What with the laughter and screams of delight from the children, the shouts of the shepherds, and the coughing of the sheep and jingling of their bells, the scene is a very noisy one; but, noisy as it is, Fairy thoroughly enjoys it, and declares she must stay till the last of John’s red-ringed flock are finished. It is such fun to see the poor sheep tumbled into the water and then rolled over on its back and rubbed from head to foot in the bright, clear stream, first by one washer in his pulpit, and then, after sundry pushes and thumps from the toothless rakes, to be seized by the other washer and subjected to another vigorous rubbing and scrubbing, and splashing and dashing, and finally to be pushed off to scramble or swim as best it might out of the river. Poor, patient sheep! They take their sufferings in very good part, and submit meekly enough to the inevitable ordeal, basing a protest as feeble as it is useless, the older and wiser ones knowing that this washing is but a preliminary to the still more disagreeable ceremony of shearing to be performed a fortnight hence, as soon as the wool is dry. And Fairy, fascinated by the picturesque scene, could not be persuaded to move when Mrs. Shelley was forced to go home to prepare some dinner—a useless labour, Fairy declared, since there would be no one to eat it, for Charlie had taken his with him, and John and Jack were too busy to stop for dinner, and she herself was not hungry, and had no intention of going home till all John’s sheep were washed. But Mrs. Shelley had no idea of leaving a pretty young girl like Fairy alone among a crowd of people, so she proposed they should both go home and fetch some dinner and share it out in the field with John and Jack, a proposal Fairy jumped at; and an hour later the four were sitting on a bank under a hedge of blackthorn, with a carpet of buttercups and daisies at their feet, eating their simple meal as happy as it was possible for four people to be. And then, while the shepherd smoked his pipe, Jack gave Fairy a lesson in the notes of the different birds which were singing around them, and Mrs. Shelley listened with pride to her eldest and darling son, and wondered whether Fairy would ever care for him in the way he evidently cared for her, and thought what a handsome couple they would make. “Oh, Jack, how clever you are; you know everything; but there, I do know one thing—I am right this time at least—there is a skylark singing up over our heads. Look,” cried Fairy, who had been making various wrong guesses at the names of the different songsters around them. “Poor little Fairy! you are wrong again; it is a woodlark; the skylark mounts up straight in a succession of springs, and then hovers, singing; the woodlark flies round and round in circles, singing all the while, as this bird is doing,” said Jack.