At first Peregrine refused to believe the rumour; the moors, he argued with himself, had always been commons and commons they must remain. Yet the rumour persisted and gradually began to work like poison in his mind. He was too proud to mention the matter to the farmers when they came up for the autumn salving of the sheep, but a constraint in their manner deepened his suspicions, and all through the winter a pall of gloom enshrouded his mind like the pall of gloom on the moors themselves. Spring brought dark foreboding to yet darker certainty. From his mountain eyrie Peregrine could now see bands of men assembling in the village below. They were wallers, attracted thither by the prospect of definite work during the summer months, and on Easter Monday a start was made. Peregrine watched them from the fells, and as he saw them carrying the blocks of limestone in their hands they seemed to him like an army of stinging ants which had been disturbed in their ant-hill and were carrying their eggs to another spot. Slowly but surely the work advanced. At first the walls took a beeline track up the hillside, but when they reached the higher ground, where scars of rock and patches of reedy swamp lay in their path, their progress became serpentine. But whether straight or winding, the white walls mounted ever upwards, and Peregrine knew that his doom was sealed. The moors which Ibbotsons had shepherded for two hundred years would soon pass out of his charge; the most ancient of callings, which Peregrine loved as he loved life itself, would be his no more; his mountain home, which had stood the shock of an age-long battle with the storms, would pass into the hand of some dalesman's hind, and he would be forced to descend to the valley and end his days in one or other of the smoky towns where his remaining sons were living. There was no human being to whom he could communicate his thoughts, yet the pent-up anguish must find outlet somehow, lest the heart-strings should snap beneath the strain. It was therefore to his sheepdog, Rover, that he unburdened his mind, as the dog lay with its paws across his knees in the heather, looking up to its master's face. "Snakes, Rover, doesta see t' snakes," he would mutter, as his eye caught the serpent-like advance of the walls. The dog seemed to catch his meaning, and responded with a low growl of sympathy. "Aye, they're snakes," the old man went on, "crawlin's up t' fell-side on their bellies an' lickin' up t' dust. They've gotten their fangs into my heart, Rover, and seean they'll be coilin' thersels about my body. I niver thowt to see t' snakes clim' t' moors; they sud hae bided i' t' dale and left t' owd shipperd to dee in peace."