waiting for any special answer, drives off at as
tremendous a speed as if a customer at the next
town were dying for want of food, and that loin
of veal under the white cloth were intended to
supply his necessity. Or it may be two farm
servants arrive in a jolt ing cart, with a frightened calf
caged in a net behind them, and they, too, stop
and shout out inquiries as to "whose that lot
of ship are?" and rough agricultural jokes that
will not always bear repeating. It may be that
Colonel Hanger's fourteen hunters pass, clothed
and hooded,in a stately ambling procession, and
the grooms and the washers bandy country
"chaff" with great violence of lungs. Presently
Farmer Stubbs charges by on his fiery little white
pony, on his way to Buyborough market; and, as
he passes, he too gives a greeting to the washers
who are to be at work on his sheep to-morrow.

But the staple audience consists of every size
of village child, who seem retained for the season.
They wear those little linen bonnets with the
huge curtains big as capes peculiar to English
villages—bonnets which furnish at once clothing
and shade. They kiss, fight, cry, and form
alliances, barter commodities, and storm and
laugh after the manner of their age and race,
enjoying the whole ceremony "vastly," as the
old fops would have said. Not that they
altogether confine their attentions to that event,
but from time to time sally and ramble into the
adjacent fields, to collect the great flat
elderflowers, to pillage thrushes' nests, to pick, fondle,
and squander blue and pink flowers, to make
surgical experiments attended with great loss of
blood with sword-grass, or to roll and scramble
among the tall nodding plumes of the tossing
"fox-tails."

June being emphatically "a shirt-sleeve"
month, bands of haymakers, witli wooden rakes
on their shoulders, and little sodden-looking
kegs at their backs, pass frequently on their way
to Summer lees, and slop at the bridge for a
minute to chat and laugh, and sing a scrap of
a song; or perhaps the squire's brougham,
brimming with his fair daughters, will halt a
moment in its stately course to the county
flower-show, and the pleasant laugh of children
will be heard as the young squires watch the
hopeless despondent struggles of the sheep.

And, lastly, towards evening, when the rose-
colour is still lingering in a cloud or two, the old
battered scarlet mail-cart, punctual as sunset,
unerring as Destiny, goes by, and the stolid
driver will shout a grave "good-night."

All this time, come sun, come rain, the washing
proceeds. One by one the black-faced
sheep are drafted off from the outer into the
inner pens, guided by incessant thumps of sticks
that sound hollow on their woolly backs, and
tumbled into the water with the violence with which
bathing-women execute their office on frightened
children—one by one they wallow in the
purgatorial clean green water, dipped under, and kept
in circulation by the long poles of the
shepherds. Here, like the unhappy ones in Dante's
flood, they are perpetually pushed under when
they attempt to rise, till they float, miserable
sops, into the hands of the washers in the blue
pulpits. Then commences a fresh phase of
misery—for these inhuman men (as the sheep
call them) rub them from top to toe, turn them
on their backs, rub them anew, and then push
them off to swim out as they can. One by one
each goes through the ordeal, eventually flounders
out at the tail end of the dam, and, half-
drowned, scrambles to land and joins his
drenched and shivering companions.

Now that the washers, about noon, emerge,
like mermen, from the water and splash out of
their blue pulpits, to come and sit under a tree
and eat their luncheons, I go down and chat
with them, and ask a few questions about the
statistics of Downshire sheep-washing. They tell me
that some years ago, before "The Plain " was
so much cultivated, and when ponds were
scarcer, as many as twenty thousand sheep
would yearly come to this Chicklebury brook to
be washed. Now, from May to the end of June,
they had seldom more than twelve thousand.
They charged two-and-sixpence a hundred, and
two men could, by dint of great exertion, wash
one thousand a day. The washing was
necessary, although the sheep got knee-deep in mud
after the washing, and the wet fleeces got
powdered with road-dust as they went home, in
order to clean the fleeces of the clotted dirt, and
to render it lighter for the shears.

In about a month the Chicklebury sheep-
washing ends. The brook, so long turbid and
thickened, once more runs clear as crystal over
the gravel and the weeds. A few showers wash
the road-dust off the cresses and the waterplants.
The ducks come back to their old
dominion, and all goes on as before.

Then, just as the haymakers have taken down
their rusty scythes, and the white-sleeved men
begin to work in the grass-fields, where the
clover is purple sweet, and the white butterflies
are blown from flower to flower, the shearing
commences. You can see sheep-shearing at any
barn door, but don't go in and touch the shears,
or you will have to pay your footing, and supply
some dozen thirsty souls with beer. The sheep
are patient victims in the hands of their persecutors,
sitting up against their knees, or lying
helpless on their backs or on their sides.

How nimbly, and like rough barbers, the men
ply the shears, not cutting the wool off short, as
if it was hair, but removing it in a continuous
fleece, as if they were flaying the sheep!

The animal goes in a stupid ragged bolster of
brown wool—a rough, hot, winterly-looking
creature—it comes from the shearers a thin, trim,
cleven-looking animal, striped with ridges of
chalky white.

Not being in the wool trade, I can scarcely
say much about the different sorts of wool.
Down tegs and Down ewes, half-bred hogs
and wethers are to me all alike. As to Kent
fleeces and Leicester fleeces, I don't know them
apart, and I scarcely know combing skins from
flannel wool or blanket wool; but this I know,
that our average price for wool is about sixteen-
pence to seventeen-pence per pound, and that