h on us are frozen to death. And I reckon you're pretty
cold already--you look it. Come down the hill wi' me, and I'll get my
missis to make yer a cup o' hot tea."

"SNARLEYCHOLOGY"

I. THEORETICAL

Farmer Perryman was rich, and it was Snarley Bob who had made him so.
Now Snarley was a cunning breeder of sheep. For three-and-forty years he
had applied his intuitions and his patience to the task of producing
rams and ewes such as the world had never seen. His system of
"observation and experiment" was peculiarly his own; it is written down
in no book, but stands recorded on barn-doors, on gate-posts, on
hurdles, and on the walls of a wheeled box which was Snarley's main
residence during the spring months of the year. It is a literature of
notches and lines--cross, parallel, perpendicular, and horizontal--of
which the chief merit in Snarley's eyes was that nobody could understand
it save himself. But it was enough to give his faculties all the aid
they required. By such simple means he succeeded long ago in laying the
practical basis of a life's work, evolving a highly complicated system
controlled by a single principle, and yet capable of manifold
application. The Perryman flock, now famous among sheep-breeders all
over the world, was the result.

Thirty years ago this flock was the admiration and the envy of the whole
countryside. Young farmers with capital were confident that they were
going to make money as soon as they began to breed from the Perryman
strain. To have purchased a Perryman ram was to have invested your money
in a gilt-edged, but rising, stock. The early "eighties" were times of
severe depression in those parts; capital was scarce, farmers were
discouraged, and the flocks deteriorated. At the present moment there is
no more prosperous corner in agricultural England, and the basis of that
prosperity is the life-work of Snarley Bob.

The fame of that work is now world-wide, though the author of it is
unknown. The Perryman rams have been exported into almost every
sheep-raising country on the globe. Hundreds of thousands of their
descendants are now nibbling food, and converting it into fine mutton
and long-stapled wool, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the
Argentine. Only last summer I saw a large animal meditating procreation
among the foot-hills of the Rockies, and was informed of the fabulous
price of his purchase--fabulous but commercially sound, for the animal
was a Perryman ram,