farmer took them to the village pound and locked them up, but in the
morning the donkeys and Joe with them had vanished and the whole village
wondered how he had done it. The stone wall of the pound was four feet
and a half high and the iron gate was locked, yet he had lifted the
donkeys up and put them over and had loaded them and gone before anyone
was up.

Once Joe met with a very great misfortune. He arrived late at a village,
and finding there was good feed in the churchyard and that everybody was
in bed, he put his donkeys in and stretched himself out among the
gravestones to sleep. He had no nerves and no imagination; and was
tired, and slept very soundly until it was light and time to put his
neddies out before any person came by and discovered that he had been
making free with the rector's grass. Glancing round he could see no
donkeys, and only when he stood up he found they had not made their
escape but were there all about him, lying among the gravestones, stone
dead every one! He had forgotten that a churchyard was a dangerous place
to put hungry animals in. They had browsed on the luxuriant yew that
grew there, and this was the result.

In time he recovered from his loss and replaced his dead neddies with
others, and continued for many years longer on his rounds.

To return to Isaac Bawcombe. He was born, we have seen, in 1800, and
began following a flock as a boy and continued as shepherd on the same
farm for a period of fifty-five years. The care of sheep was the one
all-absorbing occupation of his life, and how much it was to him appears
in this anecdote of his state of mind when he was deprived of it for a
time. The flock was sold and Isaac was left without sheep, and with
little to do except to wait from Michaelmas to Candlemas, when there