unresponding about their quiet island in the sea, solidly fixed into the still foundations of the world, against whose rocky shores the sea beats and calls and is unanswered. We were quite half an hour going through the woods; the horse’s feet made no sound on the brown, soft track under the dark evergreens. I thought that we should come out at last into more pastures, but there was no half-wooded strip of land at the end; the high woods grew squarely against an old stone wall and a sunshiny open field, and we came out suddenly into broad daylight that startled us and even startled the horse, who might have been napping as he walked, like an old soldier. The field sloped up to a low unpainted house that faced the east. Behind it were long, frost-whitened ledges that made the hill, with strips of green turf and bushes between. It was the wildest, most Titanic sort of pasture country up there; there was a sort of daring in putting a frail wooden house before it, though it might have the homely field and honest woods to front against. You thought of the elements and even of possible volcanoes as you looked up the stony heights. Suddenly I saw that a region of what I had thought gray stones was slowly moving, as if the sun was making my eyesight unsteady. “There’s the sheep!” exclaimed William, pointing eagerly. “You see the sheep?” and sure enough, it was a great company of woolly backs, which seemed to have taken a mysterious protective resemblance to the ledges themselves. I could discover but little chance for pasturage on that high sunburnt ridge, but the sheep were moving steadily in a satisfied way as they fed along the slopes and hollows. “I never have seen half so many sheep as these, all summer long!” I cried with admiration. “There ain’t so many,” answered William soberly. “It’s a great sight. They do so well because they’re shepherded, but you can’t beat sense into some folks.” “You mean that somebody stays and watches them?” I asked. “She observed years ago in her readin’ that they don’t turn out their flocks without protection anywhere but in the State o’ Maine,” returned William. “First thing that put it into her mind was a little old book mother’s got; she read it one time when she come out to the Island. They call it the ‘Shepherd o’ Salisbury Plain.’ ’Twasn’t the purpose o’ the book to most, but when she read it, ‘There, Mis’ Blackett!’ she said, ‘that’s where we’ve all lacked sense; our Bibles ought to have taught us that what sheep need is a shepherd.’ You see most folks about here gave up sheepraisin’ years ago ‘count o’ the dogs. So she gave up school-teachin’ and went out to tend her flock, and has shepherded ever since, an’ done well.”