My sheep are thoughts, which I both guide and serve, Their pasture is fair hills of fruitless love: On barren sweets they feed, and feeding starve: I wail their lot, but will not other prove. My sheep-hook is wan hope, which all upholds: My weeds, desire, cut out in endless folds. What wool my sheep shall bear, whiles thus they live, In you it is, you must the judgment give. “And then, partly to bring Mopsa again to the matter, lest she should too much take heed to our discourses, but principally, if it were possible to gather some comfort out of her answers, I kneeled down to the princess, and humbly besought her to move Mopsa in my behalf, that she would unarm her noble heart of that steely resistance against the sweet blows of love: that since all her parts were decked with some particular ornament; her face with beauty, her head with wisdom, her eyes with majesty, her countenance with gracefulness, her lips with loveliness, her tongue with victory, that she would make her heart the throne of pity, being the most {137} excellent raiment of the most excellent part. Pamela without show either of favour or disdain, either of heeding or neglecting what I had said, turned her speech to Mopsa, and with such a voice and action, as might show she spoke of a matter which little did concern her; ‘Take heed to yourself,’ said she, Mopsa, ‘for your shepherd can speak well: but truly, if he do fully prove himself such as he saith, I mean, the honest shepherd Menalcas’s brother and heir, I know no reason why you should think scorn of him.’ Mopsa though, in my conscience, she were even then far spent towards me, yet she answered her, that for all my quaint speeches, she would keep her honesty close enough, and that, as for the way of matrimony, she would step never a foot further till my master, her father, had spoken the whole word himself, no she would not. But ever and anon turning her muzzle towards me, she threw such a prospect upon me as might well have given a surfeit to any weak lover’s stomach. But, lord, what a fool am I, to mingle that drivel’s speeches among my noble thoughts! but because she was an actor in this tragedy, to give you a full knowledge, and to leave nothing that I can remember, unrepeated. “Now the princess being about to withdraw herself from us, I took a jewel made in the figure of a crab-fish, which, because it looks one way and goes another, I thought it did fitly pattern out my looking to Mopsa, but bending to Pamela: the word about it was, ‘By force, not choice;’ and still kneeling, besought the princess that she would vouchsafe to give it Mopsa, and with the blessedness of her hand to make acceptable unto her that toy which I had found following of late an acquaintance of mine at the plough. ‘For,’ said I, ‘as the earth was turned up, the ploughshare lighted upon a great stone; we pull’d that up, and so found both that and some other pretty things which we had divided betwixt us.’