physical cleanliness too, and it was like being with a well-kept horse to stand beside him; and this his house was full of the scent of the bracken growing under the oaks. Earth had not been a kind but a stern mother, like some brawny full-bosomed housewife with many children, who spends all her long days baking and washing, and making clothes, and tending the sick one, and cutting bread and pouring out tea, and cuffing one and cuddling another and listening to one’s tale, and hushing their unanimous chatter with a shout or a bang of her enormous elbow on the table. The blows of such a one are shrewd, but they are not as the sweetness of her nursing voice for enduring in the memory of bearded men and many-childed women. Once or twice again I met him in later summers near the same place. The last time he had been in the infirmary, and was much older. His fire was under the dense shelf of a spruce bough in a green deserted road worn deep in the chalk, blocked at both ends, and trodden by few mortal feet. Only a few yards away, under another spruce, lay a most ancient sheep who had apparently been turned into the lane to browse at peace. She was lame in one leg, and often fed as she knelt. Her head was dark grey and wise, her eyes pearly green and iridescent with an oblong pupil of blackish-blue, quiet, yet full of fear; her wool was dense but short and of a cinder grey; her dark horny feet were overgrown from lack of use. She would not budge even when a dog sniffed at her, but only bowed her head and threatened vainly to butt. She was huge and heavy and content, though always all alone. As she lay there, her wool glistening with rain, I had often wondered what those eyes were aware of, what part she played in the summer harmonies of night and day, the full night heavens and cloudless noon, storm and dawn, and the long moist heat of dewy mornings. She was now shorn, and the old man watched her as he drank the liquor in which a cabbage and a piece of bacon had been boiled. “I often thinks,” he said, “that I be something like that sheep ... ‘slightly wounded’ ... but not ‘short service’ now ... haha! ... left alone in this here lane to browse a bit while the weather’s fine and folks are kind.... But I don’t know but what she is better off. Look there,” he said, pointing to a wound which the shearer had made in one of her nipples, where flies clustered like a hideous flower of crape, “I have been spending this hour and more flicking the flies off her.... Nobody won’t do that for me--unless I come in for five shillings a week Old Age Pension. But I reckon that won’t be for a roving body like me without a letter-box.” In the neighbouring field a cart-horse shook herself with a noise of far-off thunder and laughed shrilly and threw up her heels and raced along the hedge. A bee could be seen going in and out of the transparent white flowers of convolvulus. The horse had her youth and strength and a workless