The boys, deprived of their bird and of an excuse for a fight, would
gladly have discharged their fury on Caleb, but they durst not, seeing
that his dog was lying at his side; they could only threaten and abuse
him, call him bad names, and finally put on their coats and walk off.

That pretty little tale of a titlark was but the first of a long
succession of memories of his early years, with half a century of
shepherding life on the downs, which came out during our talks on many
autumn and winter evenings as we sat by his kitchen fire. The earlier of
these memories were always the best to me, because they took one back
sixty years or more, to a time when there was more wildness in the earth
than now, and a nobler wild animal life. Even more interesting were some
of the memories of his father, Isaac Bawcombe, whose time went back to
the early years of the nineteenth century. Caleb cherished an admiration
and reverence for his father's memory which were almost a worship, and
he loved to describe him as he appeared in his old age, when upwards of
eighty. He was erect and tall, standing six feet two in height, well
proportioned, with a clean-shaved, florid face, clear, dark eyes, and
silver-white hair; and at this later period of his life he always wore
the dress of an old order of pensioners to which he had been admitted--a
soft, broad, white felt hat, thick boots and brown leather leggings, and
a long, grey cloth overcoat with red collar and brass buttons.

According to Caleb, he must have been an exceedingly fine specimen of a
man, both physically and morally. Born in 1800, he began following a
flock as a boy, and continued as shepherd on the same farm until he was
sixty, never rising to more than seven shillings a week and nothing
found, since he lived in the cottage where he was born and which he
inherited from his father. That a man of his fine powers, a
head-shepherd on a large hill-farm, should have had no better pay than