all events.

A solitary flock of the pure-bred old Wiltshire sheep existed in the
county as late as 1840, but the breed has now so entirely disappeared
from the country that you find many shepherds who have never even heard
of it. Not many days ago I met with a curious instance of this ignorance
of the past. I was talking to a shepherd, a fine intelligent fellow,
keenly interested in the subjects of sheep and sheep-dogs, on the high
down above the village of Broad Chalk on the Ebble, and he told me that
his dog was of mixed breed, but on its mother's side came from a Welsh
sheep-dog, that his father had always had the Welsh dog, once common in
Wiltshire, and he wondered why it had gone out as it was so good an
animal. This led me to say something about the old sheep having gone out
too, and as he had never heard of the old breed I described the animal
to him.

What I told him, he said, explained something which had been a puzzle to
him for some years. There was a deep hollow in the down near the spot
where we were standing, and at the bottom he said there was an old well
which had been used in former times to water the sheep, but masses of
earth had fallen down from the sides, and in that condition it had
remained for no one knew how long--perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred
years. Some years ago it came into his master's head to have this old
well cleaned out, and this was done with a good deal of labour, the
sides having first been boarded over to make it safe for the workmen
below. At the bottom of the well a vast store of rams' horns was
discovered and brought out; and it was a mystery to the fanner and the
men how so large a number of sheep's horns had been got together; for
rams are few and do not die often, and here there were hundreds of
horns. He understood it now, for if all the sheep, ewes as well as rams,