the sheep-
stealing stories of the old days. At one village where
I stayed often, I heard about a certain Ebenezer Garlick,
who was commonly called, in allusion no doubt to his
surname, “Sweet Vi’lets.”” He was a sober, hard-work-
ing man, an example to most, but there was this against
him, that he cherished a very close friendship with a
poor, disreputable, drunken loafer nicknamed “Flitter-
mouse,” who spent most of his time hanging about the
old coaching inn at the place for the sake of tips. Sweet
Vi'lets was always giving coppers and sixpences to this
man, but one day they fell out when Flittermouse begged
for a shilling. He must, he said, have a shilling, he
couldn’t do with less, and when the other refused he
followed him, demanding the money with abusive words,
to everybody’s astonishment. Finally Sweet Vi’lets
turned on him and told him to go to the devil. Flitter-
mouse in a rage went straight to the constable and
denounced his patron as a sheep-stealer. He, Flitter-
mouse, had been his servant and helper, and on the very
last occasion of stealing a sheep he had got rid of the
skin and offal by throwing them down an old disused

224 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

well at the top of the village street. To the well the
constable went with ropes and hooks, and succeeded in
fishing up the remains described, and he thereupon ar-
rested Garlick and took him before a magistrate, who
committed him for trial. Flittermouse was the only
witness for the prosecution, and the judge in his summing
up said that, taking into consideration Garlick’s known
character in the village as a sober, diligent, honest man,
it would be a little too much to hang him on the unsup-
ported testimony of a creature like Flittermouse, who
was half fool and half scoundrel. The jury, pleased and
very much surprised at being directed to let a man off,
obediently returned a verdict of Not Guilty, and Sweet
Vi'lets returned from Salisbury triumphant, to be con-
gratulated on his escape by all the villagers, who, how-
ever, slyly winked and smiled at one another.

Of sheep-stealing stories I will relate one more—a
case which never came into court and was never dis-
covered. It was related to me by a middle-aged man,
a shepherd of Warminster, who had it from his father,
a shepherd of Chitterne, one of the lonely, isolated vil-
lages on Salisbury Plain, between the Avon and the
Wylye. His father had it from the person who com-
mitted the crime and was anxious to tell it to some one,
and knew that the shepherd was his true friend, a silent,
safe man. He was a farm-labourer, named Shergold—
one of the South Wiltshire surnames very common in
the early part of last century, which now appear to be
dying out—described as a very big, powerful man, full
of life and energy. He had a wife and several young
children to keep, and the time was near mid-winter;
Shergold was out of work, having been discharged from

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 225

the farm at the end of the harvest; it was an exceptionally
cold season and there was no food and no firing in the
house.

One evening in late December a drover arrived at
Chitterne with a flock of sheep which he was driving to
Tilshead, another downland village several miles away.
He was anxious to get to Tilshead that night and wanted
a man to help him. Shergold was on the spot and under-
took to go with him for the sum of fourpence. They
set out when it was getting dark; the sheep were put on
the road, the drover going before the flock and Shergold
following at the tail. It was a cold, cloudy night, threat-
ening snow, and so dark that he could hardly distinguish
the dim forms of even the hindmost sheep, and by and
by the temptation to steal one assailed him. For how
easy it would be for him to do it! With his tremendous
strength he could kill and hide a sheep very quickly
without making any sound whatever to alarm the drover.
He was very far ahead; Shergold could judge the dis-
tance by the sound of his voice when he uttered a call
or shout from time to time, and by the barking of the
dog, as he flew up and down, first on one side of the road,
then on the other, to keep the flock well on it. And he
thought of what a sheep would be to him and to his
hungry ones at home until the temptation was too strong,
and suddenly lifting his big, heavy stick he brought it
down with such force on the head of a sheep as to drop
it with its skull crushed, dead as a stone. Hastily picking
it up he ran a few yards away and placed it among the
furze-bushes, intending to take it home on his way
back, and then returned to the flock.

They arrived at Tilshead in the small hours, and after

226 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

receiving his fourpence he started for home, walking
rapidly and then running to be in time, but when he got
back to where the sheep was lying the dawn was coming,
and he knew that before he could get to Chitterne with
that heavy burden on his back people would be getting
up in the village and he would perhaps be seen. The
only thing to do was to hide the sheep and return for it
on the following night. Accordingly he carried it away
- a couple of hundred yards to a pit or small hollow in
the down full of bramble and furze-bushes, and here he
concealed it, covering it with a mass of dead bracken
and herbage, and left it. That afternoon the long-threat-
ening snow began to fall, and with snow on the ground
he dared not go to recover his sheep, since his footprints
would betray him; he must wait once more for the snow
to melt. But the snow fell all night, and what must his
feelings have been when he looked at it still falling in
the morning and knew that he could have gone for the
sheep with safety, since all traces would have been quickly
obliterated !

Once more there was nothing to do but wait patiently
for the snow to cease falling and for the thaw. But
how intolerable it was; for the weather continued bitterly
cold for many days, and the whole country was white.
During those hungry days even that poor comfort of
sleeping or dozing away the time was denied him, for
the danger of discovery was ever present to his tind,
and Shergold was not one of the callous men who had
become indifferent to their fate; it was his first crime,
and he loved his own life and his wife and children, crying
to him for food. And the food for them was lying there
on the down, close by, and he could not get it! Roast

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 227

mutton, boiled mutton—mutton in a dozen delicious
forms—the thought of it was as distressing, as madden-
ing, as that of the peril he was in.

It was a full fortnight before the wished thaw came;
then with fear and trembling he went for his sheep, only
to find that it had been pulled to pieces and the flesh
devoured by dogs and foxes!

From these memories of the old villagers I turn to
the newspapers of the day to make a few citations.

The law as it was did not distinguish between a case
of the kind just related, of the starving, sorely tempted
Shergold, and that of the systematic thief: sheep-stealing
was a capital offence and the man must hang, unless
recommended to mercy, and we know what was meant
by “mercy” in those days. That so barbarous a law
existed within memory of people to be found living in
most villages appears almost incredible to us; but despite
the recommendations to “mercy” usual in a large majority
of cases, the law of that time was not more horrible
than the temper of the men who administered it. There
are good and bad among all, and in all professions, but
there is also a black spot in most, possibly in all hearts,
which may be developed to almost any extent, and change
the justest, wisest, most moral men into “human devils”
—the phrase invented by Canon Wilberforce in another
connexion. In reading the old reports and the expres-
sions used by the judges in their summings up and sen-
tences, it is impossible not to believe that the awful power
they possessed, and its constant exercise, had not only
produced the inevitable hardening effect, but had made
them cruel in the true sense of the word. Their pleasure

228 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

in passing dreadful sentences was very thinly disguised,
indeed, by certain lofty conventional phrases as to the
necessity of upholding the law, morality, and religion;
they were, indeed, as familiar with the name of the Deity
as any ranter in a conventicle, and the “enormity of the
crime’’ was an expression as constantly used in the case
of the theft of a loaf of bread, or of an old coat left
hanging on a hedge, by some ill-clad, half-starved wretch,
as in cases of burglary, arson, rape, and murder.

It is surprising to find how very few the real crimes
were in those days, despite the misery of the people;
that nearly all the “crimes” for which men were sen-
tenced to the gallows and to transportation for life, or
for long terms, were offences which would now be
sufficiently punished by a few weeks’, or even a few
days’, imprisonment. Thus in April, 1825, I note that
Mr. Justice Park commented on the heavy appearance
of the calendar. It was not so much the number (170)
of the offenders that excited his concern as it was the
nature of the crimes with which they were charged. The
worst crime in this instance was sheep-stealing!

Again, this same Mr. Justice Park, at the Spring
Assizes at Salisbury, 1827, said that though the calendar
was a heavy one, he was happy to find on looking at
the depositions of the principal cases, that they were not
of a very serious character. Nevertheless he passed sen-
tence of death on twenty-eight persons, among them
being one for stealing half a crown!

Of the twenty-eight all but three were eventually
reprieved, one of the fated three being a youth of 19,
who was charged with stealing a mare and pleaded guilty
in spite of a warning from the judge not to do so. This

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS poe

irritated the great man who had the power of life and
death in his hand. In passing sentence the judge “‘ex-
patiated on the prevalence of the crime of horse-stealing
and the necessity of making an example. The enormity
of Read’s crime rendered him a proper example, and he
would therefore hold out no hope of mercy towards
him.” As to the plea of guilty, he remarked that nowa-
days too many persons pleaded guilty, deluded with the
hope that it would be taken into consideration and they
would escape the severer penalty. He was determined
to put a stop to that sort of thing; if Read had not pleaded
guilty no doubt some extenuating circumstance would .
have come up during the trial and he would have saved
his life.

There, if ever, spoke the “human devil” in a black
cap!

I find another case of a sentence of transportation
for life on a youth of 18, named Edward Baker, for
stealing a pocket-handkerchief. Had he pleaded guilty
it might have been worse for him.

At the Salisbury Spring Assizes, 1830, Mr. Justice
Gazalee, addressing the grand jury, said that none of
the crimes appeared to be marked with circumstances
of great moral turpitude. The prisoners numbered 130;
he passed sentences of death on twenty-nine, life trans-
portations on five, fourteen years on five, seven years
on eleven, and various terms of hard labour on the others.

The severity of the magistrates at the quarter-sessions
was equally revolting. I notice in one case, where the
leading magistrate on the bench was a great local mag-
nate, an M.P. for Salisbury, etc., a poor fellow with the
unfortunate name of Moses Snook was charged with

230 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

stealing a plank ten feet long, the property of the afore-
said local magnate, M.P., etc., and sentenced to fourteen
years’ transportation. Sentenced by the man who owned
the plank, worth perhaps a shilling or two!

When such was the law of the land and the temper
of those who administered it—judges and magistrates
or landlords—what must the misery of the people have
been to cause them to rise in revolt against their masters!
They did nothing outrageous even in the height of their
frenzy; they smashed the threshing machines, burnt some
ricks, while the maddest of them broke into a few houses
and destroyed their contents; but they injured no man;
yet they knew what they were facing—the gallows or
transportation to the penal settlements ready for their
reception at the Antipodes. It is a pity that the history
of this rising of the agricultural labourer, the most patient
and submissive of men, has never been written. Nothing,
in fact, has ever been said of it except from the point
of view of landowners and farmers, but there is ample
material for a truer and a moving narrative, not only
in the brief reports in the papers of the time, but also
in the memories of many persons still living, and of their
children and children’s children, preserved in many a
cottage throughout the south of England.

Hopeless as the revolt was and quickly suppressed,
it had served to alarm the landlords and their tenants,
and taken in conjunction with other outbreaks, notably
at Bristol, it produced a sense of anxiety in the mind of
the country generally. The feeling found a somewhat
amusing expression in the House of Commons, in a
motion of Mr. Perceval, on 14 February, 1831. This
was to move an address to His Majesty to appoint a

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 231

day of a general fast throughout the United Kingdom.
He said that “‘the state of the country called for a measure
like this—that it was a state of political and religious
disorganization—that the elements of the Constitution
were being hourly loosened—that in this land there was
no attachment, no control, no humility of spirit, no
mutual confidence between the poor man and the rich,
the employer and the employed; but fear and mistrust
and aversion, where, in the time of our fathers, there
was nothing but brotherly love and rejoicing before the
Lord.”

The House was cynical and smilingly put the matter
by, but the anxiety was manifested plainly enough in
the treatment meted out to the poor men who had been
arrested and were tried before the Special Commissions
sent down to Salisbury, Winchester, and other towns.
No doubt it was a pleasant time for the judges; at Salis-
bury thirty-four poor fellows were sentenced to death;
thirty-three to be transported for life, ten for fourteen
years, and so on.

And here is one last little scene about which the reports
in the newspapers of the time say nothing, but which I
have from one who witnessed and clearly remembers it,
a woman of 95, whose whole life has been passed at a
village within sound of the Salisbury Cathedral bells.

It was when the trial was ended, when those who were
found guilty and had been sentenced were brought out
of the court-house to be taken back to prison, and from
all over the Plain and from all parts of Wiltshire their
womenfolk had come to learn their fate, and were gath-
ered, a pale, anxious, weeping crowd, outside the gates.
The sentenced men came out looking eagerly at the people

Vays A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

until they recognized their own and cried out to them
to be of good cheer. “’Tis hanging for me,’’ one would
say, “but there’ll perhaps be a recommendation to mercy,
so don’t you fret till you know.” Then another: “Don’t
go on so, old mother, ’tis only for life I’m sent.” And
yet another: “Don’t you cry, old girl, ’tis only fourteen
years I’ve got, and maybe I'll live to see you all again.”
And so on, as they filed out past their weeping women
on their way to Fisherton Jail, to be taken thence to the
transports in Portsmouth and Plymouth harbours want-
ing to convey their living freights to that hell on earth
so far from home. Not criminals but good, brave men
were these!—Wiltshiremen of that strong, enduring,
patient class, who not only as labourers on the land but
on many a hard-fought field in many parts of the world
from of old down to our war of a few years ago in
Africa, have shown the stuff that was in them!

But alas! for the poor women who were left—for
the old mother who could never hope to see her boy
again, and for the wife and her children who waited
and hoped against hope through long toiling years,

And dreamed and started as they slept

For joy that he was come,
but waking saw his face no more. Very few, so far
as I can make out, not more than one in five or six,
ever returned.

This, it may be said, was only what they might have
expected, the law being what it was—just the ordinary
thing. The hideous part of the business was that, as an
effect of the alarm created in the minds of those who
feared injury to their property and loss of power to
oppress the poor labourers, there was money in plenty

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 233

subscribed to hire witnesses for the prosecution. It was
necessary to strike terror into the people. The smell
of blood-money brought out a number of scoundrels
who for a few pounds were only too ready to swear
away the life of any man, and it was notorious that
numbers of poor fellows were condemned in this way.
One incident as to this point may be given in con-
clusion of this chapter about old unhappy things. It
relates not to one of those who were sentenced to the

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gallows or to transportation, but to an inquest and the
treatment of the dead.

I have spoken in the last chapter of the mob that visited
Hindon, Fonthill, and other villages. They ended their
round at Pytt House, near Tisbury, where they broke
up the machinery. On that occasion a body of yeomanry
came on the scene, but arrived only after the mob had
accomplished its purpose of breaking up the threshing
machines. When the troops appeared the “rioters,” as
they were called, made off into the woods and escaped;
but before they fled one of them had met his death. A
number of persons from the farms and villages around

234 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

had gathered at the spot and were looking on, when
one, a farmer from the neighbouring village of Chilmark,
snatched a gun from a gamekeeper’s hand and shot one
of the rioters, killing him dead. On 27 January, 1831,
an inquest was held on the body, and some one was
found to swear that the man had been shot by one of
the yeomanry, although it was known to everybody that,
when the man was shot, the troop had not yet arrived
on the scene. The man, this witness stated, had attacked,
or threatened, one of the soldiers with his stick, and had
been shot. This was sufficient for the coroner; he in-
structed his jury to bring in a verdict of “Justifiable
homicide,” which they obediently did. “This verdict,”
the coroner then said, “entailed the same consequences
as an act of felo-de-se, and he felt that he could not give
a warrant for the burial of the deceased. However
painful the duty devolved on him in thus adding to the
sorrows of the surviving relations, the law appeared too
clear to him to admit of an alternative.”

The coroner was just as eager as the judges to exhibit
his zeal for the gentry, who were being injured in their
interests by these disturbances; and though he could not
hang anybody, being only a coroner, he could at any rate
kick the one corpse brought before him. Doubtless the
“surviving relations,’ for whose. sorrows he had ex-
pressed sympathy, carried the poor murdered man off
by night to hide him somewhere in the earth.

After the law had been thus vindicated and all the
business done with, even to the corpse-kicking by the
coroner, the farmers were still anxious and began to
show it by holding meetings and discussions on the con-
ditions of the labourers. Everybody said that the men

OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS 235

had been very properly punished; but at the same time
it was admitted that they had some reason for their
discontent, that, with bread so dear, it was hardly pos-
sible for a man with a family to support himself on
seven shillings a week, and it was generally agreed to
raise the wages one shilling. But by and by when the
anxiety had quite died out, when it was found that the
men were more submissive than they had ever been, the
lesson they had received having sunk deep into their
minds, they cut off the extra shilling, and wages were
what they had been—seven shillings a week for a hard-
working seasoned labourer, with a family to keep, and
from four to six shillings for young unmarried men
and for women, even for those who did as much work
in the field as any man.
But there were no more risings.

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CHAPTER XIX
The Shepherd’s Return

Yarnborough Castle sheep-fair-— Caleb leaves Doveton
and goes into Dorset—A land of strange happenings
—He is home-sick and returns to Winterbourne
Bishop — Joseph, his brother, leaves home — His
meeting with Caleb’s old master—Settles in Dorset
and is joined by his sister Hannah—They marry and
have children—I go to look for them—Joseph Baw-
combe in extreme old age—Hannah in decline

Ca.eEs’s shepherding period in Doveton came to a some-
what sudden conclusion. It was nearing the end of
August and he was beginning to think about the sheep
which would have to be taken to the “Castle” sheep-fair
on 5 October, and it appeared strange to him that his
master had so far said nothing to him on the subject.
By “Castle” he meant Yarnborough Castle, the name
236

THE SHEPHERD’S RETURN 237

of a vast prehistoric earth-work on one of the high
downs between Warminster and Amesbury. ‘There is
no village there and no house near; it is nothing but an
immense circular wall and trench, inside of which the
fair is held. It was formerly one of the most important
sheep-fairs in the country, but for the last two or three
decades has been falling off and is now of little account.
When Bawcombe was shepherd at Doveton it was still
great, and when he first went there as Mr. Ellerby’s
head-shepherd he found himself regarded as a person
of considerable importance at the Castle. Before setting
out with the sheep he asked for his master’s instructions
and was told that when he got to the ground he would
be directed by the persons in charge to the proper place.
The Ellerbys, he said, had exhibited and sold their sheep
there for a period of eighty-eight years, without missing
a year, and always at the same spot. Every person visit-
ing the fair on business knew just where to find the
Ellerbys’ sheep, and, he added with pride, they expected
them to be the best sheep at the Castle.

One day Mr. Ellerby came to have a talk with his
shepherd, and in reply to a remark of the latter about
the October sheep-fair he said that he would have no
sheep to send. “No sheep to send, Master!’ exclaimed
Caleb in amazement. Then Mr. Ellerby told him that
he had taken a notion into his head that he wanted to
go abroad with his wife for a time, and that some person
had just made him so good an offer for all his sheep
that he was going to accept it, so that for the first time
in eighty-eight years there would be no sheep from Dove-
ton Farm at the Castle fair. When he came back he
would buy again; but if he could live away from the

238 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

farm, he would probably never come back—he would
sell it.

Caleb went home with a heavy heart and told his wife.
It grieved her, too, because of her feeling for Mrs. Eller-
by, but in a little while she set herself to comfort him.
“Why, what’s wrong about it?” she asked. ‘“ ’Twill be
more’n three months before the year’s out, and master’ll
pay for all the time sure, and we can go home to Bishop
and bide a little without work, and see if that father
of yours has forgiven ’ee for going away to Warminster.”

