to leave him at a wayside farmhouse--the Sylvester place--to be
dosed with hot ginger tea. At last, after losing half an hour there, we
went on without him; Addison now shook the salt dish ahead, and I,
brandishing a long stick, kept stragglers from lagging in the rear.

Three persons are needed to drive a flock of a hundred sheep; but we saw
no way except to go on and do the best we could. Now that it was light,
the sky looked as if a storm were at hand.

The storm did not reach us until nearly eleven o'clock, however; we had
got as far as the town of Albany before the first flakes began to fall.
Then Old Peg made trouble. Leaving the barn and going off so far was
against all her ideas of propriety, and now that a snowstorm had set in
she was certain that something or other was wrong. She looked this way
and that, sometimes turning completely round to look at the road.
Presently she made a bolt off to the left and, jumping a stone wall,
tried to circle back through a field. Part of the flock immediately
followed, and we had a lively race to head her off and start her along
the road again.

Addison abandoned the salt dish,--it was no longer attractive to the
sheep,--and helped me to drive the flock. At every cross road Peg seemed
bent on taking the wrong turn. In spite of the cold she kept us in a
perspiration, and we did not have time even to eat the luncheon that we
had brought in our pockets. Old Peg's one idea was to lead the flock
home to the old farm.

By hard work we kept the sheep going in the right direction until after
three o'clock in the afternoon. By that time four or five inches of snow
had fallen. It whitened the whole country and loaded the fleeces of the
sheep. The flock had begun to lag, and the younger sheep were bleating
plaintively. We were getting worried, for the storm was increasing, and
as nearly as Addison could remember we had six miles farther to go. It
would soon be night; the forests that here bordered the road were
darkening already. We had no idea how we should get the flock on after
dark.

Old Peg soon took the matter out of our hands. She had been plodding on
moodily at the head of her large family for half an hour or more, and
coming at length to a dim cross road that entered the highway from the
woods on the north side, she turned and started up it at a headlong run.

How she ran! And how the flock streamed after her! How we ran, too, to
head her off and turn her back! Addison d