Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/577

564 devoured alive, as often happens in wide upland pastures, where the flock is too large for the shepherd’s oversight: hut there are always some which seem anything but comfortable after the fly has once settled. There is another danger for them. My girls do not forget their hot scamper home, for two miles, one season when they had followed the stream beyond and above the park, and saw from the high bank a poor sheep carried round and round in the eddy of a pool, into which it had fallen, overbalanced by the weight of its fleece. We were in time to save the animal by sending men and boys while its head was yet above water: but it was not so with a ewe which held met with the same mishap at a part where the waters rushed among rocks, between two of which we saw it fast wedged, on its back, with its four legs up in the air, and the stream bubbling away through its swollen fleece. It had fallen from a height—also from the weight of its fleece—and its head had obviously been under water from the first; so it must soon have been out of its pain. Its lamb was pacing to and fro on the bank above, baaing piteously.

It is a very different thing seeing sheep in the water when there are plenty of people to take care of them. There cannot be a better place for the washing than the pool under the bridge, just outside the park, where we station ourselves some fine June morning every year. The river is shoaly there: and a man and his boys take up their position on a shoal on the further side of the pool, while others stand under the bridge, in the shadow; and we look down, and see all they do. No one of the flock ever seems to learn by experience. They are all just as sure one year as another that they are going to be drowned; and violent is the exercise they give the shepherds in getting them through the pool. What tugging, pulling, and pushing it is! And how absurd is the floundering in that shallow place! And what a din there is of bleating and baaing, and shouting and laughing! And how the boys on the shoal enjoy holding the poor beasts by the head while the shepherd grasps and wrings and rubs the fleece, which grows whiter under the operation, and then sends them back through shallower water to the bank.

After watching the process till we have had enough of the noise, my boys and I leave the girls, and ascend the stream for our dip,—unless, indeed, Whitsuntide so falls as that the lads are at school on sheep-washing day. Little Harry, at all events, will be my companion henceforth till he enters upon his school-days. He is not too young for a dip with me: no, nor for learning to swim. Why should not our children swim as soon as they can walk, as children in other countries do? In the East and the West, and in the South Sea Islands, infants can tumble about in the water as freely as on the grass: and why should not ours? My Harry thinks it excellent fun to play in the water; as in truth it is; and he prides himself on being wiser than the big sheep, who can only cry, and not swim. He never felt any fear, and thinks that pool above among the rocks his best play place. I began by putting him in, letting him scramble, lending a hand when his head went under, and letting him ride on my shoulders when I was swimming; and now he can make his way anywhere in still water, and keep himself safe where the stream runs strongest. It will never be said of my children (the girls any more than the boys), in the case of a boat capsizing, “none of the party could swim;”—that dreary and shameful announcement which we see in the newspapers a dozen times a year. Whether they be sailors, soldiers, emigrants, or merely cross the sea in travelling, my sons will not be drowned for want of learning to swim.

We take our time in going up to that pool; for Harry cannot walk so far and back again. He goes on my back or his brother’s, or is carried cherry-stone-wise at intervals: and we sit down in tempting places. In the little creeks where the sedges grow, we look for dragon-flies coming out of their sheaths; and many a time we have hit the moment when the creature is drawing itself up and out of its case, so that we could see the gauze wings unfold, and the body begin to shine, and the gay insect try the air for the first time. We track the water-beetle in shallow places; and in the shady parts there is sure to be a dimple on the surface here and there, as the fish leap at the skimming and darting flies. In the woods behind us the birds are still tuneful; and we listen for each, knowing that in two or three weeks they will almost all be silent. The note of the cuckoo has by this time changed, being deeper as well as louder, in sign of farewell for the year.

In the little thickets which overhang the stream at intervals, the wild roses are opening, hour by hour; and we gather specimens of every tint, from the deepest pink to the blush and the white. The white briony is the favourite ornament for little boys’ hats and necks; while older folk carry wild honeysuckles in their button-holes. Little nuts peep out of their fringes on the hazels, promising pleasant excursions when autumn days come. There are not a few bees, though we know that the great multitude of them are busy in the clover-fields, and among the bean-blossoms below. There is good pasture for them up here in the clumps of hawthorns which actually shine in the sun against the relief of the park belt; and in the sweets of the hedges; and in the tall foxgloves under every boulder; and, above all, in the blossoms of the limes and the elder-flowers. We must find a day for gathering elder-flowers. My wife makes elder-wine of two sorts, because her mother made them before her; and her girls understand it, though our Quaker neighbour, who manages our Temperance Society, told them last year, on meeting them with a washing-basket brimming with blossoms, that the best use of elder-flowers was to make a cooling wash for the complexion.

Then we stop to make music and musical instruments, in some resting-place where the reeds grow strong. When we move again we are furnished with a Pan’s-pipe and elder-whistles, and with a warlike apparatus of pop-guns—supplied also by the useful elder. Finally we reach our pool, and find no angler there, as we had dreaded.