ewes, clad in the lost ones' skins, in the sure hope that they will
adopt them. The ruse may be said never to fail. The solitary-confinement
pens are in the charge of still another herder, a much perplexed and
irritated man, on whose part considerable swearing--Mexican for small
ills, English for serious occasions--is to be excused. A superintendent
of two lambing ewe-flocks, it will thus be seen, has to oversee eighteen
herders or so, with their charges, besides the growing lamb-flock, all
more or less distant from each other. He is a busy man. His
head-quarters, like those of General Pope, may be said to be in the
saddle. His note-book is in constant use. It contains a record of each
day's births and deaths, of the twins (which are tagged or marked alike
for easy identification) and the still-born, that each bereft mother may
be provided with a foster-child, and the daily count of the
daily-changing flocks.

The first lamb born starts the refrain, to be taken up as the season
waxes by thousands of others scattered over the range, and swollen into
a roaring, shrieking chorus, as though an enormous public school had
just turned its urchins into the play-ground. A listener standing in the
hall of the Stock Exchange gets some faint idea of it when there has
been a serious break in Lake Shore, say, or when C.C.C.&I. has "gone
off" a considerable number of points. Out of these thousands of voices,
not to be differentiated by the human ear, the ewe knows the note of her
little one with very remarkable certainty, and the lamb the answering
cry of its dam. With this sound ringing in his ears, and daily becoming
more and more insufferable from monotony and increase, the sheep-man
rides out in the morning among his Mexicans, and returns to camp at
night aweary, with haply a couple of little ones abandoned by their
mothers in his arms, to be brought up on that _pis-aller_ of
infancy,--and, alas! occasionally of age,--the bottle.