was at work in them as in so many other families in the dale villages.  Peregrine’s six sons had long since left him alone in his steading on the moors:  some had gone down to the manufacturing towns of the West Riding and had prospered in trade; others had fought, and more than one had fallen, in the Napoleonic wars.  Peregrine, therefore, although seventy-six years of age and a widower, had no one to share roof and board with him in his shepherd’s cottage a thousand feet above the sea.

Below, in the dale, lay the villages with their clustered farmsteads and their square-towered churches of Norman foundation.  Round about his steading, which was screened by sycamores from the westerly gales, lay the mountain pastures, broken by terraces of limestone rock.  Above, where the limestone yields place to the millstone, were the high moors and fells, where grouse, curlews and merlins nested among the heather, and hardy, blue-faced sheep browsed on the mountain herbage.

It was Peregrine’s duty to shepherd on these unenclosed moors the sheep and lambs which belonged to the farmers in the dale below.  Each farmer was allowed by immemorial custom to pasture so many sheep on the moors the number being determined by the acreage of his farm.  During the lambing season, in April and May, all the sheep were below in the crofts behind the farmsteads, where the herbage was rich and the weakly ewes could receive special attention; but by the twentieth of May the flocks were ready for the mountain grass, and then it was that Peregrine’s year would properly begin.  The farmers, with their dogs in attendance, would drive their sheep and lambs up the steep, zigzagging path that led to Peregrine’s steading, and there the old shepherd would receive his charges.  Dressed in his white linen smock, his crook in his hand, and his white beard lifted by the wind, he would take his place at the mouth of the rocky defile below his house.  At a distance he might easily have been mistaken for a bishop standing at the altar of his cathedral church and giving his benediction to the kneeling multitudes.  There was dignity in every movement and gesture, and the act of receiving the farmers’ flocks was invested by him with ritual solemnity.  He gave to each farmer in turn a formal greeting, and then proceeded to count the sheep and lambs that the dogs had been trained to drive slowly past him in single file.  He knew every farmer’s “stint” or allowance, and stern were his words to the man who tried to exceed his proper number.

“Thou’s gotten ower mony yowes to thy stint, Thomas Moon,” he would say to a farmer who was trying to get the better of his neighbours.

“Nay, Peregrine, I reckon I’ve nobbut eighty, and they’re lile ’uns at that.”

“Eighty’s thy stint, but thou’s gotten eighty-twee; thou can tak heam wi’ thee twee o’ yon three-yeer-owds, an’ mind thou counts straight next yeer.”

Further argument was useless; Peregrine had the reputation of never making a mistake in his reckoning, and, amid the jeers of his fellows, Thomas Moon would drive his two rejected ewes with their lambs back to his farm.