So they comforted themselves, and were beginning to
think with pleasure of home when Mr. Ellerby informed
his shepherd that a friend of his, a good man though
not a rich one, was anxious to take him as head-shepherd,
with good wages and a good cottage rent free. The
only drawback for the Bawcombes was that it would
take them still farther from home, for the farm was in
Dorset, although quite near the Wiltshire border.

Eventually they accepted the offer, and by the middle
of September were once more settled down in what was to
them a strange land. How strange it must have seemed
to Caleb, how far removed from home and all familiar
things, when even to this day, more than forty years
later, he speaks of it as the ordinary modern man might
speak of a year’s residence in Uganda, Tierra del Fuego,
or the Andaman Islands! It was a foreign country, and
the ways of the people were strange to him, and it was
a land of very strange things. One of the strangest was
an old ruined church in the neighbourhood of the farm
where he was shepherd. It was roofless, more than half
fallen down, and all the standing portion, with the tower,
overgrown with old ivy; the building itself stood in the

THE SHEPHERD’S RETURN 239

centre of a huge round earth-work and trench, with large
barrows on the ground outside the circle. Concerning
this church he had a wonderful story: its decay and ruin
had come about after the great bell in the tower had
mysteriously disappeared, stolen one stormy night, it was
believed, by the Devil himself. The stolen bell, it was
discovered, had been flung into a small river at a distance
of some miles from the church, and there in summer-
time, when the water was low, it could be distinctly seen
lying half buried in the mud at the bottom. But all the
king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t pull it out;
the Devil, who pulled the other way, was strongest.
Eventually some wise person said that a team of white
oxen would be able to pull it out, and after much seeking
the white oxen were obtained, and thick ropes were tied
to the sunken bell, and the cattle were goaded and yelled
at, and tugged and strained until the bell came up and
was finally drawn right up to the top of the steep, cliff-
like bank of the stream. Then one of the teamsters
shouted in triumph, ‘““Now we've got out the bell, in spite
of all the devils in hell,” and no sooner had he spoken
the bold words than the ropes parted, and back tumbled
the bell to its old place at the bottom of the river, where
it remains to this day. Caleb had once met a man in
those parts who assured him that he had seen the bell
with his own eyes, lying nearly buried in mud at the
bottom of the stream.

The legend is not in the history of Dorset; a much
more prosaic account of the disappearance of the bell
is there given, in which the Devil took no part unless
he was at the back of the bad men who were concerned
in the business. But in this strange, remote country,

240 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

outside of “Wiltsheer,” Bawcombe was in a region where
anything might have happened, where the very soil and
pasture was unlike that of his native country, and the
mud adhered to his boots in a most unaccountable way.
It was almost uncanny. Doubtless he was home-sick, for
a month or two before the end of the year he asked his
master to look out for another shepherd.

This was a great disappointment to the farmer: he
had gone a distance from home to secure a good shep-
herd, and had hoped to keep him permanently, and now
after a single year he was going to lose him. What did
the shepherd want? He would do anything to please him,
and begged him to stay another year. But no, his mind
was set on going back to his own native village and to
his own people. And so when his long year was ended
he took his crook and set out over the hills and valleys,
followed by a cart containing his “sticks” and wife and
children. And at home with his old parents and his
people he was happy once more; in a short time he found
a place as head-shepherd, with a cottage in the village,
and followed his flock on the old familiar down, and
everything again was as it had been from the beginning
of life and as he desired it to be even to the end.

His return resulted incidentally in other changes and
migrations in the Bawcombe family. His elder brother
Joseph, unmarried still although his senior by about
eight years, had not got on well at home. He was a
person of a peculiar disposition, so silent with so fixed
and unsmiling an expression, that he gave the idea of a
stolid, thick-skinned man, but at bottom he was of a
sensitive nature, and feeling that his master did not treat
him properly, he gave up his place and was for a long

THE SHEPHERD’S RETURN § 241

time without one. He was singularly attentive to all
that fell from Caleb about his wide wanderings and
strange experiences, especially in the distant Dorset coun-
try; and at length, about a year after his brother’s return,
he announced his intention of going away from his native
place for good to seek his fortune in some distant place
where his services would perhaps be better appreciated.
When asked where he intended going, he answered that
he was going to look for a place in that part of Dorset
where Caleb had been shepherd for a year and had been
so highly thought of.

Now Joseph, being a single man, had no “sticks”;
all his possessions went into a bundle, which he carried
tied to his crook, and with his sheep-dog following at
his heels he set forth early one morning on the most
important adventure of his life. Then occurred an in-
stance of what we call a coincidence, but which the
shepherd of the downs, nursed in the old beliefs and
traditions, prefers to regard as an act of providence.

About noon he was trudging along in the turnpike
road when he was met by a farmer driving in a trap,
who pulled up to speak to him and asked him if he could
say how far it was to Winterbourne Bishop. Joseph
replied that it was about fourteen miles—he had left
Bishop that morning.

Then the farmer asked him if he knew a man there
named Caleb Bawcombe, and if he had a place as shep-
herd there, as he was now on his way to look for him
and to try and persuade him to go back to Dorset, where
he had been his head-shepherd for the space of a year.

Joseph said that Caleb had a place as head-shepherd
on a farm at Bishop, that he was satisfied with it, and

242 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

was moreover one that preferred to bide in his native
place.

The farmer was disappointed, and the other added,
“Maybe you’ve heard Caleb speak of his elder brother
Joseph—I be he.”

“What!” exclaimed the farmer. ‘“You’re Caleb’s
brother! Where be going then?—to a new place?”

“I’ve got no place; I be going to look for a place in
Dorsetsheer,”

“°Tis strange to hear you say that,’ exclaimed the
farmer. He was going, he said, to see Caleb, and if
he would not or could not go back to Dorset himself
to ask him to recommend some man of the village to
him; for he was tired of the ways of the shepherds of
his own part of the country, and his heart was set on
getting a man from Caleb’s village, where shepherds
understood sheep and knew their work. “Now look
here, shepherd,” he continued, “if you’ll engage yourself
to me fora year I’ll gono farther but take you right back
with me in the trap.”

The shepherd was very glad to accept the offer; he
devoutly believed that in making it the farmer was but
acting in accordance with the will of a Power that was
mindful of man and kept watch on him, even on his poor
servant Joseph, who had left his home and people to be
a stranger in a strange land.

So well did servant and master agree that Joseph never
had occasion to look for another place; when his master
died an old man, his son succeeded him as tenant of the
farm, and he continued with the son until he was past
work. Before his first year was out, his younger sister,
Hannah, came to live with him and keep house, and even-

THE SHEPHERD’S RETURN 243

tually they both got married, Joseph to a young woman
of the place, and Hannah to a small working farmer
whose farm was about a mile from the village. Children
were born to both, and in time grew up, Joseph’s sons
following their father’s vocation, while Hannah’s were
brought up to work on the farm. And some of them,
too, got married in time and had children of their own.

These are the main incidents in the lives of Joseph and
Hannah, related to me at different times by their brother ;
he had followed their fortunes from a distance, some-
times getting a message, or hearing of them incidentally,
but he did not see them. Joseph never returned to his
native village, and the visits of Hannah to her old home
had been few and had long ceased. But he cherished
a deep enduring affection for both; he was always anx-
iously waiting and hoping for tidings of them, for Joseph
was now a feeble old man living with one of his sons,
and Hannah, long a widow, was in declining health, but
still kept the farm, assisted by one of her sons and two
unmarried daughters. Though he had not heard for a
long time it never occurred to him to write, nor did they
ever write to him.

Then, when I was staying at Winterbourne Bishop
and had the intention of shortly paying a visit to Caleb,
it occurred to me one day to go into Dorset and look for
these absent ones, so as to be able to give him an account
of their state. It was not a long journey, and arriving
at the village I soon found a son of Joseph, a fine-looking
man, who took me to his cottage, where his wife led me
into the old shepherd’s room. I found him very aged
in appearance, with a grey face and sunken cheeks, lying
on his bed and breathing with difficulty ; but when I spoke

244 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

to him of Caleb a light of joy came into his eyes, and
he raised himself on his pillows, and questioned me eag-
erly about his brother’s state and family, and begged
me to assure Caleb that he was still quite well, although
too feeble to get about much, and that his children were
taking good care of him.

From the old brother I went on to seek the young
sister—there was a difference of more than twenty years
in their respective ages—and found her at dinner in
the large old farm-house kitchen. At all events she was
presiding, the others present being her son, their hired
labourer, the farm boy, and two unmarried daughters.
She herself tasted no food. I joined them at their meal,
and it gladdened and saddened me at the same time to
be with this woman, for she was Caleb’s sister, and was
attractive in herself, looking strangely young for her
age, with beautiful dark, soft eyes and but few white
threads in her abundant black hair. The attraction was
also in her voice and speech and manner; but, alas, there
was that in her face which was painful to witness—the
signs of long suffering, of nights that bring no refresh-
ment, an expression in the eyes of one that is looking
anxiously out into the dim distance—a vast unbounded
prospect, but with clouds and darkness resting on it.

It was not without a feeling of heaviness at the heart
that I said good-bye to her, nor was I surprised when,
less than a year later, Caleb received news of her death.

CHAPTER’ XX

The Dark People of the Village

How the materials for this book were obtained—The
hedgehog-hunter—A gipsy taste—History of a dark-
skinned family — Hedgehog-eaters — Half-bred and
true gipsies—Perfect health—Eating carrion—Mys-
terious knowledge and faculties— The three dark
Wiltshire types—Story of another dark man of the
village — Account of Liddy — His shepherding —A
happy life with horses—Dies of a broken heart—
His daughter

I HAVE sometimes laughed to myself when thinking how
a large part of the material composing this book was
collected. It came to me in conversations, at intervals,
during several years, with the shepherd. In his long
life in his native village, a good deal of it spent on the
quiet down, he had seen many things it was or would
be interesting to hear; the things which had interested
him, too, at the time, and had fallen into oblivion, yet
might be recovered. I discovered that it was of little
245

246 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

use to question him: the one valuable recollection he
possessed on any subject would, as a rule, not be available
when wanted; it would lie just beneath the surface so
to speak, and he would pass and repass over the ground
without seeing it. He would not know that it was there;
it would be like the acorn which a jay or squirrel has
hidden and forgotten all about, which he will neverthe-
less recover some day if by chance something occurs to
remind him of it. The only method was to talk about
the things he knew, and when by chance he was reminded
of some old experience or some little observation or
incident worth hearing, to make a note of it, then wait
patiently for something else. It was a very slow process,
but it is not unlike the one we practise always with regard
to wild nature. We are not in a hurry, but are always
watchful, with eyes and ears and mind open to what
may come; it is a mental habit, and when nothing comes
we are not disappointed—the act of watching has been
a sufficient pleasure; and when something does come
we take it joyfully as if it were a gift—a valuable object
picked up by chance in our walks.

When I turned into the shepherd’s cottage, if it was
in winter and he was sitting by the fire, I would sit and
smoke with him, and if we were in a talking mood I
would tell him where I had been and what I had heard
and seen, on the heath, in the woods, in the village, or
anywhere, on the chance of its reminding him of some-
thing worth hearing in his past life.

One Sunday morning, in the late summer, during one
of my visits to him, I was out walking in the woods and
found a man of the village, a farm labourer, with his
small boy hunting for hedgehogs. He had caught and

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 247

killed two which the boy was carrying. He told me
he was very fond of the flesh of hedgehogs—“pigs,”
he called them for short; he said he would not exchange
one for a rabbit. He always spent his holidays pig-hunt-
ing; he had no dog and didn’t want one; he found them
himself, and his method was to look for the kind of
place in which they were accustomed to live—a thick
mass of bramble growing at the side of an old ditch as
a tule. He would force his way into it and, moving
round and round, trample down the roots and loose
earth and dead leaves with his heavy iron-shod boots
until he broke into the nest or cell of the spiny little
beast hidden away under the bush.

He was a short, broad-faced man, with a brown skin,
black hair, and intensely black eyes. Talking with the
shepherd that evening I told him of the encounter, and
remarked that the man was probably a gipsy in blood,
although a labourer, living in the village and married to
a woman with blue eyes who belonged to the place.

This incident reminded him of a family, named Tar-
gett, in his native village, consisting of four brothers
and a sister. He knew them first when he was a boy
himself, but could not remember their parents. “It
seemed as if they didn’t have any,” he said. The four
brothers were very much alike: short, with broad faces,
black eyes and hair, and brown skins. They were good
workers, but somehow they were never treated by the
farmers like the other men. They were paid less wages
—as much as two to four shillings a week less per man
—and made to do things that others would not do, and
generally imposed upon. It was known to every em-
ployer of labour in the place that they could be imposed

248 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

upon; yet they were not fools, and occasionally if their
master went too far in bullying and abusing them and
compelling them to work overtime every day, they would
have sudden violent outbursts of rage and go off without
any pay at all. What became of their sister he never
knew: but none of the four brothers ever married; they
lived together always, and two died in the village, the
other two going to finish their lives in the workhouse.

One of the curious things about these brothers was
that they had a passion for eating hedgehogs. They
had it from boyhood, and as boys used to go a distance
from home and spend the day hunting in hedges and
thickets. When they captured a hedgehog they would
make a small fire in some sheltered spot and roast it,
and while it was roasting one of them would go to the
nearest cottage to beg for a pinch of salt, which was
generally given.

These, too, I said, must have been gipsies, at all events
on one side. Where there is a cross the gipsy strain is
generally strongest, although the children, if brought up
in the community, often remain in it all their lives; but
they are never quite of it. Their love of wildness and
of eating wild flesh remains in them, and it is also prob-
able that there is an instability of character, a restlessness,
which the small farmers who usually employ such men
know and trade on; the gipsy who takes to farm work
must not look for the same treatment as the big-framed,
white-skinned man who is as strong, enduring, and un-
changeable as a draught horse or ox, and constant as
the sun itself.

The gipsy element is found in many if not most vil-
lages in the south of England. I know one large scattered

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 249

village where it appears predominant—as dirty and dis-
orderly-looking a place as can be imagined, the ground
round every cottage resembling a gipsy camp, but worse
owing to its greater litter of old rags and rubbish strewn
about. But the people, like all gipsies, are not so poor
as they look, and most of the cottagers keep a trap and
pony with which they scour the country for many miles
around in quest of bones, rags, and bottles, and anything
else they can buy for a few pence, also anything they
can “pick up” for nothing.

This is almost the only kind of settled life which a
man with a good deal of gipsy blood in him can tolerate;
it affords some scope for his chaffering and predatory
instincts and satisfies the roving passion, which is not
so strong in those of mixed blood. But it is too re-
spectable or humdrum a life for the true, undegenerate
gipsy. One wet evening in September last I was prowling
in a copse near Shrewton, watching the birds, when I
encountered a young gipsy and recognized him as one
of a gang of about a dozen I had met several days before
near Salisbury. They were on their way, they had told
me, to a village near Shaftesbury, where they hoped
to remain a week or so.

“What are you doing here?” I asked my gipsy.

He said he had been to Idmiston; he had been on his
legs out in the rain and wet to the skin since morning.
He didn’t mind that much as the wet didn’t hurt him
and he was not tired; but he had eight miles to walk
yet over the downs to a village on the Wylye where his
people were staying.

I remarked that I had thought they were staying over
Shaftesbury way.

250 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

He then looked sharply at me. “Ah, yes,” he said,
“T remember we met you and had some talk a fortnight
ago. Yes, we went there, but they wouldn’t have us.
They soon ordered us off. They advised us to settle
down if we wanted to stay anywhere. Settle down!
I'd rather be dead!”

There spoke the true gipsy; and they are mostly of
that mind. But what a mind it is for human beings in
this climate! It is in a year like this of 1909, when a
long cold winter and a miserable spring, with frosty
nights lasting well into June, was followed by a cold wet
summer and a wet autumn, that we can see properly
what a mind and body is his—how infinitely more per-
fect the correspondence between organism and environ-~
ment in his case than in ours, who have made our own
conditions, who have not only houses to live in, but a
vast army of sanitary inspectors, physicians and bacteri-
ologists to safeguard us from that wicked stepmother
who is anxious to get rid of us before our time! In all
this miserable year, during which I have met and con-
versed with and visited many scores of gipsies, I have
not found one who was not in a cheerful frame of mind,
even when he was under a cloud with the police on his
track; nor one with a cold, or complaining of an ache
in his bones, or of indigestion.

The subject of gipsies catching cold connects itself
just now in my mind with that of the gipsies’ sense of
humour. He has that sense, and it makes him happy
when he is reposing in the bosom of his family and can
give it free vent; but the instant you appear on the
scene its gracious outward signs vanish like lightning
and he is once more the sly, subtle animal, watching you

a

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 251

furtively, but with the intensity of Gip the cat, described
in a former chapter. When you have left him and he
relaxes the humour will come back to him; for it is a
humour similar to that of some of the lower animals,
especially birds of the crow family, and of primitive
people, only more highly developed, and is concerned
mainly with the delight of trickery—with getting the
better of some one and the huge enjoyment resulting
from the process.

One morning, between nine and ten o’clock, during the
excessively cold spell near the end of November, 1909,
I paid a visit to some gipsies I knew at their camp. The
men had already gone off for the day, but some of the
women were there—a young married woman, two big
girls, and six or seven children. It was a hard frost and
their sleeping accommodation was just as in the summer-
time—bundles of straw and old rugs placed in or against
little half-open canvas and rag shelters; but they all ap-
peared remarkably well, and some of the children were
standing on the hard frozen ground with bare feet. They
assured me that they were all well, that they hadn’t caught
colds and didn’t mind the cold. I remarked that I had
thought the severe frost might have proved too much
for some of them in that high, unsheltered spot in the
downs, and that if I had found one of the children down
with a cold I should have given it a sixpence to comfort
it. “Oh,” cried the young married woman, “there’s my
poor six months’ old baby half dead of a cold; he’s very
bad, poor dear, and I’m in great trouble about him.”

“He is bad, the darling!” cried one of the big girls.
“T’ll soon show you how bad he is!” and with that she
dived into a pile of straw and dragged out a huge fat

252 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

sleeping baby. Holding it up in her arms she begged
me to look at it to see how bad it was; the fat baby
slowly opened its drowsy eyes and blinked at the sun, but
uttered no sound, for it was not a crying baby, but was
like a great fat retriever pup pulled out of its warm bed.

How healthy they are is hardly known even to those
who make a special study of these aliens, who, albeit
aliens, are yet more native than any Englishman in the
land. It is not merely their indifference to wet and cold;
more wonderful still is their dog-like capacity of assimi-
lating food which to us would be deadly. This is indeed
not a nice or pretty subject, and I will give but one in-
stance to illustrate my point; the reader with a squeamish
stomach may skip the ensuing paragraph.

An old shepherd of Chitterne relates that a family,
or gang, of gipsies used to turn up from time to time
at the village; he generally saw them at lambing-time,
when one of the heads of the party with whom he was
friendly would come round to see what he had to give
them. On one occasion his gipsy friend appeared, and
after some conversation on general subjects, asked him
if he had anything in his way. “No, nothing this time,”
said the shepherd. “Lambing was over two or three
months ago and there’s nothing left—no dead lamb. I
hung up a few cauls on a beam in the old shed, thinking
they would do for the dogs, but forgot them and they
went bad and then dried up.”

