ely, as she chewed her cud and gazed up
with comfortable confidence at the sturdy figure of the ram
silhouetted against the brightening sky.

This sunrise was the breaking of the black-faced ram's first day in
the wilderness. Never before had he stood on an open hilltop and
watched the light spread magically over a wide, wild landscape. Up to
the morning of the previous day, his three years of life had been
passed in protected, green-hedged valley pastures, amid tilled fields
and well-stocked barns, beside a lilied water. This rugged, lonely,
wide-visioned world into which fortune had so unexpectedly projected
him filled him with wonder. Yet he felt strangely at ease therein. The
hedged pastures had never quite suited him; but here, at length, in
the great spaces, he felt at home. The fact was that, alike in
character and in outward appearance, he was a reversion to far-off
ancestors. He was the product of a freak of heredity.

In the fat-soiled valley-lands, some fifteen miles back of Ringwaak
Hill, the farmers had a heavy, long-wooled, hornless strain of sheep,
mainly of the Leicester breed, which had been crossed, years back, by
an imported Scotch ram of one of the horned, courageous, upland,
black-faced varieties. The effect of this hardy cross had apparently
all been bred out, save for an added stamina in the resulting stock,
which was uniformly white and hornless. When, therefore, a lamb was
born with a black face and blackish-gray legs, it was cherished as a
curiosity; and when, in time, it developed a splendid pair of horns,
it became the handsomest ram in all the valley, and a source of great
pride to its owner. But when black-faced lambs began to grow common in
the hornless and immaculate flocks, the feelings of the valley folks
changed, and word went around that the strain of the white-faced must
be kept pure. Then it was decreed that the great horned ram should no
longer sire the flocks, but be hurried to the doom of his kind and go
to the shambles.

Just at this time, however, a young farmer from the backwoods
settlement over behind Ringwaak chanced to visit the valley. The sheep
of his settlement were not only hornless, but small and light-wooled
as well, and the splendid, horned ram took his fancy. Here was a
chance to improve his breed. He bought the ram for what he was worth
to the butcher, and proudly led him away, over the hills and through
the great woods, toward the settlement on the other side o