“The gnats are dancin’,” he said, “fine weather”; and the girl Pansy nodded. Watching her turn the handle of the separator, he marked her glance straying down the yard to where Ned was shutting the lane gate. She was a likely-looking wench with her shapely browned arms and her black hair, fine as silk, which she kept brushing back from her eyes with her free hand. It gave him a kind of farmyard amusement to see those eyes of hers following his son about. ‘She’s Ned’s if he wants her--young hussy!’ he thought. ‘Begad, but it would put Steer’s nose out of joint properly if that girl got in front of his precious niece.’ To say that this thought was father to a wish would too definitely express the circumambulatory mind of Bowden--a lazy and unprecise thinker; but it lurked and hovered when he took his ash-plant and browsed his way out of the yard to have a look at the young bull before supper. At the meadow of water-weed and pasture, where the young red bull was grazing, he stood leaning over the gate, with the swallows flying high. The young bull was ‘lukin’ up bravely’--in another year he would lay over that bull of Steer’s. Ah! he would that! And a dim savagery stirred in Bowden; then passed in the sensuous enjoyment--which a farmer never admits--at the scent, sight, sounds, of his fields in fine weather, at the blue above and the green beneath him, the gleam of that thread of water, half smothered in bulrushes, ‘daggers,’ and monkey flower, under the slowly sinking sun, at the song of a lark, and the murmuring in the ash-trees, at the glistening ruddy coat of the young bull and the sound of his cropping! Three rabbits ran into the hedge. So that fellow had shot his dog--his dog that had nipped up more rabbits out of corn than any dog he ever owned! He tapped his stick on the gate. The young bull raised a lazy head, gazed at his master, and, flicking his tail at the flies, resumed his pasturing. ‘Shot my dog!’ thought Bowden; ‘shot my dog! Yu wait a bit!’ II