It is now about seven o'clock. Mr Gordon moves forward. As he does so,
every man leans towards the open door of the pen in front of which he
stands. The bell sounds! With the first stroke each one of the seventy
men has sprung upon a sheep--has drawn it out--placed its head across
his knee--and is working his shears as if the "last man out" was to be
flogged, or tarred and feathered at the least. Four minutes--James
Steadman, who learned last year, has shorn down one side of his sheep;
Jack Holmes and Gundagai Bill are well down the other sides of theirs;
when Billy May raises himself with a jerking sigh, and releases his
sheep, perfectly clean-shorn from the nose to the heels, through the
aperture of his separate enclosure. With the same effort apparently he
calls out 'Wool!' and darts upon another sheep. Drawing this second
victim across his knee, he buries his shear-points in the long wool of
its neck. A moment after a lithe and eager boy has gathered up fleece
number one, and tossed it into the train-basket, the shearer is halfway
down the sheep's side, the wool hanging in one fleece like a great
glossy mat, before you have done wondering whether he did really
shear the first sheep, or whether he had not a ready-shorn one in his
coat-sleeve--like a conjuror.

By this time Jack Holmes and Gundagai Bill are 'out,' or finished; and
the cry of "Wool!' Wool!" seems to run continuously up and down the
long aisles of the shed, like a single note upon some rude instrument.
Now and then the "refrain" is varied by "Tar!" being shouted instead,
when a piece of skin is snipped off as well as the wool. Great healing
properties are attributed to this extract in the shed. And if a shearer
slice off a piece of flesh from his own person, as occasionally
happens, he gravely anoints it with the universal remedy, and considers
that the onus then lies with Providence, there being no more that man
can do. Though little time is lost, the men are by no means up to the