the gate one by one, and came round me.  It seemed to them that I was there to feed them; and they held their neat red or yellow heads to one side and the other, inquiring with their beady eyes, surprised at my stillness.  They were pretty with their speckled feathers, and as it seemed to me, plump and young, so that I wondered how many of them would in time feed me.  Finding, however, that I gave them nothing to eat, they went away, and there arose, in place of their clucking, the thin singing of air passing through some long tube.  I knew it for the whining of my dog, who had nosed me out, but could not get through the padlocked gate.  And as I lifted him over, I was glad the postman could not see me—­for I felt that to lift a dog over a gate would be against the principles of one for whom the connection of sheep with good behaviour had been too strange a thought.  And it suddenly rushed into my mind that the time would no doubt come when the conduct of apples, being plucked from the mother tree, would inspire us, and we should say:  “They’re really very good!” And I wondered, were those future watchers of apple-gathering farther from me than I, watching sheep-shearing, from the postman?  I thought, too, of the pretty dreams being dreamt about the land, and of the people who dreamed them.  And I looked at that land, covered with the sweet pinkish-green of the clover, and considered how much of it, through the medium of sheep, would find its way into me, to enable me to come out here and be eaten by midges, and speculate about things, and conceive the sentiment of how good the sheep were.  And it all seemed queer.  I thought, too, of a world entirely composed of people who could see the sheen rippling on that clover, and feel a sort of sweet elation at the scent of it, and I wondered how much clover would be sown then?  Many things I thought of, sitting there, till the sun sank below the moor line, the wind died off the clover, and the midges slept.  Here and there in the iris-coloured sky a star crept out; the soft-hooting owls awoke.  But still I lingered, watching how, one after another, shapes and colours died into twilight; and I wondered what the postman thought of twilight, that inconvenient state, when things were neither dark nor light; and I wondered what the sheep were thinking this first night without their coats.  Then, slinking along the hedge, noiseless, unheard by my sleeping spaniel, I saw a tawny dog stealing by.  He passed without seeing us, licking his lean chops.

“Yes, friend,” I thought, “you have been after something very unholy; you have been digging up buried lamb, or some desirable person of that kind!”