ir maternal
responsibilities, they are kept in solitary confinement two days,
without food. If still obdurate at the end of these two days, mother
and child, marked with red chalk or tagged alike with bright cloth, are
turned out, the herder in charge of the solitaries "roping" the ewe for
the convenience of the lamb whenever the latter indicates a desire for
nourishment.

The flock grazing out on the range will have gone by noon perhaps a mile
from the bed-ground. Here a little corral is made, and the lambs born in
the vicinity, with their mothers, are penned here over-night, one of the
two herders sleeping with them. In the afternoon the remaining herder
takes the flock grazing back to the bed-ground. The next day, with many
more to follow, repeats the routine of this and its incidents. The lambs
and good mothers of a period of twenty-four hours are bunched together
and placed a little remote from the bed-ground, with a little pen and a
herder to themselves: they constitute a so-called "baby-flock." After
five days the lambs lose their tails and have their ears punched and
marked; on the sixth day they are still farther removed from their
native spot, placed in charge of a strange herder, and become the
nucleus of a so-called "lamb-flock," which, fed from many sources, grows
till it includes six hundred ewes, with their lambs, when it is a full
flock, and is in its turn removed and the formation of a new lamb-flock
begun. During the six days' novitiate of a baby-flock five other such
flocks have been formed: so that, somewhat remotely round about the main
pen at the bed-ground of each flock, there are six baby-flocks, with
their pens and herders and several little prison-pens for unnatural
mothers, with other little pens in which mothers bereft by death of
their proper children are confined with the extra twin lambs of prolific
ewes, clad in the lost ones' skins, in the sure hope that they will
adopt them. The ruse may be said never to fail. The solitary-confinement
pens are in the charge of still another herder, a much perplexed and
irritated man, on whose part considerable swearing--Mexican for small
ills, English for serious occasions--is to be excused. A superintendent
of two lambing ewe-flocks, it will thus be seen, has to oversee eighteen
herders or so, with their charges, besides the growing lamb-flock, all
more or less distant from each other. He is a busy man. His
head-quarters, like those of General Pope, ma