The moon was nearly at the full. In its flood of pure white light, the lambing-yard, with its surrounding folds, looked like some extensive fortification, so high and impregnable seemed the walls that hemmed it in on every side. These walls were made of sheaves of straw, standing on end, shoulder to shoulder, of such girth and density that not a breath of the unruly wind could penetrate them. Within, the lambing-yard was floored a foot deep with the same straw, and on all sides were the pens, little separate bays flanked and topped by hurdles covered in with the like material. The whole place was crowded with ewes and lambs; the newest arrivals still in the pens with their mothers, the rest almost as snugly berthed out in the mainway of the yard. Outside this elaborate stockade were two great folds, the one containing the ewes still to be reckoned with, the other thronged with those whose troubles were happily over, and with whom already the cares and joys of motherhood were verging on the trite. Shepherd Artlett took no chances at any stage of his work. At the entrance to the lambing-yard, he carefully covered up the lantern with his coat, and thereafter allowed its light to fall only where he need direct his scrutiny. ‘Nane o’ Gregory’s luck fer me!’ he said. ‘There bean’t no wolves on th’ Hill nowadays, but sheep, they be jest as much afeared o’ summat as ’twur born in ’em to dread. ’Tis in their blood, I reckons. Now look ye! A naked light carried i’ th’ haand, an’ let sudden in upon ’em—see how it sets th’ shadders dancin’ an’ prancin’ all around! Like as not, ’tis so th’ wolves came leapin’ round th’ folds ages an’ ages back; an’ so it bides in th’ blood wi’ all sheep—a sort o’ natur’s bygone memory. Froughten wan yow, an’ ye be like to froughten all. Set ’em stampedin’, an’ that means slipped lambs, turned milk, an’ trouble wi’out end—Gregory’s luck agen!’ On these rounds, every pen in the yard was visited, and its denizens critically examined: not a sheep of the huddled, vociferating crowd through which we threaded our difficult course, but had her share in George Artlett’s swift-roving glance. Here and there we came upon a newborn lamb, and then George took its four legs in one handful and carried it head downwards through the throng to the nearest vacant pen, its frantic mother bleating her expostulation close in our rear. There were the feeding-cages to fill with hay, and mangold to be carried in and scattered amongst the crouching sheep. Sometimes there was a sickly lamb or ewe to doctor, when we went trudging back to rifle the medicine-chest in the hut; and rarely a weakling, who refused its natural food, must be taken under George’s coat, a silent shivering woolly atom, and restored to life and voice by the warmth of our fire and the bottle.