perhaps half a mile; but they have already been an hour, and will
probably occupy another in getting there. Some are feeding steadily;
some are in a gateway, doing nothing, like their pastor; if they were
on the loneliest slope of the Downs he and they could not be more
unconcerned. Carriages go past, and neither the sheep nor the shepherd
turn to look.

Suddenly there comes a hollow booming sound--a roar, mellowed and
subdued by distance, with a peculiar beat upon the ear, as if a wave
struck the nerve and rebounded and struck again in an infinitesimal
fraction of time--such a sound as can only bellow from the mouth of
cannon. Another and another. The big guns at Woolwich are at work. The
shepherd takes no heed--neither he nor his sheep.

His ears must acknowledge the sound, but his mind pays no attention. He
knows of nothing but his sheep. You may brush by him along the footpath
and it is doubtful if he sees you. But stay and speak about the sheep,
and instantly he looks you in the face and answers with interest.

Round the corner of the straw-rick by the red-roofed barn there comes
another man, this time with smoke-blackened face, and bringing with him
an odour of cotton waste and oil. He is the driver of a steam ploughing
engine, whose broad wheels in summer leave their impression in the deep
white dust of the roads, and in moist weather sink into the soil at the
gateways and leave their mark as perfect as in wax. But though familiar
with valves, and tubes, and gauges, spending his hours polishing brass
and steel, and sometimes busy with spanner and hammer, his talk, too, is
of the fields.

He looks at the clouds, and hopes it will continue fine enough to work.