“They'll do very well for us,” said his friend.

“No, don’t you take them!” cried the shepherd in
alarm; “I tell you they went bad months ago, and ’twould
kill anyone to eat such stuff. They’ve dried up now,
and are dry and black as old skin.”

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 2353

“That doesn’t matter—we know how to make them
all right,” said the gipsy. “Soaked with a little salt, then
boiled, they’ll do very well.” And off he carried them.

In reading the reports of the Assizes held at Salis-
bury from the late eighteenth century down to about
1840, it surprised me to find how rarely a gipsy appeared
in that long, sad, monotonous procession of “criminals”
who passed before the man sitting with his black cap on
his head, and were sent to the gallows or to the penal
settlements for stealing sheep and fowls and ducks or
anything else. Yet the gipsies were abundant then as
now, living the same wild, lawless life, quartering the
country, and hanging round the villages to spy out every-
thing stealable. The man caught was almost invariably
the poor, slow-minded, heavy-footed agricultural la-
bourer; the light, quick-moving, cunning gipsy escaped.
In the “Salisbury Journal” for 1820 I find a communi-
cation on this subject, in which the writer says that a
common trick of the gipsies was to dig a deep pit at their
camp in which to bury a stolen sheep, and on this spot
they would make their camp fire. If the sheep was not
missed, or if no report of its loss was made to the police,
the thieves would soon be able to dig it up and enjoy it;
but if inquiries were made they would have to wait until
the affair had blown over.

It amused me to find, from an incident related to me
by a workman in a village where I was staying lately,
that this simple, ancient device is still practised by the
gipsies. My informant said that on going out at about
four o’clock one morning during the late summer he was
surprised at seeing two gipsies with a pony and cart at
the spot where a party of them had been encamped a

254 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

fortnight before. He watched them, himself unseen,
and saw that they were digging a pit on the spot where
they had had their fire. They took out several objects
from the ground, but he was too far away to make out
what they were. They put them in the cart and covered
them over, then filled up the pit, trampled the earth well
down, and put the ashes and burnt sticks back in the
same place, after which they got into the cart and drove
off.

Of course a man, even a nomad, must have some
place to conceal his treasures or belongings in, and the
gipsy has no cellar nor attic nor secret cupboard, and
as for his van it is about the last place in which he would
bestow anything of value or incriminating, for though
he is always on the move, he is, moving or sitting still,
always under a cloud. The ground is therefore the
safest place to hide things in, especially in a country
like the Wiltshire Downs, though he may use rocks and
hollow trees in other districts. His habit is that of the
jay and magpie, and of the dog with a bone to put by
till it is wanted. Possibly the rural police have not yet
discovered this habit of the gipsy. Indeed, the contrast
in mind and locomotive powers between the gipsy and
the village policeman has often amused me; the former
most like the thievish jay, ever on mischief bent; the
other, who has his eye on him, is more like the portly
Cochin-China fowl of the farmyard, or the Muscovy
duck, or stately gobbler.

To go back. When the buried sheep had to be kept
too long buried and was found “gone bad” when dis-
interred, I fancy it made little difference to the diners.
One remembers Thoreau’s pleasure at the spectacle of

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 255

a crowd of vultures feasting on the carrion of a dead
horse; the fine healthy appetite and boundless vigour of
nature filled him with delight. But it is not only some
of the lower animals—dogs and vultures, for instance
—which possess this power and immunity from the effects
of poisons developed in putrid meat; the Greenlanders
and African savages, and many other peoples in various
parts of the world, have it as well.

Sometimes when sitting with gipsies at their wild
hearth, I have felt curious as to the contents of that
black pot simmering over the fire. No doubt it often
contains strange meats, but it would not have been eti-
quette to speak of such a matter. It is like the pot on
the fire of the Venezuela savage into which he throws
whatever he kills with his little poisoned arrows or fishes
out of the river. Probably my only quarrel with them
would be about the little fledgelings: it angers me to
see them beating the bushes in spring in search of small
nesties and the callow young that are in them. After
all, the gipsies could retort that my friends the jays and
magpies are at the same business in April and May.

It is just these habits of the gipsy which I have de-
scribed, shocking to the moralist and sanitarian and
disgusting to the person of delicate stomach, it may be,
which please me, rather than the romance and poetry
which the scholar-gipsy enthusiasts are fond of reading
into him. He is to me a wild, untameable animal of
curious habits, and interests me as a naturalist accord-
ingly. It may be objected that being a naturalist occupied
with the appearance of things, I must inevitably miss
the one thing which others find.

In a talk I had with a gipsy a short time ago, he said

256 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

to me: “You know what the books say, and we don’t.
But we know other things that are not in the books, and
that’s what we have. It’s ours, our own, and you can’t
know it.”

It was well put; but I was not perhaps so entirely
ignorant as he imagined of the nature of that special
knowledge, or shall we say faculty, which he claimed.
I take it to be cunning—the cunning of a wild animal
with a man’s brain—and a small, an infinitesimal, dose
of something else which eludes us. But that something
else is not of a spiritual nature: the gipsy has no such
thing in him; the soul growths are rooted in the social
instinct, and are developed in those in which that instinct
is strong. I think that if we analyse that dose of some-
thing else, we will find that it is still the animal’s cunning,
a special, a sublimated cunning, the fine flower of his
whole nature, and that it has nothing mysterious in it.
He is a parasite, but free and as well able to exist free
as the fox or jackal; but the parasitism pays him well,
and he has followed it so long in his intercourse with
social man that it has come to be like an instinct, or secret
knowledge, and is nothing more than a marvellously keen
penetration which reveals to him the character and de-
gree of credulity and other mental weaknesses of his
subject.

It is not so much the wind on the heath, brother, as
the fascination of lawlessness, which makes his life an
everlasting joy to him; to pit himself against gamekeeper,
farmer, policeman, and everybody else, and defeat them
all, to flourish like the parasitic fly on the honey in the
hive and escape the wrath of the bees.

I must now return from this long digression to my

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 257

conversation with the shepherd about the dark people of
the village.

There were, I continued, other black-eyed and black-
haired people in the villages who had no gipsy blood
in their veins. So far as I could make out there were
dark people of three originally distinct and widely dif-
ferent races in the Wiltshire Downs. There was a good
deal of mixed blood, no doubt, and many dark persons
could not be identified as belonging to any particular
race. Nevertheless three distinct types could. be traced
among the dark people, and I took them to be, first, the
gipsy, rather short of stature,.brown-skinned, with broad
face and high cheek-bones, like the men we had just been
speaking of. Secondly, the men and women of white
skins and good features, who had rather broad faces and
round heads, and were physically and mentally just as
good as the best blue-eyed people; these were probably
the descendants of the dark, broad-faced Wilsetze, who
came over at the time when the country was being over-
run with the English and other nations or tribes, and
who colonized in Wiltshire and gave it their name. The
third type differed widely from both the others. They
were smallest in size and had narrow heads and long
or oval faces, and were very dark, with brown skins;
they also differed mentally from the others, being of a
more lively disposition and hotter temper. The char-
acters which distinguish the ancient British or Iberian
race appeared to predominate in persons of this type.

The shepherd said he didn’t know much about “all
that,” but he remembered that they once had a man in
the village who was like the last kind I had described.
He was a labourer named Tark, who had several sons,

258 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

and when they were grown up there was a last one born:
he had to be the last because his mother died when she
gave him birth; and that last one was like his father,
small, very dark-skinned, with eyes like sloes, and ex-
ceedingly lively and active.

Tark, himself, he said, was the liveliest, most amusing
man he had ever known, and the quickest to do things,
whatever it was he was asked to do, but he was not
industrious and not thrifty. The Tarks were always
very poor. He had a good ear for music and was a singer
of the old songs—he seemed to know them all. One of
his performances was with a pair of cymbals which he
had made for himself out of some old metal plates, and
with these he used to play while dancing about, clashing
them in time, striking them on his head, his breast, and
legs. In these dances with the cymbals he would whirl
and leap about in an astonishing way, standing sometimes
on his hands, then on his feet, so that half the people
in the village used to gather at his cottage to watch his
antics on a summer evening.

One afternoon he was coming down the village streef
and saw the blacksmith standing near his cottage looking
up at a tall fir tree which grew there on his ground.
“What be looking at?” cried Tark. The blacksmith
pointed to a branch, the lowest branch of all, but about
forty feet from the ground, and said a chaffinch had
his nest in it, about three feet from the trunk, which his
little son had set his heart on having. He had promised
to get it down for him, but there was no long ladder and
he didn’t know how to get it.

Tark laughed and said that for half a gallon of beer
he would go up legs first and take the nest and bring

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 259

it down in one hand, which he would not use in climbing,
and would come down as he went up, head first.

“Do it, then,” said the blacksmith, “and I’ll stand the
half gallon.”

Tark ran to the tree, and turning over and standing
on his hands, clasped the bole with his legs and then with
his arms and went up to the branch, when taking the
nest and holding it in one hand, he came down head first
to the ground in safety.

There were other anecdotes of his liveliness and agility.
Then followed the story of the youngest son, known as
Liddy. “I don’t rightly know,” said Caleb, “what the
name was he was given when they christened ’n; but
he were always called Liddy, and nobody knowed any
other name for him.”

Liddy’s grown-up brothers all left home when he was
a small boy: one enlisted and was sent to India and never
returned; the other two went to America, so it was said.
He was 12 years old when his father died, and he had to
shift for himself ; but he was no worse off on that account,
as they had always been very poor owing to poor Tark’s
love of beer. Before long he got employed by a small
working farmer who kept a few cows and a pair of horses
and used to buy wethers to fatten them, and these the
‘boy kept on the down.

Liddy was always a “‘leetel chap,” and looked no more
than 9 when 12, so that he could do no heavy work;
but he was a very willing and active little fellow, with
a sweet temper, and so lively and full of fun as to be
a favourite with everybody in the village. The men
would laugh at his pranks, especially when he came from
the fields on the old plough horse and urged him to a

260 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

gallop, sitting with his face to the tail; and they would
say that he was like his father, and would never be much
good except to make people laugh. But the women had
a tender feeling for him, because, although motherless
and very poor, he yet contrived to be always clean and
neat. He took the greatest care of his poor clothes,
washing and mending them himself. He also took an
intense interest in his wethers, and almost every day
he would go to Caleb, tending his flock on the down, to
sit by him and ask a hundred questions about sheep and
their management. He looked on Caleb, as head-shep-
herd on a good-sized farm, as the most important and
most fortunate person he knew, and was very proud to
have him as guide, philosopher, and friend

Now it came to pass that once in a small lot of thirty
or forty wethers which the farmer had bought at a sheep-
fair and brought home it was discovered that one was
a ewe—a ewe that would perhaps at some future day
havealamb! Liddy was greatly excited at the discovery ;
he went to Caleb and told him about it, almost crying at
the thought that his master would get rid of it. For
what use would it be to him? but what a loss it would
be! And at last, plucking up courage, he went to the
farmer and begged and prayed to be allowed to keep the
ewe, and the farmer laughed at him; but he was a little
touched at the boy’s feeling, and at last consented. Then
Liddy was the happiest boy in the village, and whenever
he got the chance he would go out to Caleb on the down
to talk about and give him news of the one beloved ewe.
And one day, after about nineteen or twenty weeks,
Caleb, out with his flock, heard shouts at a distance,
and, turning to look, saw Liddy coming at great speed

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 261

towards him, shouting out some great news as he ran;
but what it was Caleb could not make out, even when
the little fellow had come to him, for his excitement made
him incoherent. The ewe had lambed, and there were
twins—two strong healthy lambs, most beautiful to see!
Nothing so wonderful had ever happened in his life
before! And now he sought out his friend oftener than
ever, to talk of his beloved lambs, and to receive the
most minute directions about their care. Caleb, who is
not a laughing man, could not help laughing a little when
he recalled poor Liddy’s enthusiasm. But that beautiful
shining chapter in the poor boy’s life could not last, and
when the lambs were grown they were sold, and so were
all the wethers, then Liddy, not being wanted, had to
find something else to do.

I was too much interested in this story to let the sub-
ject drop. What had been Liddy’s after-life? Very
uneventful: there was, in fact, nothing in it, nor in him,
except an intense love for all things, especially animals;
and nothing happened to him until the end, for he has
been dead now these nine or ten years. In his next place
he was engaged, first, as carter’s boy, and then under-
carter, and all his love was lavished on the horses. They
were more to him than sheep, and he could love them
without pain, since they were not being prepared for
the butcher with his abhorred knife. Liddy’s love and
knowledge of horses became known outside of his own
little circle, and he was offered and joyfully accepted a
place in the stables of a wealthy young gentleman farmer,
who kept a large establishment and was a hunting man.
From stable-boy he was eventually promoted to groom.
Occasionally he would reappear in his native place. His

262 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

home was but a few miles away, and when out exercising
a horse he appeared to find it a pleasure to trot down
the old street, where as a farmer’s boy he used to make
the village laugh at his antics. But he was very much
changeed from the poor boy, who was often hatless and
barefooted, to the groom in his neat, well-fitting black
suit, mounted on a showy horse.

In this place he continued about thirty years, and was
married and had several children and was very happy,
and then came a great disaster. His employer having
met with heavy losses sold all his horses and got rid of
his servants, and Liddy had to go. This great change,
and above all his grief at the loss of his beloved horses,
was more than he could endure. He became melancholy
and spent his days in silent brooding, and by and by,
to everybody’s surprise, Liddy fell ill, for he was in the
prime of life and had always been singularly healthy.
Then to astonish people still more, he died. What ailed
him—what killed him? every one asked of the doctor;
and his answer was that he had no disease—that nothing
ailed him except a broken heart; and that was what
killed poor Liddy.

In conclusion I will relate a little incident which oc-
curred several months later, when I was again on a visit
to my old friend the shepherd. We were sitting together
on a Sunday evening, when his old wife looked out and
said, “Lor, here be Mrs. Taylor with her children coming
in to see us.” And Mrs. Taylor soon appeared, wheeling
her baby in a perambulator, with two little girls following.
She was a comely, round, rosy little woman, with black
hair, black eyes, and a singularly sweet expression, and
her three pretty little children were like her. She stayed

DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE 263

half an hour in pleasant chat, then went her way down
the road to her home. Who, I asked, was Mrs. Taylor.

Bawcombe said that in a way she was a native of their
old village of Winterbourne Bishop: at least her father
was. She had married a man who had taken a farm
near them, and after having known her as a young girl
they had been glad to have her again as a neighbour.
“She’s a daughter of that Liddy I told ’ee about some
time ago,” he said.

MISSELFORE » BOWER CHALKE

CHAPTER XXI

Some Sheep-Dogs

Breaking a sheep-dog—The shepherd buys a pup—His
training—He refuses to work—He chases a swallow
and is put to death—The shepherd’s remorse—Bob,
the sheep-dog—How he was bitten by an adder—
Period of the dog’s receptivity—Tramp, the sheep-
dog—Roaming lost about the country—A rage of
hunger—Sheep-killing dogs—Dogs running wild—
Anecdotes—A Russian sheep-dog—Caleb parts with
Tramp

To Caleb the proper training of a dog was a matter of
the very first importance. A man, he considered, must
have not only a fair amount of intelligence, but also
experience, and an even temper, and a little sympathy
as well, to sum up the animal in hand—its special apti-
tudes, its limitations, its disposition, and that something
in addition, which he called a “kink,” and would probably
have described as its idiosyncrasy if he had known the
word. There was as much individual difference among
264

SOME SHEEP-DOGS 265

dogs as there is in boys; but if the breed was right, and
you went the right way about it, you could hardly fail
to get a good servant. If a dog was not properly broken,
if its trainer had not made the most of it, he-was not
a “good shepherd”: he lacked the intelligence—“under-
standing” was his word—or else the knowledge or pa-
tience or persistence to do his part. It was, however,
possible for the best shepherd to make mistakes, and one
of the greatest to be made, which was not uncommon,
was to embark on the long and laborious business of
training an animal of mixed blood—a sheep-dog with
a taint of terrier, retriever, or some other unsuitable
breed in him. In discussing this subject with other shep-
herds I generally found that those who were in perfect
agreement with Caleb on this point were men who were
somewhat like him in character, and who regarded their
work with the sheep as so important that it must be done
thoroughly in every detail and in the best way. One of
the best shepherds I know, who is 60 years old and has
been on the same downland sheep-farm all his life, as-
sures me that he has never had and never would have a
dog which was trained by another. But the shepherd of
the ordinary kind says that he doesn’t care much about
the animal’s parentage, or that he doesn’t trouble to in-
quire into its pedigree: he breaks the animal, and finds
that he does pretty well, even when he has some strange
blood in him; finally, that all dogs have faults and you
must put up with them. Caleb would say of such a man
that he was not a “good shepherd.” One of his saddest
memories was of a dog which he bought and broke with-
out having made the necessary inquiries about its par-
entage.

266 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

It happened that a shepherd of the village, who had
taken a place at a distant farm, was anxious to dispose
of a litter of pups before leaving, and he asked Caleb
to have one. Caleb refused. ‘My dog’s old, I know,”
he said, “but I don’t want a pup now and I won’t have ’n.”

A day or two later the man came back and said he
had kept one of the best of the five for him—he had
got rid of all the others. “You can’t do better,” he per-
sisted. “No,” said Caleb, “what I said I say again. I
won't have ’n, I’ve no money to buy a dog.”

“Never mind about money,” said the other. “You’ve
got a bell I like the sound of; give he to me and take the
pup.” And so the exchange was made, a copper bell for
a nice black pup with a white collar; its mother, Baw-
combe knew, was a good sheep-dog, but about the other
parent he made no inquiries.

On receiving the pup he was told that its name was
Tory, and he did not change it. It was always difficult,
he explained, to find a name for a dog—a name, that
is to say, which anyone would say was a proper name
for a dog and not a foolish name. One could think of a
good many proper names—Jack and Watch, and so on
—but in each case one would remember some dog which
had been called by that name, and it seemed to belong
to that particular well-remembered dog and to no other,
and so in the end because of this difficulty he allowed the
name to remain.

The dog had not cost him much to buy, but as it was
only a few weeks old he had to keep it at his own cost
for fully six months before beginning the business of
breaking it, which would take from three to six months
longer. A dog cannot be put to work before he is quite

SOME SHEEP-DOGS 267

half a year old unless he is exceptionally vigorous. Sheep
are timid creatures, but not unintelligent, and they can
distinguish between the seasoned old sheep-dog, whose
furious onset and bite they fear, and the raw young re-
cruit as easily as the rook can distinguish between the
man with a gun and the man of straw with a broomstick
under his arm. They will turn upon and attack the
young dog, and chase him away with his tail between
his legs. He will also work too furiously for his strength
and then collapse, with the result that he will make a
cowardly sheep-dog, or, as the shepherds say, “‘broken-
hearted.”

