state in which sheep could not.

The heat from the dropping sun, not far now above the moorline, struck
full into the ferns and long grass of the bank where I was sitting, and
the midges rioted on me in this last warmth. The wind was barred out, so
that one had the full sweetness of the clover, fast becoming hay, over
which the swallows were wheeling and swooping after flies. And far up,
as it were the crown of Nature's beautiful devouring circle, a buzzard
hawk, almost stationary on the air, floated, intent on something pleasant
below him. A number of little hens crept through the gate one by one,
and came round me. It seemed to them that I was there to feed them; and
they held their neat red or yellow heads to one side and the other,
inquiring with their beady eyes, surprised at my stillness. They were
pretty with their speckled feathers, and as it seemed to me, plump and
young, so that I wondered how many of them would in time feed me.
Finding, however, that I gave them nothing to eat, they went away, and
there arose, in place of their clucking, the thin singing of air passing
through some long tube. I knew it for the whining of my dog, who had
nosed me out, but could not get through the padlocked gate. And as I
lifted him over, I was glad the postman could not see me--for I felt that
to lift a dog over a gate would be against the principles of one for whom
the connection of sheep with good behaviour had been too strange a
thought. And it suddenly rushed into my mind that the time would no doubt
come when the conduct of apples, being plucked from the mother tree,
would inspire us, and we should say: "They're really very good!" And I
wondered, were those future watchers of apple-gathering farther from me
than I, watching sheep-shearing, from the postman? I thought, too, of the
pretty dreams being dreamt about the land, and of the people who dreamed
them. And I looked at that land, covered with the sweet pinkish-green of
the clover, and considered how much of it, through the medium of sheep,