Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/136

132 here's the ram a-ramming. It doesn't make so much noise in the day-time as it does at night. I must see it, too. Grandfather said I must. Funny, old Aunt Testy telling me it was dangerous."

The gap in the barbed wire fence was found as Aunt Testy had directed. Rebecca crawled through the wrapped place and followed the pink path across the meadow. The noise of the ram increased as she approached the bubbling, tumbling little stream that cut through the green pasture.

"Heavens, what a darling little brook!" she cried as the path curved around the hill and suddenly descended to the stream, where it dived under, as Rebecca expressed it, only to come up on the other side as dry and pink as ever. Willows bordered the brook. Under a shelving bank was the home of the hydraulic ram, a low, box-like house about four feet high with a sloping roof of rough boards designed merely to protect the machinery from the grazing cattle. From its interior came the steady thud, thud of the ram.

"It sounds like a spirit in prison," thought Rebecca as she approached the little house. "I wonder if you want to get out," she whispered through a knot hole in the side. It seemed to