Another thing. He must be made to work at first
with an old sheep-dog, for though he has the impulse to
fly about and do something, he does not know what to
do and does not understand his master’s gestures and
commands. He must have an object-lesson, he must see
the motion and hear the word and mark how the old
dog flies to this or that point and what he does. The
word of command or the gesture thus becomes associated
in his mind with a particular action on his part. But he
must not be given too many object-lessons or he will
lose more than he will gain—a something which might
almost be described as a sense of individual responsibility.
That is to say, responsibility to the human master who
delegates his power to him. Instead of taking his power
directly from the man he takes it from the dog, and this
becomes a fixed habit so quickly that many shepherds
say that if you give more than from three to six lessons
of this kind to a young dog you will spoil him. He will
need the mastership of the other dog, and will thereafter
always be at a loss and work in an uncertain way.

268 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

A timid or unwilling young dog is often coupled with
the old dog two or three times, but this method has its
dangers too, as it may be too much for the young dog’s
strength, and give him that “broken heart” from which
he will never recover; he will never be a good sheep-dog.

To return to Tory. In due time he was trained and

IN THE FOLD.

proved quick to learn and willing to work, so that before
long he began to be useful and was much wanted with
the sheep, as the old dog was rapidly growing stiffer on
his legs and harder of hearing.

One day the lambs were put into a field which was
half clover and half rape, and it was necessary to keep
them on the clover. This the young dog could not or
would not understand; again and again he allowed the

SOME SHEEP-DOGS 269

lambs to go to the rape, which so angered Caleb that
he threw his crook at him. Tory turned and gave him
a look, then came very quietly and placed himself behind
his master. From that moment he refused to obey, and
Bawcombe, after exhausting all his arts of persuasion,
gave it up and did as well as he could without his assist-
ance.

That evening after folding-time he by chance met a
shepherd he was well acquainted with and told him of
the trouble he was in over Tory.

“You tie him up for a week,” said the shepherd, “and
treat him well till he forgets all about it, and he’ll be the
same as he was before you offended him. He’s just
like old Tom—he’s got his father’s temper.”

“What’s that you say?” exclaimed Bawcombe. “Be
you saying that Tory’s old Tom’s son? I’d never have
taken him if I’d known that. Tom’s not pure-bred—
he’s got retriever’s blood.”

“Well, ’tis known, and I could have told ’ee, if thee’d
asked me,” said the shepherd. “But you do just as I
tell ’ee, and it’ll be all right with the dog.”

Tory was accordingly tied up at home and treated
well and spoken kindly to and patted on the head, so
that there would be no unpleasantness between master
and servant, and if he was an intelligent animal he would
know that the crook had been thrown not to hurt but
merely to express disapproval of his naughtiness.

Then came a busy day for the shepherd, when the
lambs were trimmed before being taken to the Wilton
sheep-fair. There was Bawcombe, his boy, the decrepit
old dog, and Tory to do the work, but when the time
came to start Tory refused to do anything.

270 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

When sent to turn the lambs he walked off to a distance
of about twenty yards, sat down and looked at his master.
Caleb hoped he would come round presently when he
saw them all at work, and so they did the best they could
without him for a time; but the old dog was stiffer and
harder of hearing than ever, and as they could not get
on properly Caleb went at intervals to Tory and tried
to coax him to give them his help; and every time he
was spoken to he would get up and come to his master,
then when ordered to do something he would walk off
to the spot where he had chosen to be and calmly sit
down once more and look at them. Caleb was becoming
more and more incensed, but he would not show it to
the dog; he still hoped against hope; and then a curious
thing happened. A swallow came skimming along close
to the earth and passed within a yard of Tory, when up
jumped the dog and gave chase, darting across the field
with such speed that he kept very near the bird until it
rose and passed over the hedge at the further side. The
joyous chase over Tory came back to his old place, and
sitting on his haunches began watching them again strug-
gling with the lambs. It was more than the shepherd
could stand; he went deliberately up to the dog, and
taking him by the straw collar still on his neck drew
him quietly away to the hedge-side and bound him to
a bush, then getting a stout stick he came back and
gave him one blow on the head. So great was the blow
that the dog made not the slightest sound: he fell; his
body quivered a moment and his legs stretched out—he
was quite dead. Bawcombe then plucked an armful of
bracken and threw it over his body to cover it, and going
back to the hurdles sent the boy home, then spreading

SOME SHEEP-DOGS 271

his cloak at the hedge-side, laid himself down on it and
covered his head.

An hour later the farmer appeared on the scene.
“What are you doing here, shepherd?” he demanded in
surprise. ‘Not trimming the lambs!”

Bawcombe, raising himself on his elbow, replied that
he was not trimming the lambs—that he would trim no
lambs that day.

“Oh, but we must get on with the trimming!” cried
the farmer.

Bawcombe returned that the dog had put him out, and
now the dog was dead—he had killed him in his anger,
and he would trim no more lambs that day. He had
said it and would keep to what he had said.

Then the farmer got angry and said that the dog had

a very good nose and would have been useful to him to
take rabbits.
_ “Master,” said the other, “I got he when he were a
pup and broke ’n to help me with the sheep and not to
catch rabbits; and now I’ve killed ’n and he’ll catch no
rabbits.”

The farmer knew his man, and swallowing his anger
walked off without another word.

Later on in the day he was severely blamed by a shep-
herd friend who said that he could easily have sold the
dog to one of the drovers, who were always anxious to
pick up a dog in their village, and he would have had the
money to repay him for his trouble; to which Bawcombe
returned, “If he wouldn’t work for I that broke ’n he
wouldn’t work for another. But I’M never again break
a dog that isn’t pure-bred.”

But though he justified himself he had suffered re-

rays ‘A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

morse for what he had done; not only at the time, when
he covered the dead dog up with bracken and refused
to work any more that day, but the feeling had persisted
all his life, and he could not relate the incident without
showing it very plainly. He bitterly blamed himself for
having taken the pup and for spending long months in
training him without having first taken pains to inform
himself that there was no bad blood in him. And al-
though the dog was perhaps unfit to live he had finally
killed him in anger. If it had not been for that sudden
impetuous chase after a swallow he would have borne
with him and considered afterwards what was to be
done; but that dash after the bird was more than he
could stand; for it looked as if Tory had done it pur-
posely, in something of a mocking spirit, to exhibit his
wonderful activity and speed to his master, sweating
there at his task, and make him see what he had lost in
offending him.

The shepherd gave another instance of a mistake he
once made which caused him a good deal of pain. It
was the case of a dog named Bob which he owned when
a young man. He was an exceptionally small dog, but
his quick intelligence made up for lack of strength, and
he was of a very lively disposition, so that he was
a good companion to a shepherd as well as a good
servant.

One summer day at noon Caleb was going to his flock
in the fields, walking by a hedge, when he noticed Bob
sniffing suspiciously at the roots of an old holly-tree
growing on the bank. It was a low but very old tree
with a thick trunk, rotten and hollow inside, the cavity
being hidden with the brushwood growing up from the

SOME SHEEP-DOGS 273

roots. As he came abreast of the tree, Bob looked up
and emitted a low whine, that sound which says so much
when used by a dog to his master and which his master
does not always rightly understand. At all events he
did not do so in this case. It was August and the shoot-
ing had begun, and Caleb jumped to the conclusion that
a wounded bird had crept into the hollow tree to hide,
and so to Bob’s whine, which expressed fear and asked
what he was to do, the shepherd answered, “Get him.”
Bob dashed in, but quickly recoiled, whining in a piteous
way, and began rubbing his face on his legs. Bawcombe
in alarm jumped down and peered into the hollow trunk
and heard a slight rustling of dead leaves, but saw
nothing. His dog had been bitten by an adder, and he
at once returned to the village, bitterly blaming himself
for the mistake he had made and greatly fearing that
he would lose his dog. Arrived at the village his mother
at once went off to the down to inform Isaac of the
trouble and ask him what they were to do. Caleb had
to wait some time, as none of the villagers who gathered
round could suggest a remedy, and in the meantime Bob
continued rubbing his cheek against his foreleg, twitching
and whining with pain; and before long the face and
head began to swell on one side, the swelling extending
to the nape and downwards to the throat. Presently
Isaac himself, full of concern, arrived on the scene, hav-
ing left his wife in charge of the flock, and at the same
time a man from a neighbouring village came riding by
and joined the group. The horseman got off and assisted
Caleb in holding the dog while Isaac made a number of
incisions with his knife in the swollen place and let out
some blood, after which they rubbed the wounds and all

27/4 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

the swollen part with an oil used for the purpose. The
composition of this oil was a secret: it was made by a
man in one of the downland villages and sold at eighteen-
pence a small bottle; Isaac was a believer in its efficacy, |
and always kept a bottle hidden away somewhere in his
cottage.

Bob recovered in a few days, but the hair fell out from
all the part which had been swollen, and he was a curious-
looking dog with half his face and head naked until he
got his fresh coat, when it grew again. He was as good
and active a dog as ever, and lived to a good old age,
but one result of the poison he never got over: his bark
had changed from a sharp ringing sound to a low and
hoarse one. “He always barked,” said the shepherd,
“like a dog with a sore throat.”

To go back to the subject of training a dog. Once
you make a beginning it must be carried through to a
finish. You take him at the age of 6 months and the
education must be fairly complete when he is a year old.
He is then lively, impressionable, exceedingly adaptive;
his intelligence at that period is most like man’s; but it
would be a mistake to think that it will continue so—
that to what he learns now in this wonderful half-year,
other things may be added by and by as opportunity
arises. At a year he has practically got to the end of
his capacity to learn. He has lost his human-like recep-
tivity, but what he has been taught will remain with him
for the rest of his life. We can hardly say that he re-
members it; it is more like what is called “inherited mem-
ory” or “lapsed intelligence.”

All this is very important to a shepherd, and explains
the reason an old head-shepherd had for saying to me

SOME SHEEP-DOGS 275

that he had never had and never would have a dog he
had not trained himself. No two men follow precisely
the same method in training, and a dog transferred from
his trainer to another man is always a little at a loss;
method, voice, gestures, personality, are all different;
his new master must study him and in a way adapt him-
self to the dog. The dog is still more at a loss when
transferred from one kind of country to another where
the sheep are worked in a different manner, and one
instance Caleb gave me of this is worth relating. It
was, I thought, one of his best dog stories.

His dogs as a rule were bought as pups; occasionally
he had had to get a dog already trained, a painful neces-
sity to a shepherd, seeing that the pound or two it costs
—the price of an ordinary animal—is a big sum of
money to him. And once in his life he got an old trained
sheep-dog for nothing. He was young then, and acting
as under-shepherd in his native village, when the report
came one day that a great circus and menagerie which
had been exhibiting in the west was on its way to Salis-
bury, and would be coming past the village about six
o’clock on the following morning. The turnpike was
a little over a mile away, and thither Caleb went with
half a dozen other young men of the village at about
five o’clock to see the show pass, and sat on a gate beside
a wood to wait its coming. In due time the long proces-
sion of horses and mounted men and women, and gor-
geous vans containing lions and tigers and other strange
beasts, came by, affording them great admiration and
delight. When it had gone on and the last van had
disappeared at the turning of the road, they got down
from the gate and were about to set out on their way

276 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

back when a big, shaggy sheep-dog came out of the
wood and running to the road began looking up and
down in a bewildered way. They had no doubt that
he belonged to the circus and had turned aside to hunt
a rabbit in the wood; then, thinking the animal would
understand them, they shouted to it and waved their
arms in the direction the procession had gone. But the
dog became frightened, and turning fled back into cover,
and they saw no more of it.

Two or three days later it was rumoured that a strange
dog had been seen in the neighbourhood of Winterbourne
Bishop, in the fields; and women and children going to
or coming from outlying cottages and farms had encoun-
tered it, sometimes appearing suddenly out of the furze-
bushes and staring wildly at them; or they would meet
him in some deep lane between hedges, and after standing
still a moment eyeing them he would turn and fly in
terror from their strange faces. Shepherds began to
be alarmed for the safety of their sheep, and there was
a good deal of excitement and talk about the strange
dog. Two or three days later Caleb encountered it. He
was returning from his flock at the side of a large grass
field where four or five women were occupied cutting the
thistles, and the dog, which he immediately recognized
as the one he had seen at the turnpike, was following
one of the women about. She was greatly alarmed and
called to him, “(Come here, Caleb, for goodness’ sake,
and drive this big dog away! He do look so desprit,
I’m afeared of he.”

“Don’t you be feared,” he shouted back. “He won't
hurt ’ee; he’s starving—don’t you see his bones sticking
out? He’s asking to be fed.” Then going a little nearer

SOME SHEEP-DOGS 277

he called to her to take hold of the dog by the neck and
keep him while he approached. He feared that the dog
on seeing him coming would rush away. After a little
while she called the dog, but when he went to her she
shrank away from him and called out, “No, I daren’t
touch he—he’ll tear my hand off. I never see’d such a
desprit-looking beast!’

“°Tis hunger,” repeated Caleb, and then very slowly
and cautiously he approached, the dog all the time eyeing
him suspiciously, ready to rush away on the slightest
alarm. And while approaching him he began to speak
gently to him, then coming to a stand stooped and patting
his legs called the dog to him. Presently he came, sinking
his body lower as he advanced and at last crawling, and
when he arrived at the shepherd’s feet he turned himself
over on his back—that eloquent action which a dog uses
when humbling himself before and imploring mercy from
one mightier than himself, man or dog.

Caleb stooped, and after patting the dog gripped him
firmly by the neck and pulled him up, while with his
free hand he undid his leather belt to turn it into a dog’s
collar and leash; then, the end of the strap in his hand,
he said “Come,” and started home with the dog at his
side. Arrived at the cottage he got a bucket and mixed
as much meal as would make two good feeds, the dog
all the time watching him with his muscles twitching and
the water running from his mouth. The meal well mixed
he emptied it out on the turf, and what followed, he said,
was an amazing thing to see: the dog hurled himself
down on the food and started devouring it as if the mass
of meal had been some living savage creature he had
captured and was frenziedly tearing to pieces. He turned

Te

278 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

round and round, floundering on the earth, uttering
strange noises like half-choking growls and screams while
gobbling down the meal; then when he had devoured it
all he began tearing up and swallowing the turf for the
sake of the little wet meal still adhering to it.

Such rage of hunger Caleb had never seen, and it was
painful to him to think of what the dog had endured
during those days when it had been roaming foodless
about the neighbourhood. Yet it was among sheep all
the time—scores of flocks left folded by night at a dis-
tance from the village; one would have imagined that
the old wolf and wild-dog instinct would have come to
life in such circumstances, but the instinct was to all
appearance dead.

My belief is that the pure-bred sheep-dog is indeed the
last dog to revert to a state of nature; and that when
sheep-killing by night is traced to a sheep-dog, the animal
has a bad strain in him, of retriever, or cur, or “rabbit-
dog,’”’ as the shepherds call all terriers. When I was a
boy on the pampas sheep- killing dogs were common
enough, and they were always curs, or the common dog
of the country, a smooth-haired animal about the size
of a coach-dog, red, or black, or white. I recall one
instance of sheep-killing being traced to our own dogs
—we had about six or eight just then. A native neigh-
bour, a few miles away, caught them at it one morning;
they escaped him in spite of his good horse, with lasso
and bolas also, but his sharp eyes saw them pretty welf
in the dim light, and by and by he identified them, and
my father had to pay him for about thirty slain and
badly injured sheep; after which a gallows was erected
and our guardians ignominiously hanged. Here we shoot

SOME SHEEP-DOGS Wes

dogs; in some countries the old custom of hanging them,
which is perhaps less painful, is still followed.

It was common, too, in those days on the pampas,
especially in the outlying districts, for dogs to take to
a wholly wild life. I remember once, when staying with
a native friend among the Sierras, near Cape Corrientos,
that he owned a fine handsome dog, so good-tempered
and intelligent that I was very much attached to him.
He was, my friend said, a wild dog; he had found a
bitch with a litter of pups in a huge burrow she had
made for herself in the ground, and he had killed them
all except this one, which he took home and reared as
an experiment. —

In England it is perhaps now impossible for a dog
to run wholly wild, or to exist in that state for any length
of time. I find one case reported in the “Salisbury Jour-
nal” of 31 May, 1779. It interested me very much
because I had long been familiar with the place in which
the escaped dog was found. This was in Pamba Wood,
near Silchester, and is sometimes called Silchester Forest
—the “Proud Pamba” of Drayton’s “Polyolbion.”

A poor woman while gathering sticks in the wood
came upon the remains of a dead man—the skull and a
number of bones. She gave notice of it, and a crowd of
villagers went to the spot, and found there a foxhound
bitch which had been missing from the kennels for about
two months. She had a litter of eight pups about two
months old in a pit about six feet deep which she had
made herself, and it was plain that the dogs had de-
voured the flesh of the man after he had met his death
close to the pit. Nothing except the flesh on his feet
and ankles remained uneaten: they were cased in thick

280 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

high boots, so hard that the dogs had been unable to
tear them to pieces. The dead man was identified or
taken to be a thrasher from the neighbouring village of
Aldermaston who had been missing about a fortnight,
and it was supposed that he had gone into the wood to
cut a flail and had been seized with sudden illness and
died at that spot.

The pups were very wild and savage, and I should
rather think that the man had found the bitch with her
young and had attempted to take them single-handed
for the sake of the reward, and had been attacked, pulled
down, and killed, after which they began to feed on
the body. One wonders how this dog had managed to
support herself and her eight pups in the forest during
the six weeks before the poor thrasher came in their
way to provide them with food.

In this same journal I find a case of a dog devouring
its own master. The man was a rat-catcher living in
a cottage at Fovant, a small village in the valley of the
Nadder. Going home drunk one night from the public-
house he fell in the road, and remained lying there in
a drunken sleep, and towards morning a wagon passed
over him, the wheel crushing his head. The wagoner
reported the case, and the constable with men to help
him went and removed the body to the man’s cottage,
and after depositing it on the floor of the kitchen or
living room went their way, closing the door after them.
Later in the day they returned, and going in found the
dog devouring the man’s flesh.

We experience an intense disgust at a case like this;
but we have the same feeling when we hear of man
eating dog; in both cases, owing to the long and intimate

SOME SHEEP-DOGS 281

association between man and dog, we are affected as
by a kind of cannibalism.

To go back to our story. From that time the stray
dog was Caleb’s obedient and affectionate slave, always
watching his face and every gesture, and starting up at
his slightest word in readiness to do his bidding. When
put with the flock he turned out to be a useful sheep-
dog, but unfortunately he had not been trained on the
Wiltshire Downs. It was plain to see that the work
was strange to him, that he had been taught in a different
school, and could never forget the old and acquire a new
method. But as to what conditions he had been reared
in or in what district or country no one could guess.
Every one said that he was a sheep-dog, but unlike any
sheep-dog they had ever seen; he was not Wiltshire, nor
Welsh, nor Sussex, nor Scotch, and they could say no
more. Whenever a shepherd saw him for the first time
his attention was immediately attracted, and he would
stop to speak with Caleb. “What sort of a dog do you
call that?” he would say. “I never see’d one just like
’n before.”

At length one day when passing by a new building
which some workmen had been brought from a distance
to erect in the village, one of the men hailed Caleb and
said, “Where did you get that dog, mate?”

“Why do you ask me that?” said the shepherd.

