Below the “pill”—­for we have been gazing up stream—­some sheep are lying under a gnarled willow on the left bank; some are nibbling at the lichen and moss on the trunk, others are standing about in pretty groups of three and four.  One of them has just had a ducking.  Trying to get a drink of water, he overbalanced himself and fell in.  He walks about shaking himself, and doubtless feels very uncomfortable.  Sheep do not care much for bathing in cold water.  You have only to see the sheep-washing in the spring to realise how they dislike it.  There is a place higher up the stream called the Washpool, where every day in May you can watch the men bundling the poor old sheep into the water, one after the other, and dipping them well, to free the wool from insects of all kinds.  And how the trout enjoy the ticks that come from their thickly matted coats!  One poor sheep is hopping about on the cricket field dead lame.  Perhaps that leg he drags behind is broken!  Why does not the farmer kill the poor brute?  There is much misery of this kind caused in country places by the thoughtlessness of farmers.  How much has yet to be learnt by the very men who love to describe the labourers as “them ’ere ignorant lower classes”!  Alas! that these things can happen among the green fields and spreading elms and the heavenly sunshine of summer days!  We should have more moral courage, and do as Carlyle bids us in his old solemn way:  “But above all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brute-mindedness, attack it, I say; smite it, wisely, unwearily, and rest not while thou livest and it lives; but smite, smite in the name of God.  The Highest God, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee, still audibly if thou hast ears to hear.”

On the cricket pitch, a bare hundred yards away from the river bank, is a plentiful crop of dandelions, crow’s-foot, clover, and, worst of all, enormous plantains.  A gravel soil is very favourable to plantains, for stones work up and the grass dies.  The dreadful plantain seems to thrive anywhere and everywhere, and on bare spots where grass cannot live he immediately appears.  Rabbits have been making holes all over the pitch, and red spikes of sorrel, wonderfully rich and varied in colour, rise everywhere at the lower end of the field towards the river.  The cricket ground has been somewhat neglected of late.

There is a great elm tree down close to the ground—­the only tree that the winter gales had left to shade us on hot summer days.  It came down suddenly, without the slightest warning; and underneath it that most careless of all keepers, Tom Peregrine, had left the large mowing-machine and the roller.  So careless are some of these Gloucestershire folk that sooner than do as I had ordered and put the mowing-machine in the barn hard by, they must leave it in the open air and under this ill-fated tree.  Down came my last beloved elm, smashing the mowing-machine and putting an end to all thoughts of cricket here this summer.  It will be ages before the village carpenter will come with his timber cart and draw the tree away.  A Gloucestershire man cannot do a job like this in under two years; they are always so busy, you see, in Gloucestershire—­never a moment to spare to get anything done!