§14

Lambing was always late upon the Marsh. The wan film of the winter
grasses had faded off the April green before the innings became noisy
with bleating, and the new-born lambs could match their whiteness with
the first flowering of the blackthorn.

It was always an anxious time--though the Marsh ewes were hardy--and
sleepless for shepherds, who from the windows of their lonely lambing
huts watched the yellow spring-dazzle of the stars grow pale night after
night. They were bad hours to be awake, those hours of the April dawn,
for in them, the shepherds said, a strange call came down from the
country inland, straying scents of moss and primroses reaching out
towards the salt sea, calling men away from the wind-stung levels and
the tides and watercourses, to where the little inland farms sleep in
the sheltered hollows among the hop-bines, and the sunrise is warm with
the scent of hidden flowers.

Dick Socknersh began to look wan and large-eyed under the strain--he
looked more haggard than the shepherd of Yokes Court or the shepherd of
Birdskitchen, though they kept fast and vigil as long as he. His
mistress, too, had a fagged, sorrowful air, and soon it became known all
over the Three Marshes that Ansdore's lambing that year had been a
gigantic failure.

"It's her own fault," said Prickett at the Woolpack, "and serve her
right for getting shut of old Fuller, and then getting stuck on this