“Because I know where he come from: he’s a Rooshian,
that’s what he is. I’ve see’d many just like him in the
Crimea when I was there. But I never see’d one before
in England.”

Caleb was quite ready to believe it, and was a little
proud at having a sheep-dog from that distant country.

282 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

He said that it also put something new into his mind.
He didn’t know nothing about Russia before that, though
he had been hearing so much of our great war there
and of all the people that had been killed. Now he
realized that Russia was a great country, a land where
there were hills and valleys and villages, where there were
flocks and herds, and shepherds and sheep-dogs just as
in the Wiltshire Downs. He only wished that Tramp
—that was the name he had given his dog—could have
told him his history.

Tramp, in spite of being strange to the downs and the
downland sheep-dog’s work, would probably have been
kept by Caleb to the end but for his ineradicable passion
for hunting rabbits. He did not neglect his duty, but
he would slip away too often, and eventually when a
man who wanted a good dog for rabbits one day offered
Caleb fifteen shillings for Tramp he sold him, and as he
was taken away to a distance by his new master, he never
saw him again.

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CHAPTER XXII
The Shepherd as Naturalist

'General remarks—Great Ridge Wood—Encounter with
a roe-deer — A hare on a stump—A gamekeeper’s
memory—Talk with a gipsy—-A strange story of a
hedgehog — A gipsy on memory — The shepherd’s
feeling for animals—Anecdote of a shrew—Anecdote
of an owl—Reflex effect of the gamekeeper’s calling
—We remember best what we see emotionally

Ir will appear to some of my readers that the interesting
facts about wild life, or rather about animal life, wild
and domestic, gathered in my talks with the old shepherd,
do not amount to much. If this is all there is to show
after a long life spent out of doors, or all that is best
worth preserving, it is a somewhat scanty harvest, they
will say. To me it appears a somewhat abundant one.
We field naturalists, who set down what we see and hear
in a notebook lest we forget it, do not always bear in
mind that it is exceedingly rare for those who are not
naturalists, whose senses and minds are occupied with
283

284 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

other things, to come upon a new and interesting fact
in animal life, or that these chance observations are
quickly forgotten. This was strongly borne in upon
me lately while staying in the village of Hindon in the
neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood, which clothes
the summit of the long high down overlooking the vale
of the Wylye. It is an immense wood, mostly of scrub
or dwarf oak, very dense in some parts, in others thin,
with open, barren patches, and like a wild forest, cover-
ing altogether twelve or fourteen square miles—perhaps
more. There are no houses near, and no people in it
except a few gamekeepers: I spent long days in it without
meeting a human being. It was a joy to me to find such
a spot in England, so wild and solitary, and I was filled
with pleasing anticipation of all the wild life I should
see in such a place, especially after an experience I had
on my second day init. I was standing in an open glade
when a cock-pheasant uttered a cry of alarm, and imme-
diately afterwards, startled by the cry perhaps, a roe-
deer rushed out of the close thicket of oak and holly in
which it had been hiding, and ran past me at a very short
distance, giving me a good sight of this shyest of the
large wild animals still left to us. He looked very beau-
tiful to me, in that mouse-coloured coat which makes him
invisible in the deep shade in which he is accustomed
to pass the daylight hours in hiding, as he fled across
the green open space in the brilliant May sunshine. But
he was only one, a chance visitor, a wanderer from wood
to wood about the land; and he had been seen once, a
month before my encounter with him, and ever since
then the keepers had been watching and waiting for him,
gun in hand, to send a charge of shot into his side.

THE SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST 285

That was the best and the only great thing I saw in
the Great Ridge Wood, for the curse of the pheasant
is on it as on all the woods and forests in Wiltshire, and
all wild life considered injurious to the semi-domestic
bird, from the sparrowhawk to the harrier and buzzard
and goshawk, and from the little mousing weasel to the
badger; and all the wild life that is only beautiful, or
which delights us because of its wildness, from the squir-
rel to the roe-deer, must be included in the slaughter.

One very long summer day spent in roaming about in
this endless wood, always on the watch, had for sole
result, so far as anything out of the common goes, the
spectacle of a hare sitting on a stump. The hare started
up at a distance of over a hundred yards before me and
rushed straight away at first, then turned and ran on
my left so as to get round to the side from which I had
come. I stood still and watched him as he moved swiftly
over the ground, seeing him not as a hare but as a dim
brown object successively appearing, vanishing, and re-
appearing, behind and between the brown tree-trunks,
until he had traced half a circle and was then suddenly
lost to sight. Thinking that he had come to a stand I put
my binocular on the spot where he had vanished, and
saw him sitting on an old oak stump about thirty inches
high. It was a round mossy stump about eighteen inches
in diameter, standing in a bed of brown dead leaves, with
the rough brown trunks of other dwarf oak-trees on
either side of it. The animal was sitting motionless, in
profile, its ears erect, seeing me with one eye, and was
like a carved figure of a hare set on a pedestal, and had
a very striking appearance.

As I had never seen such a thing before I thought it

286 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

was worth mentioning to a keeper I called to see at his
lodge on my way back in the evening. It had been a
blank day, I told him—a hare sitting on a stump being
the only thing I could remember to tell him. “Well,”
he said, “you’ve seen something I’ve never seen in all
the years I’ve been in these woods. And yet, when you
come to think of it, it’s just what one might expect a

yr :
DWARF OQAMS iN THE GREAT RIDGE Woop

hare would do. The wood is full of old stumps, and it
seems only natural a hare should jump on to one to
get a better view of a man or animal at a distance among
the trees. But I never saw it.”

What, then, had he seen worth remembering during
his long hours in the wood on that day, or the day before,
or on any day during the last thirty years since he had
been policing that wood, I asked him. He answered
that he had seen many strange things, but he was not

THE SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST 287

now able to remember one to tell me! He said, further,
that the only things he remembered were those that re-
lated to his business of guarding and rearing the birds;
all other things he observed in animals, however remark-
able they might seem to him at the moment, were things
that didn’t matter and were quickly forgotten.

On the very next day I was out on the down with a
gipsy, and we got talking about wild animals. He was
a middle-aged man and a very perfect specimen of his
race—not one of the blue-eyed and red or light-haired
bastard gipsies, but dark as a Red Indian, with eyes like
a hawk, and altogether a hawk-like being, lean, wiry,
alert, a perfectly wild man in a tame, civilized land. The
lean, mouse-coloured lurcher that followed at his heels
was perfect, too, in his way—man and dog appeared
made for one another. When this man spoke of his life,
spent in roaming about the country, of his very perfect
health, and of his hatred of houses, the very atmosphere
of any indoor place producing a suffocating and sicken-
ing effect on him, I envied him as I envy birds their
wings, and as I can never envy men who live in mansions.
His was the wild, the real life, and it seemed to me that
there was no other worth living.

“You know,” said he, in the course of our talk about
wild animals, “we are very fond of hedgehogs—we like
them better than rabbits.”

“Well, so do I,” was my remark. I am not quite sure
that I do, but that is what I told him. “But now you
talk of hedgehogs,” I said, “it’s funny to think that,
common as the animal is, it has some queer habits I
can’t find anything about from gamekeepers and others
I’ve talked to on the subject, or from my own observa-

288 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

tion. Yet one would imagine that we know all there is
to be known about the little beast; you’ll find his history
in a hundred books—perhaps in five hundred. There’s
one book about our British animals so big you’d hardly
be able to lift its three volumes from the ground with
all your strength, in which its author has raked together
everything known about the hedgehog, but he doesn’t
give me the information I want—just what I went to
the book to find. Now here’s what a friend of mine
once saw. He’s not a naturalist, nor a sportsman, nor
a gamekeeper, and not a gipsy; he doesn’t observe ani-
mals or want to find out their ways; he is a writer, occu-
pied day and night with his writing, sitting among books,
yet he saw something which the naturalists and game-
keepers haven’t seen, so far as I know. He was going
home one moonlight night by a footpath through the
woods when he heard a very strange noise a little dis-
tance ahead, a low whistling sound, very sharp, like the
continuous twittering of a little bird with a voice like
a bat, or a shrew, only softer, more musical. He went
on very cautiously until he spied two hedgehogs standing
on the path facing each other, with their noses almost or
quite touching. He remained watching and listening to
them for some moments, then tried to go a little nearer
and they ran away.

“Now I’ve asked about a dozen gamekeepers if they
ever saw such a thing, and all said they hadn’t; they
never heard hedgehogs make that twittering sound, like
a bird or a singing mouse; they had only heard them
scream like a rabbit when in a trap. Now what do you
say about it?”

“T’ve never seen anything like that,” said the gipsy.

THE SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST 289

“T only know the hedgehog makes a little whistling sound
when he first comes out at night; I believe it is a sort of
call they have.”

“But no doubt,” I said, “you’ve seen other queer things
in hedgehogs and in other little animals which I should
like to hear.”

Yes, he had, first and last, seen a good many queer
things both by day and night, in woods and other places,
he replied, and then continued: “But you see it’s like
this. We see something and say ‘Now that’s a curious
thing!’ and then we forget all about it. You see, we don’t
lay no store by such things; we ain’t scolards and don’t
know nothing about what’s said in books. We see
something and say That’s something we never saw before
and never heard tell of, but maybe others have seen it
and you can find it in the books. So that’s how ’tis,
but if I hadn’t forgotten them I could have told you a
lot of queer things.”

That was all he could say, and few can say more.
Caleb was one of the few who could, and one wonders
why it was so, seeing that he was occupied with his own
tasks in the fields and on the down where wild life is
least abundant and varied, and that his opportunities
were so few compared with those of the gamekeeper.
It was, I take it, because he had sympathy for the crea-
tures he observed, that their actions had stamped them-
selves on his memory, because he had seen them emo-
tionally. We have seen how well he remembered the
many sheep-dogs he had owned, how vividly their various
characters are portrayed in his account of them. I have
met with shepherds who had little to tell about the dogs
they had possessed; they had regarded their dogs as

290 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

useful servants and nothing more as long as they lived,
and when dead they were forgotten. But Caleb had a
feeling for his dogs which made it impossible for him
to forget them or to recall them without that tenderness
which accompanies the thought of vanished human
friends. In a lesser degree he had something of this
feeling for all animals, down even to the most minute
and unconsidered. I recall here one of his anecdotes of
a very small creature—a shrew, or over-runner, as he
called it.

One day when out with his flock a sudden storm of
rain caused him to seek for shelter in an old untrimmed
hedge close by. He crept into the ditch, full of old dead
leaves beneath the tangle of thorns and brambles, and
setting his back against the bank he thrust his legs out,
and as he did so was startled by an outburst of shrill
little screams at his feet. Looking down he spied a
shrew standing on the dead leaves close to his boot,
screaming with all its might, its long thin snout pointed
upwards and its mouth wide open; and just above it,
two or three inches perhaps, hovered a small brown
butterfly. There for a few moments it continued hover-
ing while the shrew continued screaming ; then the butter-
fly flitted away and the shrew disappeared among the
dead leaves.

Caleb laughed (a rare thing with him) when he nar-
rated this little incident, then remarked: “The over-
runner was a-crying ’cause he couldn’t catch that leetel
butterfly.”

The shepherd’s inference was wrong; he did not know
—few do—that the shrew has the singular habit, when
surprised on the surface and in danger, of remaining

THE SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST 291

motionless and uttering shrill cries. His foot, set down
close to it, had set it screaming; the small butterfly, no
doubt disturbed at the same moment, was there by chance.
I recall here another little story he related of a bird—a
long-eared owl.

One summer there was a great drought, and the rooks,
unable to get their usual food from the hard, sun-baked
pasture-lands, attacked the roots and would have pretty
well destroyed them if the farmer had not protected his
swedes by driving in stakes and running lines of cotton-
thread and twine from stake to stake all over the field.
This kept them off, just as thread keeps the chaffinches
from the seed-beds in small gardens, and as it keeps the
sparrows from the crocuses on lawns and ornamental
grounds. One day Caleb caught sight of an odd-looking,
brownish-grey object out in the middle of the turnip-
field, and as he looked it rose up two or three feet into
the air, then dropped back again, and this curious move-
ment was repeated at intervals of two or three minutes
until he went to see what the thing was. It turned out
to be a long-eared owl, with its foot accidentally caught
by a slack thread, which allowed the bird to rise a couple
of feet into the air; but every such attempt to escape
ended in its being pulled back to the ground again. It
was so excessively lean, so weightless in his hand, when
he took it up after disengaging its foot, that he thought
it must have been captive for the space of two or three
days. The wonder was that it had kept alive during
those long midsummer days of intolerable heat out there
in the middle of the burning field! Yet it was in very
fine feather and beautiful to look at with its long, black
ear-tufts and round, orange-yellow eyes, which would

292 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

never lose their fiery lustre until glazed in death. Caleb’s
first thought on seeing it closely was that it would have
been a prize to anyone who liked to have a handsome
bird stuffed in a glass case. Then raising it over his
head he allowed it to fly, whereupon it flew off a dis-
tance of a dozen or fifteen yards and pitched among the
turnips, after which it ran a little space and rose again
with labour, but soon recovering strength it flew away
over the field and finally disappeared in the deep shade
of the copse beyond.

In relating these things the voice, the manner, the
expression in his eyes, were more than the mere words,
and displayed the feeling which had caused these little
incidents to endure so long in his memory.

The gamekeeper cannot have this feeling: he may
come to his task with the liveliest interest in, even with
sympathy for, the wild creatures amidst which he will
spend his life, but it is all soon lost. His business in the
woods is to kill, and the reflex effect is to extinguish
all interest in the living animal—in its life and mind.
It would, indeed, be a wonderful thing if he could remem-
ber any singular action or appearance of an animal which
he had witnessed before bringing his gun automatically
to his shoulder.

CHAPFER XXIII

The Master of the Village

Moral effect of the great man—An orphaned village—
The masters of the village—Elijah Raven—Strange
appearance and character—Elijah’s house—The owls
— Two rooms in the house — Elijah hardens with
time—The village club and its arbitrary secretary—
Caleb dips the lambs and falls ill—His claim on the
club rejected—Elijah in court

In my roamings about the downs it is always a relief—
a positive pleasure in fact—to find myself in a village
which has no squire or other magnificent and munificent
person who dominates everybody and everything, and,
if he chooses to do so, plays providence in the community.
I may have no personal objection to him—he is sometimes
almost if not quite human; what I heartily dislike is the
effect of his position (that of a giant among pigmies)
293

294 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

on the lowly minds about him, and the servility, hypoc-
risy, and parasitism which spring up and flourish in his
wide shadow whether he likes these moral weeds or
not. Asa rule he likes them, since the poor devil has
this in common with the rest of us, that he likes to stand
high in the general regard. But how is he to know it
unless he witnesses its outward beautiful signs every
day and every hour on every countenance he looks upon?
Better, to my mind, the severer conditions, the poverty
and unmerited sufferings which cannot be relieved, with
the greater manliness and self-dependence when the
people are left to work out their own destiny. On this
account I was pleased to make the discovery on my first
visit to Caleb’s native village that there was no magnate,
or other big man, and no gentleman except the parson,
who was not a rich man. It was, so to speak, one of
the orphaned villages left to fend for itself and fight its
own way in a hard world, and had nobody even to give
the customary blankets and sack of coals to its old
women. Nor was there any very big farmer in the place,
certainly no gentleman farmer; they were mostly small
men, some of them hardly to be distinguished in speech
and appearance from their hired labourers.

In these small isolated communities it is common to
find men who have succeeded in rising above the others
and in establishing a sort of mastery over them. They
set a man a little apart, a little higher than the others,
who are never able to better themselves; the main differ-
ence is that they are harder and more grasping and have
more self-control. These qualities tell eventually, and
set a man a little apart, a little higher than the others,
and he gets the taste of power, which reacts on him like

THE MASTER OF THE VILLAGE 295

the first taste of blood on the big cat. Henceforward
he has his ideal, his definite goal, which is to get the
upper hand—to be on top. He may be, and generally
is, an exceedingly unpleasant fellow to have for a neigh-
bour—mean, sordid, greedy, tyrannous, even cruel, and
he may be generally hated and despised as well, but along
with these feelings there will be a kind of shamefaced
respect and admiration for his courage in following his
own line in defiance of what others think and feel. It is
after all with man as with the social animals: he must
have a master—not a policeman, or magistrate, or a
vague, far-away, impersonal something called the authori-
ties or the government; but a head of the pack or herd,
a being like himself whom he knows and sees and hears
and feels every day. A real man, dressed in old familiar
clothes, a fellow-villager, who, wolf or dog like, has
fought his way to the mastership.

There was a person of this kind at Winterbourne
Bishop who was often mentioned in Caleb’s reminis-
cences, for he had left a very strong impression on the
shepherd’s mind—as strong, perhaps, though in a dis-
agreeable way, as that of Isaac his father, and of Mr.
Ellerby of Doveton. For not only was he a man of great
force of character, but he was of eccentric habits and
of a somewhat grotesque appearance.

The curious name of this person was Elijah Raven.
He was a native of the village and lived till extreme old
age in it, the last of his family, in a small house inherited
from his father, situated about the center of the village
street. It was a quaint, old, timbered house, little bigger
than a cottage, with a thatched roof, and behind it some
outbuildings, a small orchard, and a field of a dozen or

296 (A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

fifteen acres. Here he lived with one other person, an
old man who did the cooking and housework, but after
this man died he lived alone. Not only was he a bachelor,
but he would never allow any woman to come inside
his house. Elijah’s one idea was to get the advantage
of others—to make himself master in the village. Begin-
ning poor, he worked in a small, cautious, peddling way
at farming, taking a field or meadow or strip of down
here and there in the neighbourhood, keeping a few sheep,
a few cows, buying and selling and breeding horses.
The men he employed were those he could get at low
wages—poor labourers who were without a place and
wanted to fill up a vacant time, or men like the Targetts
described in a former chapter who could be imposed
upon; also gipsies who flitted about the country, working
in a spasmodic way when in the mood for the farmers
who could tolerate them, and who were paid about half
the wages of an ordinary labourer. If a poor man had
to find money quickly, on account of illness or some
other cause, he could get it from Elijah at once—not
borrowed, since Elijah neither lent nor gave—but he
could sell him anything he possessed—a horse or cow,
or sheep-dog, or a piece of furniture; and if he had
nothing to sell, Elijah would give him something to do
and pay him something for it. The great thing was
that Elijah had money which he was always willing to
circulate. At his unlamented death he left several thou-
sands of pounds, which went to a distant relation, and
a name which does not smell sweet but is still remem-
bered not only at Winterbourne Bishop but at many
other villages on Salisbury Plain.

Elijah was short of stature, broad shouldered, with

THE MASTER OF THE VILLAGE 297

an abnormally big head and large dark eyes. They say
that he never cut his hair in his life. It was abundant
and curly, and grew to his shoulders, and when he was
old and his great mass of hair and beard became white
it was said that he resembled a gigantic white owl.
Mothers frightened their children into quiet by saying,
“Elijah will get you if you don’t behave yourself.” He
knew and resented this, and though he never noticed a
child he hated to have the little ones staring in a half-
terrified way at him. To seclude himself more from the
villagers he planted holly and yew bushes before his
house, and eventually the entire building was hidden
from sight by the dense evergreen thicket. The trees
were cut down after his death: they were gone when I
first visited the village and by chance found a lodging
in the house, and congratulated myself that I had got
the quaintest, old rambling rooms I had ever inhabited.
I did not know that I was in Elijah Raven’s house, al-
though his name had long been familiar to me: it only
came out one day when I asked my landlady, who was
a native, to tell me the history of the place. She remem-
bered how as a little girl, full of mischief and greatly
daring, she had sometimes climbed over the low front
wall to hide under the thick yew bushes and watch to
catch a sight of the owlish old man at his door or window.

