d itself to his view, the eagle
shaped his flight into a vast circle, or rather into a series of
stupendous loops. His neck was stretched toward the earth, in the
intensity of his search for something to ease the bitter hunger of his
nestlings and his mate.

Not far from the sea, and still in darkness, stood a low, round hill, or
swelling upland. Bleak and shelterless, whipped by every wind that the
heavens could let loose, it bore no bush but an occasional juniper
scrub. It was covered with mossy hillocks, and with a short grass,
meagre but sweet. There in the chilly gloom, straining her ears to catch
the lightest footfall of approaching peril, but hearing only the hushed
thunder of the surf, stood a lonely ewe over the lamb to which she had
given birth in the night.

Having lost the flock when the pangs of travail came upon her, the
unwonted solitude filled her with apprehension. But as soon as the first
feeble bleating of the lamb fell upon her ear, everything was changed.
Her terrors all at once increased tenfold,--but they were for her young,
not for herself; and with them came a strange boldness such as her heart
had never known before. As the little weakling shivered against her
side, she uttered low, short bleats and murmurs of tenderness. When an
owl hooted in the woods across the valley, she raised her head angrily
and faced the sound, suspecting a menace to her young. When a mouse
scurried past her, with a small, rustling noise amid the withered mosses
of the hillock, she stamped fiercely, and would have charged had the
intruder been a lion.

When the first gray of dawn descended over the pasture, the ewe feasted
her eyes with the sight of the trembling little creature, as it lay on
the wet grass. With gentle nose she coaxed it and caressed it, till
presently it struggled to its feet, and, with its pathetically awkward
legs spread wide apart to preserve its balance, it began to nurse.
Turning her head as far around as she could, the ewe watched its every
motion with soft murmurings of delight.

And now that wave of rose, which had long ago washed the mountain and
waked the eagles spread tenderly across the open pasture. The lamb
stopped nursing; and the ewe, moving forward two or three steps, tried
to persuade it to follow her. She was anxious that it should as soon as
possible learn to walk freely, so they might together rejoin the flock.
She felt that the open pasture was full of dangers.

The lamb se