Had Snarley received a due share of the unearned increment which his own and his rams' achievements brought into other hands he would probably have died a millionaire. But for all his toil and skill he received no more than a shepherd's wage. There were not wanting persons, of course, who regarded his condition as a crucial instance of the exceeding rottenness of our present industrial system. There was a great lady from London, named Lady Lottie Passingham, who resolved to take up the case. Lady Lottie belonged to the class who look upon the universe as a leaky old kettle and themselves as tinkers appointed by Providence to mend the holes. That Snarley's position represented a hole of the first magnitude was plain enough to Lady Lottie the moment she became acquainted with the facts. Her first step was to interest her brother, the Earl of Clodd, a noted breeder of pedigree stock, on the old man's behalf; her second, to rouse the slumbering soul of the victim to a sense of the injustice of his lot. I believe she succeeded better with her brother than with Snarley; for with him she utterly failed. Her discourse on the possibilities of bettering his position might as well have been spoken into the ears of the senior ram; and if the ram had responded, as he probably would, by pinning Lady Lottie against the wall of the barn, her overthrow would have been no more complete nor unmerited than that she actually received from Snarley Bob. For it so happened that Providence, in equipping the lady for her world-mending mission, had forgotten to give her a pleasant voice. Now if there was one thing in the world which made Snarley "madder" than anything else could do, it was the high-pitched, strident tones of a woman engaged in argument. The consequence was that his self-restraint broke down, and before the lady had said half the things she had meant to say, or come within sight of the splendid offer she was going to make on behalf of the Earl of Clodd, Snarley had spoken words and performed actions which caused his benefactress to retreat from the farmyard with her nose in the air, declaring she "would have nothing more to do with the horrid brute." She was not the first of Snarley's would-be benefactors who had formed the same resolve.