Page:The English Peasant.djvu/182

 During the present summer found my way into the cottage of a Southdown shepherd, who had pursued his calling for well-nigh seventy years. Old H—— was a fine intelligent man, with a forehead large enough for a professor, arched, characteristic eyebrows, and a mouth full of humour. In came his ancient comrade, Peter, an honest and true-hearted old worthy. They both complained sadly of the change in the position and prospects of the shepherding life now-a-days. They corroborated the fact that a shepherd was formerly allowed to keep his own sheep among the flocks of his master, and instanced the case of one shepherd who, if I remember right, possessed as many as seventy sheep, all bought out of his I own earnings. Now the masters objected even to their keeping a hog.

Forty or fifty years ago a shepherd's wages were seventeen or eighteen shillings a week; at present sixteen or seventeen is the highest amount he can get. Everything is dearer now than then, except bread, which old H—— had known as high as three shillings and a penny the gallon since he had been married. They reckoned that every member in a household consumed a gallon of flour per week, so that one may readily calculate from' this what a man, his wife, and six children would require.

Peter had to pay two and sixpence a week for his cottage, and it had, I think he said, no garden.

Old H—— had been in one situation where he never went home to his dinner from year's end to year's end, Sundays and Christmas Day included.

Winter was bad enough, what with wind, and rain, and cold; but summer was worse. It was anxious work to keep the sheep from straying, but the great trouble was to keep the flock free from their terrible enemy, the blow-fly. This miserable insect lays its eggs in the wool of the poor sheep, and the maggots become alive in four-and-twenty hours, and begin at once to feed on their victims. Directly a sheep is "struck," as they call it, the only remedy is to shear it at once, for if not quickly relieved it will faint from exhaustion.

These men were respectable in the best sense, yet they evidently thought it no degradation to take the parish money. At the basis