arrived with a whip, and having found the cowherd sleeping
peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating.
The cowherd is a great hulking young man, much bigger
than the man who beat him, but he took his punishment
as part of the day's work and made no remark of any sort.
It could not have hurt him much through his leather breeches,
and I think he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work
for a strong young man with no brains looking after cows.
Nobody with less imagination than a poet ought to take it up
as a profession.

After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two
with as many hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils,
and while we were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I happened
to look up into its mazy green, and there, on a branch quite close to my head,
sat a little baby owl. I got on the seat and caught it easily, for it
could not fly, and how it had reached the branch at all is a mystery.
It is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the quaintest,
wisest, solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let it go,
but the temptation to keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present
on a journey, has seen it was not to be resisted, as he has often
said how much he would like to have a young owl and try and tame it.
So I put it into a roomy cage and slung it up on a branch near where it
had been sitting, and which cannot be far from its nest and its mother.
We had hardly subsided again to our tea when I saw two more balls
of fluff on the ground in the long grass and scarcely distinguishable
at a little distance from small mole-hills. These were promptly united
to their relation in the cage, and now when the Man of Wrath comes home,
not only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the orthodox smiles,
but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems wicked to take them