For many years Elijah had two feathered tenants, a
pair of white owls—the birds he so much resembled.
They occupied a small garret at the end of his bedroom,
having access to it through a hole under the thatch. They
bred there in peace, and on summer evenings one of the
common sights of the village was Elijah’s owls flying
from the house behind the evergreens and returning to

298 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

it with mice in their talons. At such seasons the threat
to the unruly children would be varied to “Old Elijah’s
owls will get you.”” Naturally, the children grew up with
the idea of the bird and the owlish old man associated
in their minds.

It was odd that the two very rooms which Elijah had
occupied during all those solitary years, the others being
given over to spiders and dust, should have been assigned
to me when I came to lodge in the house. The first, my
sitting-room, was so low that my hair touched the ceiling
when I stood up my full height; it had a brick floor and
a wide old fireplace on one side. Though so low-ceilinged
it was very large and good to be in when I returned from
a long ramble on the downs, sometimes wet and cold,
to sit by a wood fire and warm myself. At night when
I climbed to my bedroom by means of the narrow,
crooked, worm-eaten staircase, with two difficult and
dangerous corners to get round, I would lie awake staring
at the small square patch of greyness in the black interior
made by the latticed window; and listening to the wind
and rain outside, would remember that the sordid, owlish
old man had slept there and stared nightly at that same
grey patch in the dark for very many years. If, I
thought, that something of a man which remains here
below to haunt the scene of its past life is more likely
to exist and appear to mortal eyes in the case of a person
of strong individuality, then there is a chance that I may
be visited this night by Elijah Raven his ghost. But
his owlish countenance never appeared between me and
that patch of pale dim light; nor did I ever feel a breath
of cold unearthly air on me.

Elijah did not improve with time; the years that made

THE MASTER OF THE VILLAGE 299

him long-haired, whiter, and more owl-like also made
him more penurious and grasping, and anxious to get
the better of every person about him. There was scarcely
a poor person in the village—not a field labourer nor
shepherd nor farmer’s boy, nor any old woman he had
employed, who did not consider that they had suffered
at his hands. The very poorest could not escape; if he
got some one to work for fourpence a day he would find
a reason to keep back a portion of the small sum due to
him. At the same time he wanted to be well thought of,
and at length an opportunity came to him to figure as
one who did not live wholly for himself but rather as
a person ready to go out of his way to help his neigh-
bours.

There had long existed a small benefit society or club
in the village to which most of the farm-hands in the
parish belonged, the members numbering about sixty or
seventy. Subscriptions were paid quarterly, but the rules
were not strict, and any member could take a week or a
fortnight longer to pay; when a member fell ill he re-
ceived half the amount of his wages a week from the
funds in hand, and once a year they had a dinner. The
secretary was a labourer, and in time he grew old and
infirm and could not hold a pen in his rheumaticky fingers,
and a meeting was held to consider what was to be done
in the matter. It was not an easy one to settle. There
were few members capable of keeping the books who
would undertake the duty, as it was unpaid, and no one
among them well known and trusted by all the members.
It was then that Elijah Raven came to the rescue. He
attended the meeting, which he was allowed to do owing
to his being a person of importance—the only one of

300 'A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

that description in the village; and getting up on his legs
he made the offer to act as secretary himself. This came
as a great surprise, and the offer was at once and unani-
mously accepted, all unpleasant feelings being forgotten,
and for the first time in his life Elijah heard himself
praised as a disinterested person, one it was good to have
in the village.

Things went on very well for a time, and at the yearly
dinner of the club a few months later, Elijah gave an
account of his stewardship, showing that the club had
a surplus of two hundred pounds. Shortly after this
trouble began; Elijah, it was said, was making use of
his position as secretary for his own private interests
and to pay off old scores against those he disliked. When
a man came with his quarterly subscription Elijah would
perhaps remember that this person had refused to work
for him or that he had some quarrel with him, and if
the subscription was overdue he would refuse to take it;
he would tell the man that he was no longer a member,
and he also refused to give sick pay to any applicant
whose last subscription was still due, if he happened to
be in Elijah’s black book. By and by he came into col-
lision with Caleb, one of the villagers against whom he
cherished a special grudge, and this small affair resulted
in the dissolution of the club.

At this time Caleb was head-shepherd at Bartle’s Cross,
a large farm above a mile and a half from the village.
One excessively hot day in August he had to dip the
lambs; it was very hard work to drive them from the
farm over a high down to the stream a mile below the
village, where there was a dipping place, and he was
tired and hot, and in a sweat when he began his work.

THE MASTER OF THE VILLAGE 301

With his arms bared to the shoulders he took and plunged
his first lamb into the tank. When engaged in dipping,
he said, he always kept his mouth closed tightly for fear
of getting even a drop of the mixture in it, but on this
occasion it unfortunately happened that the man assisting
him spoke to him and he was compelled to reply, but had
no sooner opened his mouth to speak than the lamb made
a violent struggle in his arms and splashed the water
over his face and into his mouth. He got rid of it as
quickly as he could, but soon began to feel bad, and before
the work was over he had to sit down two or three times
to rest. However, he struggled on to the finish, then took
the flock home and went to his cottage. He could do
no more. The farmer came to see what the matter was,
and found him in a fever, with face and throat greatly
swollen. “You look bad,” he said; “you must be off
to the doctor.” But it was five miles to the village where
the doctor lived, and Bawcomhe replied that he couldn’t
go. “I’m too bad—I couldn’t go, master, if you offered
me money for it,” he said.

Then the farmer mounted his horse and went himself,
and the doctor came. “No doubt,” he said, “you’ve got
some of the poison into your system and took a chill at
the same time.” The illness lasted six weeks, and then
the shepherd resumed work, although still feeling very
shaky. By and by when the opportunity came, he went
to claim his sick pay—six shillings a week for the six
weeks, his wages being then twelve shillings. Elijah
flatly refused to pay him: his subscription, he said, had
been due for several weeks and he had consequently for-
feited his right to anything. In vain the shepherd ex-
plained that he could not pay when lying ill at home

302). A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

with no money in the house and receiving no pay from
the farmer. The old man remained obdurate, and with
a very heavy heart the shepherd came out and found
three or four of the villagers waiting in the road outside
to hear the result of the application. They, too, were
men who had been turned away from the club by the
arbitrary secretary. Caleb was telling them about his
interview when Elijah came out of the house and lean-
ing over the front gate began to listen. The shepherd
then turned towards him and said in a loud voice: ‘Mr.
Elijah Raven, don’t you think this is a tarrible hard
case! I’ve paid my subscription every quarter for thirty
years and never had nothing from the fund except two
weeks’ pay when I were bad some years ago. Now I’ve
been bad six weeks, and my master giv’ me nothing for
that time, and I’ve got the doctor to pay and nothing
to live on. What am I to do?”

Elijah stared at him in silence for some time, then
spoke: “I told you in there I wouldn’t pay you one penny
of the money and I'll hold to what I said—in there I
said it indoors, and I say again that indoors I'll never
pay you—no, not one penny piece. But if I happen
some day to meet you out of doors then I'll pay you.
Now go.”

And go he did, very meekly, his wrath going down
as he trudged home; for after all he would have his
money by and by, although the hard old man would
punish him for past offences by making him wait for it.

A week or so went by, and then one day while passing
through the village he saw Elijah coming towards him,
and said to himself, Now I'll be paid! When the two
men drew near together he cried out cheerfully, “Good

THE MASTER OF THE VILLAGE 303

morning, Mr. Raven.” The other without a word and
without a pause passed by on his way, leaving the poor
shepherd gazing crestfallen after him.

After all he would not get his money! The question
was discussed in the cottages, and by and by one of the
villagers who was not so poor as most of them, and went
occasionally to Salisbury, said he would ask an attorney’s
advice about the matter. He would pay for the advice
out of his own pocket ; he wanted to know if Elijah could
lawfully do such things.

To the man’s astonishment the attorney said that as
the club was not registered and the members had them-
selves made Elijah their head he could do as he liked—
no action would lie against him. But if it was true and
it could be proved that he had spoken those words about
paying the shepherd his money if he met him out of
doors, then he could be made to pay. He also said he
would take the case up and bring it into court if a sum
of five pounds was guaranteed to cover expenses in case
the decision went against them.

Poor Caleb, with twelve shillings a week to pay his
debts and live on, could guarantee nothing, but by and
by when the lawyer’s opinion had been discussed at great
length at the inn and in all the cottages in the village,
it was found that several of Bawcombe’s friends were
willing to contribute something towards a guarantee
fund, and eventually the sum of five pounds was raised
and handed over to the person who had seen the lawyer.

His first step was to send for Bawcombe, who had
to get a day off and journey in the carrier’s cart one
market-day to Salisbury. The result was that action
was taken, and in due time the case came on. Elijah

304 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

Raven was in court with two or three of his friends—
small working farmers who had some interested motive
in desiring to appear as his supporters. He, too, had
engaged a lawyer to conduct his case. The judge, said
Bawcombe, who had never seen one before, was a tar-
rible stern-looking old man in his wig. The plaintiff’s
lawyer he did open the case and he did talk and talk a lot,
but Elijah’s counsel he did keep on interrupting him,
and they two argued and argued, but the judge he never
said no word, only he looked blacker and more tarrible
stern. Then when the talk did seem all over, Bawcombe,
ignorant of the forms, got up and said, “I beg your lord-
ship’s pardon, but may I speak?” He didn’t rightly
remember afterwards what he called him, but ’twere your
lordship or your worship, he was sure. “Yes, certainly,
you are here to speak,” said the judge, and Bawcombe
then gave an account of his interview with Elijah and of
the conversation outside the house.

Then up rose Elijah Raven, and in a loud voice ex-
claimed, “Lord, Lord, what a sad thing it is to have
to sit here and listen to this man’s lies!”

“Sit down, sir,” thundered the judge; “sit down and
hold your tongue, or I shall have you removed.”

Then Elijah’s lawyer jumped up, and the judge told
him he’d better sit down too because he knowed who the
liar was in this case. “A brutal case!’ he said, and that
was the end, and Bawcombe got his six weeks’ sick pay
and expenses, and about three pounds besides, being his
share of the society’s funds which Elijah had been ad-
vised to distribute to the members.

And that was the end of the Winterbourne Bishop
club, and from that time it has continued without one.

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CHAPTER XXIV,

Isaac’s Children

Isaac Bawcombe’s family — The youngest son — Caleb
goes to seek David at Wilton sheep-fair—Martha,
the eldest daughter— Her beauty—She marries
Shepherd Ierat—The name of Ierat—Story of Ellen
Ierat—The Ierats go to Somerset—Martha and the
lady of the manor—Martha’s travels—Her mistress
dies — Return to Winterbourne Bishop — Shepherd
Ierat’s end

CALEB was one of five, the middle one, with a brother
and sister older and a brother and sister younger than
himself—a symmetrical family. I have already written
incidentally of the elder brother and the youngest sister,
and in this chapter will complete the history of Isaac’s
children by giving an account of the eldest sister and
youngest brother.

The brother was David, the hot-tempered young shep-
herd who killed his dog Monk, and who afterwards

305

306 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

followed his brother to Warminster. In spite of his
temper and “‘want of sense” Caleb was deeply attached
to him, and when as an old man his shepherding days
were finished he followed his wife to their new home,
he grieved at being so far removed from his favourite
brother. For some time he managed to make the journey
to visit him once a year. Not to his home near War-
minster, but to Wilton, at the time of the great annual
sheep-fair held on 12 September. From his cottage he
would go by the carrier’s cart to the nearest town, and
thence by rail with one or two changes by Salisbury to
Wilton.

After I became acquainted with Caleb he was ill and
not likely to recover, and for over two years could not
get about. During all this time he spoke often to me
of his brother and wished he could see him. I won-
dered why he did not write; but he would not, nor would
the other. These people of the older generation do not
write to each other; years are allowed to pass without
tidings, and they wonder and wish and talk of this and
that absent member of the family, trusting it is well with
them, but to write a letter never enters into their minds.

At last Caleb began to mend and determined to go
again to Wilton sheep-fair to look for his beloved
brother; to Warminster he could not go; it was too far.
September the 12th saw him once more at the old meet-
ing-place, painfully making his slow way to that part
of the ground where Shepherd David Bawcombe was
accustomed to put his sheep. But he was not there. “T
be here too soon,” said Caleb, and sat himself patiently
down to wait, but hours passed and David did not appear,
so he got up and made his way about the fair in search

ISAAC’S CHILDREN 307

of him, but couldn’t find ’n. Returning to the old spot
he got into conversation with two young shepherds and
told them he was waiting for his brother who always
put his sheep in that part. “What be his name?” they
asked, and when he gave it they looked at one another
and were silent. Then one of them said, “Be you Shep-
herd Caleb Bawcombe?” and when he had answered them
the other said, “You'll not see your brother at Wilton
to-day. We've come from Doveton, and knew he. You'll
not see your brother no more. He be dead these two
years.”

Caleb thanked them for telling him, and got up and
went his way very quietly, and got back that night to
his cottage. He was very tired, said his wife; he
wouldn’t eat and he wouldn’t talk. Many days passed
and he still sat in his corner and brooded, until the wife
was angry and said she never knowed a man make so
great a trouble over losing a brother. ’T'was not like
losing a wife or a son, she said; but he answered not
a word, and it was many weeks before that dreadful
sadness began to wear off, and he could talk cheerfully
once more of his old life in the village.

Of the sister, Martha, there is much more to say; her
life was an eventful one as lives go in this quiet down-
land country, and she was, moreover, distinguished above
the others of the family by her beauty and vivacity. I
only knew her when her age was over 80, in her native
village where her life ended some time ago, but even at
that age there was something of her beauty left and a
good deal of her charm. She had a good figure still
and was of a good height; and had dark fine eyes, clear,
dark, unwrinkled skin, a finely shaped face, and her

308 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

grey hair once black was very abundant. Her manner,
too, was very engaging. At the age of 25 she married
a shepherd named Thomas lerat—a surname I had not
heard before and which made me wonder where were
the Ierats in Wiltshire that in all my rambles among the
downland villages I had never come across them, not even
in the churchyards. Nobody knew—there were no Ierats
except Martha lerat, the widow, of Winterbourne Bishop
and her son—nobody had ever heard of any other family
of the name. I began to doubt that there ever had been
such a name until quite recently when, on going over
an old downland village church, the rector took me out
to show me “a strange name” on a tablet let into the
wall of the building outside. The name was Ierat and
the date the seventeenth century. He had never seen
the name excepting on that tablet. Who, then, was
Martha’s husband? It was a queer story which she
would never have told me, but I had it from her brother
and his wife.

A generation before that of Martha, at a farm in
the village of Bower Chalk on the Ebble, there was a
girl named Ellen Ierat employed as a dairymaid. She
was not a native of the village, and if her parentage and
place of birth were ever known they have long passed
out of memory. She was a good-looking, nice-tempered
girl, and was much liked by her master and mistress,
so that after she had been about two years in their service
it came as a great shock to find that she was in the family
way. The shock was all the greater when the fresh dis-
covery was made one day that another unmarried woman
in the house, who was also a valued servant, was in the
same condition. The two unhappy women had kept

——_— =. =~

ISAAC’S CHILDREN 309

their secret from every one except from each other until
it could be kept no longer, and they consulted together
and determined to confess it to their mistress and abide
the consequences.

Who were the men? was the first question asked.
There was only one—Robert Coombe, the shepherd,
who lived at the farm-house, a slow, silent, almost in-
articulate man, with a round head and flaxen hair; a
bachelor of whom people were accustomed to say that
he would never marry because no woman would have
such a stolid, dull-witted fellow for a husband. But he
was a good shepherd and had been many years on the
farm, and it was altogether a terrible business. Forth-
with the farmer got out his horse and rode to the downs
to have it out with the unconscionable wretch who had
brought that shame and trouble on them. He found
him sitting on the turf eating his midday bread and bacon,
with a can of cold tea at his side, and getting off his
horse he went up to him and damned him for a scoundrel
and abused him until he had no words left, then told his
shepherd that he must choose between the two women
and marry at once, so as to make an honest woman of
one of the two poor fools; either he must do that or
quit the farm forthwith.

Coombe heard in silence and without a change in his
countenance, masticating his food the while and washing
it down with an occasional draught from his can, until
he had finished his meal; then taking his crook he got
up, and remarking that he would “think of it” went after
his flock. |

The farmer rode back cursing him for a clod; and in
the evening Coombe, after folding his flock, came in to

310 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

give his decision, and said he had thought of it and
would take Jane to wife. She was a good deal older
than Ellen and not so good-looking, but she belonged
to the village and her people were there, and everybody
knowed who Jane was, an’ she was an old servant an’
would be wanted on the farm. Ellen was a stranger
among them, and being only a dairymaid was of less
account than the other one.

So it was settled, and on the following morning Ellen,
the rejected, was told to take up her traps and walk.

What was she to do in her condition, no longer to
be concealed, alone and friendless in the world? She
thought of Mrs. Poole, an elderly woman of Winter-
bourne Bishop, whose children were grown up and away
from home, who when staying at Bower Chalk some
months before had taken a great liking for Ellen, and
when parting with her had kissed her and said: “My
dear, I lived among strangers too when I were a girl
and had no one of my own, and know what ’tis.” That
was all; but there was nobody else, and she resolved to
go to Mrs. Poole, and so laden with her few belongings
she set out to walk the long miles over the downs to
Winterbourne Bishop where she had never been. It was
far to walk in hot August weather when she went that
sad journey, and she rested at intervals in the hot shade
of a furze-bush, haunted all day by the miserable fear
that the woman she sought, of whom she knew so little,
would probably harden her heart and close her door
against her. But the good woman took compassion on
her and gave her shelter in her poor cottage, and kept
her till her child was born, in spite of all the women’s
bitter tongues. And in the village where she had found

ISAAC’S CHILDREN 311

refuge she remained to the end of her life, without a
home of her own, but always in a room or two with
her boy in some poor person’s cottage. Her life was
hard but not unpeaceful, and the old people, all dead and
gone now, remembered Ellen as a very quiet, staid woman
who worked hard for a living, sometimes at the wash-tub,
but mostly in the fields, haymaking and harvesting and
at other times weeding, or collecting flints, or with a
spud or sickle extirpating thistles in the pasture-land.
She worked alone or with other poor women, but with
the men she had no friendships; the sharpest women’s
eyes in the village could see no fault in her in this respect;
if it had not been so, if she had talked pleasantly with
them and smiled when addressed by them, her life would
have been made a burden to her. She would have been
often asked who her brat’s father was. The dreadful
experience of that day, when she had been cast out and
was alone in the world, when, burdened with her unborn
child, she had walked over the downs in the hot August
weather, in anguish of apprehension, had sunk into her
soul. Her very nature was changed, and in a man’s
presence her blood seemed frozen, and if spoken to she
answered in monosyllables with her eyes on the earth.
This was noted, with the result that all the village women
were her good friends; they never reminded her of her
fall, and when she died still young they grieved for her
and befriended the little orphan boy she had left on their
hands.

