hlands when the dark comes, and out of it with the sun. A drink of
water from the brook, and about to breakfast.

We gathered the cattle into a drove, and started them in a broken line
across the hills toward the road, the huge black muleys strolling along,
every fellow at his leisure. The sun peeping through his gateway in the
east gilded the tops of the brown sedge and turned the grass into a sea
of gold. Through this Eldorado the line of black cattle waded in deep
grasses to the knee,--curly-coated beasts from some kingdom of the
midnight in mighty contrast to this golden country. I might have been
the Merchant's Son transported by some wicked fairy to a land of
wonders, watching, with terror in his throat, the rebellious jins under
some enchantment of King Solomon travelling eastward to the sun.

Now a hungry fellow paused to gather a bunch of the good-tasting grass
and was butted out of the path, and now some curly-shouldered
belligerent roared his defiant bellow and it went rumbling through the
hills. We drove the cattle through the open gate of the pasture and down
a long lane to the scales.

Nicholas Marsh seemed another man, and I felt the first touch of triumph
come with the crisp morning. Woodford was losing. We had the cattle and
there remained only to drive them in. It is a wonderful thing how the
frost glistening on a rail, or a redbird chirping in a thicket of purple
raspberry briers, can lift the heart into the sun. Marks and his crew
were creatures of a nightmare, gone in the daylight, hung up in the dark
hollow of some oak tree with the bat.

Marsh and the drivers went ahead of the cattle to the scales, and I
followed the drove, stopping to close the gate and fasten it with its
wooden pin to the old chestnut gate-post. High up on this gate-post was
a worn hole about as big as a walnut, door to the mansion of some
speckled woodpecker. As I whistled merrily under his sill, the master of
this house stepped up to his threshold and leered down at me.

He looked old and immoral, with a mosaic past, the sort of woodpecker
who, if born into a higher estate, would have guzzled rum and gambled
with sailors. His head was bare in spots, his neck frowsy, and his
eyelids scaly. "Young sir," this debauched old Worldly Wiseman seemed to
say, "you think you're a devil of a fellow merely because it happens to
be morning. Gad sooks! You must be very young. When you get a trifle
further on with the mischief of living,