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!"

Sneaking past, in this sweet night, which stirred in one such sentiment,
that ghoulish cur was like the omnivorousness of Nature. And it came to
me, how wonderful and queer was a world which embraced within it, not
only this red gloating dog, fresh from his feast on the decaying flesh of
lamb, but all those hundreds of beings in whom the sight of a fly with
one leg shortened produced a quiver of compassion. For in this savage,
slinking shadow, I knew that I had beheld a manifestation of divinity no
less than in the smile of the sky, each minute growing more starry. W