f Parson Peppers.

"An' the ravens they did feed him, fare ye well,
fare ye well."

I sprang out of bed and pressed my face against the window. There was no
sound in the world. Below, the Valley River lay like a plate of
burnished yellow metal. Under the enchanted moon it was the haunted
water of the fairy. No mortal went singing down its flood, surely,
unless he sailed in the ship that the tailors sewed together, or went
a-dreaming in that mystic barge rowed by the fifty daughters of Danaus.

I crept back under the woven coverlid. This was haunted country, and
Parson Peppers was doubtless snoring in a bed.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SIX HUNDRED

It is an unwritten law of the Hills that all cattle bought by the pound
are to be weighed out of their beds, that is, in the early morning
before they have begun to graze. This is the hour set by immemorial
custom.

We were in the saddle while the sun was yet abed. The cattle were on two
great boundaries of a thousand acres, sleeping in the deep blue grass on
the flat hill-tops. Jud and two of Marsh's drivers took one line of the
ridges, and Marsh and I took the other.

The night was lifting when we came out on the line of level hill-tops,
and through the haze the sleeping cattle were a flock of squatting
shadows. As we rode in among them the dozing bullocks arose awkwardly
from their warm beds and stretched their great backs, not very well
pleased to have their morning rest broken.

We rode about, bringing them into a bunch, arousing some morose old
fellow who slept by himself in a corner of the hill, or a dozen
aristocrats who held a bedchamber in some windless cove, or a straying
Ishmaelite hidden in a broom-sedge hollow,--all displeased with the
interruption of their forty winks before the sunrise. Was it not enough
to begin one's day with the light and close it with the light? What did
man mean by his everlasting inroads on the wholesome ways of nature? The
Great Mother knew what she was about. All the people of the fields could
get up in the morning without this cursed row. Whoever was one of them
snoozing in his trundle-bed after the sun had flashed him a good
morning?

The home-life of the steer would be healthy reading in any family. He
never worries, and his temper has no shoal. Either he is contented and
goes about his business, or he is angry and he fights. He is clean, and
as regular in his habits as a lieutenant of infantry. To bed on the
hig