He was then about 11 years old, and was a stout
little fellow with a round head and flaxen hair like his
father ; but he was not so stolid and not like him in char-
acter; at all events his old widow in speaking of him

312 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

to me said that never in all his life did he do one unkind
or unjust thing. He came from a long line of shepherds,
and shepherding was perhaps almost instinctive in him;
from his earliest boyhood the tremulous bleating of the
sheep and half-muffled clink of the copper bells and the
sharp bark of the sheep-dog had a strange attraction for

him. He was always ready when a boy was wanted to
take charge of a flock during a temporary absence of the
shepherd, and eventually when only about 15 he was
engaged as under-shepherd, and for the rest of his life
shepherding was his trade.

His marriage to Martha Bawcombe came as a surprise
to the village, for though no one had any fault to find
with Tommy Ierat there was a slur on him, and Martha,
who was the finest girl in the place, might, it was thought,

ISAAC’S CHILDREN 313

have looked for some one better. But Martha had always
liked Tommy; they were of the same age and had been
playmates in their childhood; growing up together their
childish affection had turned to love, and after they
had waited some years and Tommy had a cottage and
seven shillings a week, Isaac and his wife gave their
consent and they were married. Still they felt hurt at
being discussed in this way by the villagers, so that when
Ierat was offered a place as shepherd at a distance from
home, where his family history was not known, he was
glad to take it and his wife to go with him, about a month
after her child was born.

The new place was in Somerset, thirty-five to forty
miles from their native village, and Ierat as shepherd
at the manor-house farm on a large estate would have
better wages than he had ever had before and a nice
cottage to live in. Martha was delighted with her new
home—the cottage, the entire village, the great park
and mansion close by, all made it seem like paradise to
her. Better than everything was the pleasant welcome
she received from the villagers, who looked in to make
her acquaintance and seemed very much taken with her
appearance and nice, friendly manner. They were all
eager to tell her about the squire and his lady, who were
young, and of how great an interest they took in their
people and how much they did for them and how they
were loved by everybody on the estate.

It happens, oddly enough, that I became acquainted
with this same man, the squire, over fifty years after
the events I am relating, when he was past 80. This
acquaintance came about by means of a letter he wrote
me in reference to the habits of a bird or some such

314 ‘A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

small matter, a way in which I have become acquainted
with scores—perhaps I should say hundreds—of persons
in many parts of the country. He was a very fine man,
the head of an old and distinguished county family; an
ideal squire, and one of the few large landowners I have
had the happiness to meet who was not devoted to that
utterly selfish and degraded form of sport which consists
in the annual rearing and subsequent slaughter of a host
of pheasants.

Now when Martha was entertaining half a dozen of
her new neighbours who had come in to see her, and
exhibited her baby to them and then proceeded to suckle
it, they looked at one another and laughed, and one
said, “Just you wait till the lady at the mansion sees ’ee
—she’ll soon want ’ee to nurse her little one.”

What did they mean? They told her that the great
lady was a mother too, and had a little sickly baby and
wanted a nurse for it, but couldn’t find a woman to
please her.

Martha fired up at that. Did they imagine, she asked,
that any great lady in the world with all her gold could
tempt her to leave her own darling to nurse another
woman’s! She would not do such a thing—she would
rather leave the place than submit to it. But she didn’t
believe it—they had only said that to tease and frighten
her !

They laughed again, looking admiringly at her as she
stood before them with sparkling eyes, flushed cheeks,
and fine full bust, and only answered, “Just you wait,
my dear, till she sees ’ee.”

And very soon the lady did see her. The people at
the manor were strict in their religious observances, and

ISAAC’S CHILDREN 315

it had been impressed on Martha that she had better
attend at morning service on her first Sunday, and a
girl was found by one of her neighbours to look after
the baby in the meantime. And so when Sunday came
she dressed herself in her best clothes and went to church
with the others. The service over, the squire and his
wife came out first and were standing in the path ex-
changing greetings with their friends; then as the others
came out with Martha in the midst of the crowd the lady
turned and fixed her eyes on her, and suddenly stepping
out from the group she stopped Martha and said, “Who
are you?f—lI don’t remember your face.”

“No, ma’am,” said Martha, blushing and curtsying.
“T be the new shepherd’s wife at the manor-house farm
—we’ve only been here a few days.”

The other then said she had heard of her and that
she was nursing her child, and she then told Martha to
- go to the mansion that afternoon as she had something
to say to her.

The poor young mother went in fear and trembling,
trying to stiffen herself against the expected blandish-
ments.

Then followed the fateful interview. The lady was
satisfied that she had got hold of the right person at
last—the one in the world who would be able to save her
precious little one “from to die,” the poor pining infant
on whose frail little life so much depended! She would
feed it from her full, healthy breasts and give it some-
thing of her own abounding, splendid life. Martha’s
own baby would do very well—there was nothing the
matter with it, and it would flourish on “the bottle” or
anything else, no matter what. All she had to do was

316 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

to go back to her cottage and make the necessary arrange-
ments, then come to stay at the mansion.

Martha refused, and the other smiled; then Martha
pleaded and cried and said she would never never leave
her own child, and as all that had no effect she was
angry, and it came into her mind that if the lady would
get angry too she would be ordered out and all would
be over. But the lady wouldn’t get angry, for when
Martha stormed she grew more gentle and spoke tenderly
-and sweetly, but would still have it her own way, until
the poor young mother could stand it no longer, and so
rushed away in a great state of agitation to tell her hus-
band and ask him to help her against her enemy. But
Tommy took the lady’s side, and his young wife hated
him for it, and was in despair and ready to snatch up
her child and run away from them all, when all at once
a carriage appeared at the cottage, and the great lady
herself, followed by a nurse with the sickly baby in her
arms, came in. She had come, she said very gently,
almost pleadingly, to ask Martha to feed her child once,
and Martha was flattered and pleased at the request, and
took and fondled the infant in her arms, then gave it
suck at her beautiful breast. And when she had fed the
child, acting very tenderly towards it like a mother, her
visitor suddenly burst into tears, and taking Martha in
her arms she kissed her and pleaded with her again until
she could resist no more; and it was settled that she was
to live at the mansion and come once every day to the
village to feed her own child from the breast.

Martha’s connexion with the people at the mansion
did not end when she had safely reared the sickly child.
The lady had become attached to her and wanted to have

i
a

ISAAC’S CHILDREN 317,

her always, although Martha could not act again as wet
nurse, for she had no more children herself. And by
and by when her mistress lost her health after the birth
of a third child and was ordered abroad, she took Martha
with her, and she passed a whole year with her on the
Continent, residing in France and Italy. They came
home again, but as the lady continued to decline in health
she travelled again, still taking Martha with her, and
they visited India and other distant countries, including
the Holy Land; but travel and wealth and all that the
greatest physicians in the world could do for her, and
the tender care of a husband who worshipped her, availed
not, and she came home in the end to die; and Martha
went back to her Tommy and the boy, to be separated
no more while their lives lasted.

The great house was shut up and remained so for
years. The squire was the last man in England to shirk
his duties as landlord and to his people whom he loved,
and who loved him as few great landowners are loved
in England, but his grief was too great for even his
great strength to bear up against, and it was long feared
by his friends that he would never recover from his loss.
But he was healed in time, and ten years later married
again and returned to his home, to live there until nigh
upon his ninetieth year. Long before this the Ierats had
returned to their native village. When I last saw Martha,
then in her eighty-second year, she gave me the follow-
ing account of her Tommy’s end.

He continued shepherding up to the age of 78. One
Sunday, early in the afternoon, when she was ill with
an attack of influenza, he came home, and putting aside
his crook said, “I’ve done work.”

318 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

”?

“It’s early,” she replied, “but maybe you got the boy
to mind the sheep for you.”

“I don’t mean I’ve done work for the day,” he returned.
“T’ve done for good—lI’ll not go with the flock no more.”

“What be saying?” she cried in sudden alarm. “Be
you feeling bad—what be the matter?”

“No, I’m not bad,” he said. “I’m perfectly well, but
I’ve done work;” and more than that he would not say.

She watched him anxiously but could see nothing
wrong with him; his appetite was good, he smoked his
pipe, and was cheerful.

Three days later she noticed that he had some difficulty
in pulling on a stocking when dressing in the morning,
and went to his assistance. He laughed and said, “Here’s
a funny thing! You be ill and I be well, and you’ve got
to help me put on a stocking!’ and he laughed again.

After dinner that day he said he wanted a drink and
would have a glass of beer. There was no beer in the
house, and she asked him if he would have a cup of tea.

“Oh, yes, that’ll do very well,” he said, and she made
it for him.

After drinking his cup of tea he got a footstool, and
placing it at her feet sat down on it and rested his head
on her knees; he remained a long time in this position
so perfectly still that she at length bent over and felt
and examined his face, only to discover that he was
dead.

And that was the end of Tommy Ierat, the son of
Ellen. He died, she said, like a baby that has been fed
and falls asleep on its mother’s breast.

?

ORCHESTON S!? GEORGE

CHAPTER XXV

Living in the Past

Evening talks—On the construction of sheep-folds—
Making hurdles—Devil’s guts—Character in sheep-
dogs—Sally, the spiteful dog—Dyke, the lost dog
who returned—Strange recovery of a lost dog—Bad-
ger, the playful dog—Badger shepherds the fowls—
A ghost story—A Sunday-evening talk—Parsons and
ministers—Noisy religion—The shepherd’s love of
his calling—Mark Dick and the giddy sheep—Con-
clusion

Durinc our frequent evening talks, often continued till
a late hour, it was borne in on Caleb Bawcombe that his
anecdotes of wild creatures interested me more than
anything else he had to tell; but in spite of this, or because
he could not always bear it in mind, the conversation
almost invariably drifted back to the old subject of
sheep, of which he was never tired. Even in his sleep
319

320 (A’' SHEPHERD'S LIFE

he does not forget them; his dreams, he says, are always
about sheep; he is with the flock, shifting the hurdles,
or following it out on the down. A troubled dream,
when he is ill or uneasy in his sleep is invariably about
some difficulty with the flock; it gets out of his control,
and the dog cannot understand him or refuses to obey
when everything depends on his instant action. The
subject was so much to him, so important above all others,
that he would not spare the listener even the minutest
details of the shepherd’s life and work. His “hints on
the construction of sheep-folds’” would have filled a
volume; and if any farmer had purchased the book he
would not have found the title a misleading one and that
he had been defrauded of his money. But with his
singular fawnlike face and clear eyes on his listener it
was impossible to fall asleep, or even to let the attention
wander; and incidentally even in his driest discourse
there were little bright: touches which one would not
willingly have missed.

About hurdles he explained that it was common for
the downland shepherds to repair the broken and worn-
out ones with the long woody stems of the bithy-wind
from the hedges; and when I asked what the plant was
he’ described the wild clematis or traveller’s-joy; but
those names he did not know—to him the plant had
always been known as bithywind or else Devil's guts.
It struck me that bithywind might have come by the
transposition of two letters from withybind, as if one
should say flutterby for butterfly, or flagondry for drag-
onfly. Withybind is one of the numerous vernacular
names of the common convolvulus. Lilybind is another.
But what would old Gerarde, who invented the pretty

LIVING IN THE PAST 321

name of traveller’s-joy for that ornament of the wayside
hedges, have said to such a name as Devil’s guts?

There was, said Caleb, an old farmer in the parish
of Bishop who had a peculiar fondness for this plant,
and if a shepherd pulled any of it out of one of his
hedges after leafing-time he would be very much put out;
he would shout at him, “Just you leave my Devil’s guts
alone or I'll not keep you on the farm.” And the shep-
herds in revenge gave him the unpleasant nickname of
“Old Devil’s Guts,” by which he was known in that part
of the country.

As a rule, talk about sheep, or any subject connected
with sheep, would suggest something about sheep-dogs
—individual dogs he had known or possessed, and who
always had their own character and peculiarities, like
human beings. They were good and bad and indifferent ;
a really bad dog was a rarity; but a fairly good dog
might have some trick or vice or weakness. There was
Sally, for example, a stump-tail bitch, as good a deg
with sheep as he ever possessed, but you had to consider
her feelings. She would keenly resent any injustice from
her master. If he spoke too sharply to her, or rebuked
her unnecessarily for going a little out of her way just
to smell at a rabbit burrow, she would nurse her anger
until an opportunity came of inflicting a bite on some
erring sheep. Punishing her would have made matters
worse: the only way was to treat her as a reasonable
being and never to speak to her as a dog—a mere
slave.

Dyke was another dog he remembered well. He be-
longed to old Shepherd Matthew Titt, who was head-
shepherd at a farm near Warminster, adjacent to the

322 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

one where Caleb worked. Old Mat and his wife lived
alone in their cottage out of the village, all their children
having long grown up and gone away to a distance from
home, and being so lonely “by their two selves” they
loved their dog just as others love their relations. But
Dyke deserved it, for he was a very good dog. One year
Mat was sent by his master with lambs to Weyhill, the
little village near Andover, where a great sheep-fair is
held in October every year. It was distant over thirty
miles, but Mat though old was a strong man still and
greatly trusted by his master. From this journey he
returned with a bad heart, for he had lost Dyke. He
had disappeared one night while they were at Weyhill.
Old Mrs. Titt cried for him as she would have cried for
a lost son, and for many a long day they went about
with heavy hearts.

Just a year had gone by when one night the old woman
was roused from sleep by loud knocks on the window-
pane of the living-room below. “Mat! Mat!” she cried,
shaking him vigorously, “wake up—old Dyke has come
back to us!” “What be you talking about?” growled
the old shepherd. “Lie down and go to sleep—you’ve
been dreaming.” “’Tain’t no dream; ’tis Dyke—I know
his knock,” she cried, and getting up she opened the
window and put her head well out, and there sure enough
was Dyke, standing up against the wall and gazing up
at her, and knocking with his paw against the window
below.

Then Mat jumped up, and going together downstairs
they unbarred the door and embraced the dog with joy,
and the rest of the night was spent in feeding and caress-
ing him, and asking him a hundred questions, which he

LIVING IN THE PAST 323

could only answer by licking their hands and wagging
his tail.

It was supposed that he had been stolen at the fair,
probably by one of the wild, little, lawless men called
“general dealers,’’ who go flying about the country in
a trap drawn by a fast-trotting pony; that he had been
thrown, muffled up, into the cart and carried many a
mile away, and sold to some shepherd, and that he had
lost his sense of direction. But after serving a stranger
a full year he had been taken with sheep to Weyhill
Fair once more, and once there he knew where he was,
and had remembered the road leading to his old home
and master, and making his escape had travelled the thirty
long miles back to Warminster.

The account of Dyke’s return reminded me of an
equally good story of the recovery of a lost dog which
I heard from a shepherd on the Avon. He had been
lost over a year, when one day the shepherd, being out
on the down with his flock, stood watching two drovers
travelling with a flock on the turnpike road below, nearly
a mile away, and by and by,hearing one of their dogs
bark he knew at that distance that it was his dog. “I
haven’t a doubt,” he said to himself, “and if I know his
bark he’ll know my whistle.” With that he thrust two
fingers in his mouth and blew his shrillest and longest
whistle, then waited the result. Presently he spied a
dog, still at a great distance, coming swiftly towards
him; it was his own dog, mad with joy at finding his
old master.

Did ever two friends, long sundered by unhappy chance,
recognize each other’s voices at such a distance and so
come together once more!

324 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

Whether the drovers had seen him desert them or
not, they did not follow to recover him, nor did the
shepherd go to them to find out how they had got pos-
session of him; it was enough that he had got his dog
back.

No doubt in this case the dog had recognized his old
home when taken by it, but he was in another man’s
hands now, and the habits and discipline of a life made
it impossible for him to desert until that old, familiar
and imperative call reached his ears and he could not
disobey.

Then (to go on with Caleb’s reminiscences) there was
Badger, owned by a farmer and worked for some years
by Caleb—the very best stump-tail he ever had to help
him. This dog differed from others in his vivacious
temper and ceaseless activity. When the sheep were
feeding quietly and there was little or nothing to do
for hours at a time, he would not lie down and go to
sleep like any other sheep-dog, but would spend his vacant
time “amusing of hisself’”’ on some smooth slope where
he could roll over and over; then run back and roll over
again and again, playing by himself just like a child.
Or he would chase a butterfly or scamper about over the
down hunting for large white flints, which he would
bring one by one and deposit them at his master’s feet,
pretending they were something of value and greatly
enjoying the game. This dog, Caleb said, would make
him laugh every day with his games and capers.

When Badger got old his sight and hearing failed;
yet when he was very nearly blind and so deaf that he
could not hear a word of command, even when it was
shouted out quite close to him, he was still kept with the

LIVING IN THE PAST 325

flock because he was so intelligent and willing. But he
was too old at last; it was time for him to be put out of
the way. The farmer, however, who owned him, would
not consent to have him shot, and so the wistful old
dog was ordered to keep at home at the farm-house.
Still he refused to be superannuated, and not allowed to
go to the flock he took to shepherding the fowls. In
the morning he would drive them out to their run and
keep them there in a flock, going round and round them
by the hour, and furiously hunting back the poor hens
that tried to steal off to lay their eggs in some secret
place. This could not be allowed, and so poor old Badger,
who would have been too miserable if tied up, had to
be shot after all.

These were always his best stories—his recollections
of sheep-dogs, for of all creatures, sheep alone excepted,
he knew and loved them best. Yet for one whose life
had been spent in that small isolated village and on the
bare down about it, his range was pretty wide, and it
even included one memory of a visitor from the other
world. Let him tell it in his own words.

“Many say they don’t believe there be such things
as ghosties. They niver see’d ’n. An’ I don’t say I
believe or disbelieve what I hear tell. I warn’t there to
see. I only know what I see’d myself: but I don’t say
that it were a ghostie or that it wasn’t one. I was com-
ing home late one night from the sheep; ’twere close
on ‘leven o’clock, a very quiet night, with moon sheen
that made it a’most like day. Near th’ end of the village
I come to the stepping-stones, as we call ’n, where there
be a gate and the road, an’ just by the road the four
big white stones for people going from the village to

326 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

‘the copse an’ the down on t’other side to step over the
water. In winter ‘twas a stream there, but the water
it dried in summer, and now ’twere summer-time and
there wur no water. When I git there I see’d two
women, both on ’em tall, with black gowns on, an’ big
bonnets they used to wear; an’ they were standing face
to face so close that the tops o’ their bonnets wur a’most
touching together. Who be these women out so late?
says I to myself. Why, says I, they be Mrs. Durk from
up the village an’ Mrs. Gaarge Durk, the keeper’s wife
down by the copse. Then I thought I know’d how
‘twas: Mrs. Gaarge, she’d a» been to see Mrs. Durk in
the village, and Mrs. Durk she were coming out a leetel
way with her, so far as the stepping-stones, and they
wur just having a last leetel talk before saying Good
night. But mind, I hear’d no talking when I passed ’n.
An’ I’d hardly got past ’n before I says, Why, what
a fool be I! Mrs. Durk she be dead a twelvemonth,
an’ I were in the churchyard and see’d her buried myself.
Whatever be I thinking of? ‘That made me stop and
turn round to look at ’n agin. An’ there they was just
as I see’d ’n at first—Mrs. Durk, who was dead a twelve-
month, an’ Mrs. Gaarge Durk from the copse, standing
there with their bonnets a’most touching together. An’
I couldn’t hear nothing—no talking, they were so still
as two posties. Then something came over me like a
tarrible coldness in the blood and down my back, an’
I were afraid, and turning I runned faster than I ever
runned in my life, an’ never stopped—not till I got to
the cottage.”

