such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.

Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this
place up against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found
nowhere in the wind, and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in
nature. They were the notes of Farmer Oak's flute.

The tune was not floating unhindered into the open air: it seemed
muffled in some way, and was altogether too curtailed in power to
spread high or wide. It came from the direction of a small dark
object under the plantation hedge--a shepherd's hut--now presenting
an outline to which an uninitiated person might have been puzzled
to attach either meaning or use.

The image as a whole was that of a small Noah's Ark on a small
Ararat, allowing the traditionary outlines and general form of
the Ark which are followed by toy-makers--and by these means are
established in men's imaginations among their firmest, because
earliest impressions--to pass as an approximate pattern. The hut
stood on little wheels, which raised its floor about a foot from the
ground. Such shepherds' huts are dragged into the fields when the
lambing season comes on, to shelter the shepherd in his enforced
nightly attendance.

It was only latterly that people had begun to call Gabriel "Farmer"
Oak. During the twelvemonth preceding this time he had been enabled
by sustained efforts of industry and chronic good spirits to lease
the small sheep-farm of which Norcombe Hill was a portion, and stock
it with two hundred sheep. Previously he had been a bailiff for a
short time, and earlier still a shepherd only, having from his