Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/487

stocks. The time-honoured spring romance of fragrant haycocks is hastening to its doom, inasmuch as the greater portion of the oat-crop saved is intended to be reduced into chaff, as being more portable or saleable in that form. It is obviously better economy, by using the reaper and string-binder, to have it arranged mechanically in sheaves and hand-placed in stocks. It is then more convenient for loading, stacking, and the final operation of the chaff-cutter. Most of these sheaves are six feet and over in height. Heavy-headed, too, withal. We were informed that four tons of chaff to the acre is not an uncommon yield this year. The lambs, which are running with their mothers in the great enclosures, wire-fenced and ring-barked as to timber, through which the high road passes, are wonderfully well-grown and healthy-looking. The percentage, averaging from eighty to ninety, is exceptionally high, when it is considered that the expense of tendance is nominal. From five to seven thousand ewes—even more sometimes—are running in each paddock, unwatched and untended till marking-time, thence to the shearing, which is also the weaning period. This year the shepherd-kings have a right royal time of it, though not more than sufficient to compensate them for the losses and crosses of the last decade. Apropos of this woolly people, here approaches an aged shepherd. He is mounted, so that he has received his cheque. Solvent and resolved, he is journeying to the town, on pleasure bent, of a rational nature let us hope. The flies of mid-day are troublesome, but he has a net-veil round his weather-beaten face; so has the steady veteran steed. The collie, following dutifully, is unprotected from flies, but accoutred with a wire muzzle—not, as the young lady from the city supposed, to prevent his biting the sheep, but lest he should swallow the innocent-seeming morsel of meat by the wayside, intended for vagrom canines, and containing the deadly crystals of strychnine. Certes, with plenteousness the land runs o'er, this gracious year of our Lord 1887. The cattle lounging about the roads—the roads, like the fields, knee-deep in thick green grass—with their shining coats and plump bodies, testify to the bounty of the season. The birds call and twitter. The skylark, faint reflex as he is of his English compeer, yet mounts skyward and sings his shorter lay rejoicingly. The wild-duck, gladsome and unharmed, swims in