A Shepherd's Life - Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs by W. H. (William Henry) Hudson
page 72 of 262 (27%)
page 72 of 262 (27%)
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or bitter, jealous reproach--all that part of her was swallowed up and
annihilated in the joy of a woman who had been denied a child of her own to love and nourish and worship. And now one had come to her and it mattered little how. Two or three days later the infant was baptized at the village church with the quaint name of Moses Found. Caleb was a little surprised at my thinking it a laughable name. It was to his mind a singularly appropriate one; he assured me it was not the only case he knew of in which the surname Found had been bestowed on a child of unknown parentage, and he told me the story of one of the Founds who had gone to Salisbury as a boy and worked and saved and eventually become quite a prosperous and important person. There was really nothing funny in it. The story of Moses Found had been told him by his old mother; she, he remarked significantly, had good cause to remember it. She was herself a native of the village, born two or three years later than the mysterious Moses; her father, John Barter by name was a carpenter and lived in an old, thatched house which still exists and is very familiar to me. He had five sons; then, after an interval of some years, a daughter was born, who in due time was to be Isaac's wife. When she was a little girl her brothers were all grown up or on the verge of manhood, and Moses, too, was a young man--"the spit of his father" people said, meaning the head-keeper--and he was now one of Harbutt's under-keepers. About this time some of the more ardent spirits in the village, not satisfied with an occasional hunt when a deer broke out and roamed over the downs, took to poaching them in the woods. One night, a hunt having been arranged, one of the most daring of the men secreted himself close to the keeper's house, and having watched the keepers go in and the |
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