A boy has no perception whatsoever of the poetry of farm-life: he considers a woodman's work crabbed prose. The idea of making poetry out of any part of it, or out of a herder's work either, is to him stark idiocy. Sheep-washing, for instance, is simply working a whole spring day in very chilly water, and sheep-shearing is a task at which he makes "ridgy" work and endures the horror of seeing the gentle, thin-skinned creatures bleed under his awkward shears. The boy cannot conceive what poetry there is about oxen. From the moment a calf hides in the hay with its mother's help, and makes believe there is no calf born yet, until it becomes an ox, it cannot for an instant be considered poetic by a boy. The calf is a creature that insists, whenever it drinks, on thrusting its head to the bottom of the pail with a splash that deluges the boy with milk: it drinks until it is out of breath, and then withdraws its head with another splash and an explosion of milk-steam from its nostrils--performances which cause the boy's friends to remark wherever he goes, "You smell of sour milk." The boy likes well enough to feed the oxen their full measures of meal; he likes to see them get down on their knees to lick up morsels that roll into corners of the stable-floor; he stretches his hand in before them for little balls of meal they cannot reach with their long tongues, at which they draw back with a thwack against the stanchion, breathing hard and gazing at him with their large black eyes; and when the off ox tries to capture the nigh ox's portion, the boy raps him back to his place. Quite a pastoral friendship exists between the boy and the nigh ox, which, being continually bullied by the off ox, needs the boy's protection, and is therefore placed next him at work. But, for all that, he does not see the romance of such matters.