ve, and
learn to forget the new. But the education must be true and not false, in
tune with the life that shall be; not cramped and with little connection
between it and the field of labour that lies ahead. Uniformity is often
but to bring down to one dead level, to crush true liberty and freedom,
to force unnatural growth, and to give this a trend untrue. Education on
such lines seems curiously false to many minds, as well as stultifying.

Scot, who had no appearance of a sheep-dog--that is, as his class are
generally portrayed in coloured prints--might possibly have been brought
up as a water-spaniel, or he might have been the darling of a
semi-detached villa and have learnt to walk drab, unlovely streets
without endangering his life: it is all a matter of education, fortified
by environment. As it was, he was brought up with a cottage for a home
and learnt the mysteries of sheep, the tending and the care of them, what
the stretching of limbs meant, no less than freedom and free air.

The life was a hard one, no doubt, in one sense. Sometimes there were
short commons: there was much bad weather to be faced, when his master
was clad in strange clothes and wore a sack like the hood of a monk over
the top of his weather-worn cap, and he himself was glad to get to the
shelter of the hut, where the stove was burning: there was the wet, when
all alike were mud-smothered: there were the biting winds of March. But
there came the glad spring and the long summer days; the one gave a
flavour to the other and created a love for both, and deep down in the
heart where that love burnt bright was the pride of his calling, the
honour of tending sheep. Soft jobs were not for men--or manly dogs.

Of course Murphy could not be a sheep-dog; that is, unless Job Nutt had a
mind to make him. Then, of course, he would have had a proper
schoolmaster, and been brought up to things among which he had been born
and bred, while lookers-on beheld a novel kind of sheep-dog. As it was,
however, his master owned no sheep. Yet, seeing that his lot had not been
that of some--to walk the streets for exercise, or to lie in the cramped
garden of a villa in a town--it was only right he should learn all that
he could, and that his education should partake of the fields and the
upland downs around his home.

As to whether it would have been possible to have trained him to the
streets at all must now be left among the things unknown. The impression
remains