mansion or big building, no puff of white steam and sight of a long,
black train creeping over the earth, nor any other strange thing. It
would appear to him even as he knew it before he fell asleep--the same
familiar scene, with furze and bramble and bracken on the slope, the
wide expanse with sheep and cattle grazing in the distance, and the dark
green of trees in the hollows, and fold on fold of the low down beyond,
stretching away to the dim, farthest horizon.




CHAPTER IV

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS

Caleb Bawcombe--An old shepherd's love of his home--Fifty years'
shepherding--Bawcombe's singular appearance--A tale of a titlark--Caleb
Bawcombe's father--Father and son--A grateful sportsman and Isaac
Bawcombe's pension--Death following death in old married couples--In a
village churchyard--A farm-labourer's gravestone and his story


It is now several years since I first met Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd of
the South Wiltshire Downs, but already old and infirm and past work. I
met him at a distance from his native village, and it was only after I
had known him a long time and had spent many afternoons and evenings in
his company, listening to his anecdotes of his shepherding days, that I
went to see his own old home for myself--the village of Winterbourne
Bishop already described, to find it a place after my own heart. But as
I have said, if I had never known Caleb and heard so much from him about