It was not a bad ghost story: but then such stories
seldom are when coming from those who have actually

LIVING IN THE PAST 327

seen, or believe they have seen, an immaterial being.
Their principal charm is in their infinite variety; you
never find two real or true ghost stories quite alike. and
in this they differ from the weary inventions of the
fictionist.

But invariably the principal subject was sheep.

“I did always like sheep,” said Caleb. “Some did
say to me that they couldn’t abide shepherding because
of the Sunday work. But I always said, Someone must
do it; they must have food in winter and water in sum-
mer, and must be looked after, and it can’t be worse for
me to do it.”

It was on a Sunday afternoon, and the distant sound
of the church bells had set him talking on this subject.
He told me how once, after a long interval, he went to
the Sunday morning service in his native village, and
the vicar preached a sermon about true religion. Just
the going to church, he said, did not make men religious.
Out there on the downs there were shepherds who sel-
dom saw the inside of a church, who were sober, righteous
men and walked with God every day of their lives. .
Caleb said that this seemed to touch his heart because
he knowed it was true.

When I asked him if he would not change the church
for the chapel, now he was ill and his vicar paid him
no attention, while the minister came often to see and
talk to him, as I had witnessed, he shook his head and
said that he would never change. He then added: “We
always say that the chapel ministers are good men: some
say they be better than the parsons; but all I’ve knowed
—all them that have talked to me—have said bad things

328 A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

of the Church, and that’s not true religion: I say that
the Bible teaches different.”

Caleb could not have had a very wide experience, and
most of us know Dissenting ministers who are wholly
free from the fault he pointed out; but in the purely
rural districts, in the small villages where the small men
are found, it is certainly common to hear unpleasant
things said of the parish priest by his Nonconformist
rival; and should the parson have some well-known fault
or make a slip, the other is apt to chuckle over it with a
very manifest and most unchristian delight.

The atmosphere on that Sunday afternoon was very
still, and by and by through the open window floated
a strain of music; it was from the brass band of the
Salvationists who were marching through the next vil-
lage, about two miles away. We listened, then Caleb
remarked: “Somehow I never cared to go with them
Army people. Many say they’ve done a great good, and
I don’t disbelieve it, but there was too much what I call
—NOISE; if, sir, you can understand what I mean.”

I once heard the great Dr. Parker speak the word
imagination, or, as he pronounced it, im-madge-i-na-
shun, with a volume of sound which filled a large build-
ing and made the quality he named seem the biggest
thing in the universe. That in my experience was his
loftiest oratorical feat; but I think the old shepherd rose
to a greater height when, after a long pause during which
he filled his lungs with air, he brought forth the tre-
mendous word, dragging it out gratingly, so as to illus-
trate the sense in the prolonged harsh sound.

To show him that I understood what he meant very
well, I explained the philosophy of the matter as follows.

LIVING IN THE PAST 329

He was a shepherd of the downs, who had lived always
in a quiet atmosphere, a noiseless world, and from life-
long custom had become a lover of quiet. The Salvation
Army was born in a very different world, in East Lon-
don—the dusty, busy, crowded world of streets, where
men wake at dawn to sounds that are like the opening
of hell’s gates, and spend their long strenuous days and
their lives in that atmosphere peopled with innumerable
harsh noises, until they, too, acquire the noisy habit, and
come at last to think that if they have anything to say
to their fellows, anything to sell or advise or recommend,
from the smallest thing—from a mackerel or a cabbage
or a penn’orth of milk, to a newspaper or a book or a
picture or a religion—they must howl and yell it out at
every passer-by. And the human voice not being suf-
ficiently powerful, they provide themselves with bells
and gongs and cymbals and trumpets and drums to help
them in attracting the attention of the public.

He listened gravely to this outburst, and said he didn’t
know exactly ’bout that, but agreed that it was very
quiet on the downs, and that he loved their quiet. “Fifty
years,” he said, “I’ve been on the downs and fields, day
and night, seven days a week, and I’ve been told that it’s
a poor way to spend a life, working seven days for ten
or twelve, or at most thirteen shillings. But I never
seen it like that; I liked it, and I always did my best.
You see, sir, I took a pride in it. I never left a place
but I was asked to stay. When I left it was because of
something I didn’t like. I couldn’t never abide cruelty
to a dog or any beast. And I couldn’t abide bad lan-
guage. If my master swore at the sheep or the dog
I wouldn’t bide with he—no, not for a pound a week.

330 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

I liked my work, and I liked knowing things about sheep.
Not things in books, for I never had no books, but what
I found out with my own sense, if you can understand
me.

“T remember, when I were young, a very old shepherd
on the farm; he had been more’n forty years there, and
he was called Mark Dick. He told me that when he

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were a young man he was once putting the sheep in the
fold, and there was one that was giddy—a young ewe.
She was always a-turning round and round and round,
and when she got to the gate she wouldn’t go in but kept
on a-turning and turning, until at last he got angry and,
lifting his crook, gave her a crack on the head, and down
she went, and he thought he’d killed her. But in a little
while up she jumps and trotted straight into the fold,
and from that time she were well. Next day he told
his master, and his master said, with a laugh, “Well,
now you know what to do when you gits a giddy sheep.’
Some time after that Mark Dick he had another giddy

Se eee OO

LIVING IN THE PAST 331

one, and remembering what his master had said, he
swung his stick and gave he a big crack on the skull,
and down went the sheep, dead. He’d killed it this
time, sure enough. When he tells of this one his master
said, “You’ve cured one and you've killed one; now
don’t you try to cure no more,’ he says.

“Well, some time after that I had a giddy one in my
flock. I'd been thinking of what Mark Dick had told
me, so I caught the ewe to see if I could find out any-
thing. I were always a tarrible one for examining sheep
when they were ill. I found this one had a swelling at
the back of her head; it were like a soft ball, bigger ’n
a walnut. So I took my knife and opened it, and out
ran a lot of water, quite clear; and when I let her go
she ran quite straight, and got well. After that I did
cure other giddy sheep with my knife, but I found out
there were some I couldn’t cure. They had no swelling,
and was giddy because they’d got a maggot on the brain
or some other trouble I couldn’t find out.”

Caleb could not have finished even this quiet Sunday
afternoon conversation, in the course of which we had
risen to lofty matters, without a return to his old favour-
ite subjects of sheep and his shepherding life on the
downs. He was long miles away from his beloved home
now, lying on his back, a disabled man who would never
again follow a flock on the hills nor listen to the sounds
he loved best to hear—the multitudinous tremulous bleat-
ings of the sheep, the tinklings of numerous bells, and
crisp ringing bark of his dog. But his heart was there
still, and the images of past scenes were more vivid in
him than they can ever be in the minds of those who
live in towns and read books. “I can see it now,” was

332 ‘A SHEPHERD’S LIFE

a favourite expression of his when relating some incident
in his past life. Whenever a sudden light, a kind of
smile, came into his eyes, I knew that it was at some
ancient memory, a touch of quaintness or humour in
some farmer or shepherd he had known in the vanished
time—his father, perhaps, or old John, or Mark Dick.
or Liddy, or Dan’l Burdon, the solemn seeker after
buried treasure.

After our long Sunday talk we were silent for a time,
and then he uttered these impressive words: “I don’t
say that I want to have my life again, because ’twould
be sinful. We must take what is sent. But if ’twas
offered to me and I was told to choose my work, I’d
say, Give me my Wiltsheer Downs again and let me be
a shepherd there all my life long.”

INDEX

Appers, sheep-dog’s enmity to, 67; effect of bite, 273.
Agricultural machinery, outbreak against, 195.
Aldermaston, 280.

Alvediston, village on the Ebble, 8.

Antiquaries, Society of, at Old Sarum, 21.

Apollo of the Downs, an, 34,

Avon, river, 8, 9, 18, 25, 224.

Barrorp St. Martin, on the Nadder, 210.

Barley bannocks, playing at ball with, 220-1.

Barrows, destroyed by cultivation and by rabbits, 15, 16; on Bishop
Down, 40, 43.

Bawcombe, Caleb: his life-story, 45-53; earliest shepherding experi-
ence, 65; his mother, 68; his younger brother David, 160, 165, 305;
at Doveton Farm, on the Wylye, 190; in Dorsetshire, 238; return
to Winterbourne Bishop, 240; his elder brother Joseph, 240-1;
his eldest sister Martha, 307; memories, 319.

——Isaac. Caleb’s father, history of, 51-55; his children, 66; great
strength, 73; deer-poaching, 79-82; early instruction in the
Bible, 141-4.

Bird life on the Downs, 116-26.

Bird-scarer, the, 4; small boy as, 217.

“Birds of Wiltshire,” 120.

Bishop Down, human bones thrown out by rabbit on, 42.

Bithywind, local name of clematis, 320.

Bourne, river, 9-25.

Bower Chalk, village of, on the Ebble, 308.

Britford, sheep fair, 69.

Broad Chalk, village on the Ebble, 13.

Brown thrush, 126.

Bustard, a memory and a place-name, 116,

Buzzard, common, at Savernake, 117.

Caste feeling, 49.

Cats: trout-fishing, 174; killed by train, 175; character of Gip, 176;
a rat-destroyer, 178; gipsies’ cats, 178-9; Sir Henry Wyatt’s
cat, 180-1; hunting cats, 181; poaching cat at Fonthill Bishop,
183; a farmer’s cats, 185; fatal weakness in cats, 186-9.

333

334 INDEX

Chilmark, village of, 234.

Chitterne, village of, 224.

Church bells, legend of stolen, 239,

Clarke’s “For the Term of his Natural Life,” 221.
Clematis, wild, local names of, 320.

Codford St. Peter, on the Wylye, 148.

Combe Bissit, village on the Ebble, 8.

Compton Chamberlain, village on the Nadder, 120.
Constable, painting of Salisbury Cathedral, 19.
Corn-crake, caught by sheep-dog, 164.

Coroner, an obsequious, 234,

Cranborne Chase, 84, 118

Darx people in Wiltshire, three types of, 257; history of the Tarks,
258-63.

Death following death in aged couples, 55.

Deer, fallow, in Cranborne Chase, 84; roe, 284.

Deer-stealing, 79; a keeper tricked, 87-8; fights with poachers, 88;
Reed of Odstock, 206.

Devil, the, in a black cap, 229; church bells stolen by, 239.

Devil’s guts, name for clematis, 320.

Di-dapper, 183.

Donkeys, poisoned by yew, 77.

Doveton, village on the Wylye, 144; farm, 190.

Downs, aspects of the, 2, 6; effect of the plough, 15; silence of
the, 328.

Downton, village on the Avon, 8.

Druid’s Head, the, on Salisbury Plain, 223.

EartTHworks, destroyed by cultivation, 15; on Winterbourne Bishop
Down, 81.
Ebble, or Ebele, river, 4, 8, 25.

FIELDFARE, nesting in Wilts, 122.

Firewood-gathering, 211.

Flowers, cottage garden, 153; wild in Wylye vale, 154.

Flycatchers, habits of, 203.

Fonthill Bishop, 183, 201.

Found, the surname of, 87.

Fovant, village on the Nadder, 280.

Foxes, trapping, 104; gamekeepers on, 105; foxes versus pheasants,
106; Caleb kills a fox, 108; two varieties of, 110; playful spirits
in, 111-3; a danger to sheep when hunted, 115.

Fox-hound turning wild, 279.

GaTHERGOOD, wisdom of shepherd, 101-4.
Gazalee, Mr. Justice, at the Salisbury Assizes, 229.

INDEX 335

Gerarde, the herbalist, 320.

Ghosts, the shepherd on, 325.

Gilpin, on scenery, 2-3.

Gipsies, liking for cats in, 179; south of England, 248; dislike of
a settled life, 250; sense of humour in, 250; carrion eating, 252;
stolen goods buried by, 253; supposed secret knowledge, 256; as
naturalists, 287-9.

Goshawk in Fonthill Bishop Woods, 118.

Gray hairs, from old age, in dogs, 169; in a mole, 170.

Grayling, in the Wylye, 158.

Great Ridge Wood, rabbits in, 212; roe deer, 284.

Greenfinches, 158.

Groveley Wood, 210.

Harsutt, keeper, 85; fight with poachers, 88.

Hares, poached by shepherds, 95; fond of black-thorn twigs, 102;
catching, with a shepherd’s crook, 102; sitting on stumps, 285.

Hawks, extermination of, 117.

Hedge-fruit, 36.

Hedgehogs, a hunter of, 246; eaters of, 248; gipsies love of flesh of,
287; unknown habits of, 288.

Heytesbury, Wylye vale, village of, 151.

Hindon, decay of, 201; smugglers at, 203; birds in, 202.

Hoare, Sir Richard Colt, barrows opened by, 43.

Hounds, method of feeding, 118.

TBeRIAN types in Wiltshire, 257.

lerat, surname of, 308; history of Ellen, 308-12.
Imber, village of, and Imber Court Farm, 171.
Infirmary, the Salisbury, 26.

Jarvis, the village blacksmith, 73.
Joan, story of the aged villager, 214.

Krnea’s Copse, ‘New Forest, 113.
Knook, on the Wylye, church and manor-house of, 151.

Lams suckled by sheep-dog, 72.
Lamb Inn, Hindon, 202.

Lilybind, name of convolvulus, 320.
London, image of, on the mind, 23.
Lord Lovell, story of the last, 149,
Lower Pertwood Farm, 205.

MAGISTRATES, severity of, 229.
Magpies, 122; destroyed by gamekeepers, 123; at Winterbourne
Bishop, 123.

336 INDEX

Marlborough, 1; Downs, 8.

Mere Down, 125-32.

Mistle-thrush, 122.

Mobs in 1831, 195; their suppression, 232; at Pytt House, 233.
Monkton Deverill, 206.

Moorhen, 183.

Napper, river, 9, 10, 145.
Norton Bavant, village on the Wylye, 148.

OxpstTock, village on the Ebble, 8, 206.

Old Father Time, 209.

Old Joe, the collier, 74.

Old Nance, the rook-scarer, 166-7.

Old Sarum, 19; excavations at, 20.

Open air, pleasures of the, 3.

Overrunner, see Shrew.

Owl, long-eared, 113, 291; white, in the village, 297.

PamBa wood, 279,

Park, Mr. Justice, severity of, 228.

Peat, used as fuel, 75.

Percival, Mr., resolution by, in House of Commons, 230.

Pewsey, vale of, 8.

Pheasant, preserving the, effects of, 106.

Plantain, flowering habit of, 10.

Poaching, the moral law and, 93; village, 97; on the Downs, 101-3.
Psalm, the hundred and ninth, 197.

Raven, Elijah, master of the village, 295-304.

Ravens: former abundance, 124; attracted by carrion, 118-9; fighting,
119; former nesting sites, 120; in Great Ridge Wood, 120.

Rawlings, strange character of farmer, 205.

Roe deer, 284.

Rooks, abundance on the downs, 124; feasting on corn, 125; attacking
root crops, 291.

SALISBURY, five rivers of, 8, 9; the feeling for, 17; Leland’s description
of, 22; view of, from Old Sarum, 22; market-day at, 23; streets,
inns, and cathedral, 27; street scene at, 32.

Salisbury cathedral, seen from the meadows, 18; spire and rainbow,
19; action of the dean and chapter, 21; interior, effect on the
child mind, 28.

“Salisbury Journal,” 279.

Salisbury Plain: limits of, 8; effect of military occupation, 10; cul-
tivation, 14; destruction of barrows and earthworks, 15; great
rookery, 124.

INDEX 337

Sheep, effect of, on the downs, 8, 9; Old Wiltshire breed, 11; South
Down and Hampshire Down breeds, 12; the shepherd’s love of,
327; singular cure for giddiness in, 331.

Sheep-bells, purpose of, 129-32.

Sheep-dogs: old Welsh breed in Wilts, 13; Jack, the adder-killer,
67; Rough, the bobtail, 68-72; an acquired conscience in, 96;
Monk, the fox-killer, 109; his tragic end, 160-1; life story of
Watch, 159-71; training, 264, 267-8, 274; history of Tory, 268;
Bob, effect of adder-bite on, 272; Tramp, the stray, 276-282;
return to wildness, 277; Sally, the stump-tail, 321; Dyke, a hom-
ing dog, 321-2; lost dog recovered, 323; history of Badger, 324-5.

Sheep-stealing, in the past, 221-2; temptations to, 222; anecdotes of,

222-4.

Shepherd, sheep following, 131-3; bible-reading, 138-44.

Shergold, surname of, 224.

Shrew, 290.

Silchester, Forest of, 279,

Smith, Rev. A. C., “Birds of Wiltshire,” 120,

South Downs, 2, 7.

Sparrowhawk, starlings preyed on by, 128.

Starling, the shepherd’s favourite bird, 126; taking refuge among
the sheep, 126; music of, 127; imitations and bell-like sounds
produced by, 129,

Stone curlew, 117.

Stonehenge, 10.

Surnames in Wilts, 61-3, 308.

Sutton Veney, Wylye vale village, 148.

Swallow, a sheep dog chasing a, 270,

TisHEAD, village of, 8, 225.
Tisbury, 202.

Titlark, story of a, 50.

Tollard Royal, 8.

Towns in Wilts, names of, 145.
Treasure-seeker, a, 137.

Turtledove, 123.

Tytherington, story of a dog at, 148.

Upton Lovett, village on the Wylye, 149.
VittacEs, Wylye vale, 147.

WarmMINSTER, 145-6.

Warner, Richard, of Bath, works by, 133; on a Cornish custom, 133.
Watch, life story of a sheep-dog, 159-71.

Water, in the village, perennial streams and winterbournes, 36.
West Knoyle, 124.

338 INDEX

White Sheet Hill, 8; shepherd and sheep, 132.

Wild life on Salisbury Plain, destruction of, 10.

Wilsetae, 257.

Wilton, tree-shaded road, 19; junction of Wylye and Nadder at, 145;
sheep fair, 306.

Wiltshire, not a favourite county, 1.

Winterbourne Bishop, the favourite village, 34-8; home feeling in,
41; a village without a squire, 294; the village master, 294; benefit
society in, 299.

Wishford, a Wylye vale village, 210.

Wyatt, Sir Henry, fed by a cat, 180.

Wylye, river and vale of, 8, 9, 10, 18, 25; villages, 147; churches,
148; manor houses, 150; cottages and cottage gardens, 152-5.

YaRNBOROUGH Castle, 236.

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