it, the headboard and footboard of which are the walls of
the building itself. It might be called a bedroom on the inside, but
as it is only a two-story bunk boarded in and roofed over, it is more
properly a room-bed; or rather it is comparable to a passage at sea
with its upper and lower bunk and the surrounding ocean of prairie--a
sort of stateroom in the flight of Time. The architect of this one had
been short of lumber, or too economical, the result being that the
present occupant was a trifle too long for it; and he had considered
the advisability of cutting a little window in the side to let his feet
out. Its inconveniences bothered him little, however, as he spent his
evenings stretched out on the prairie by the fire. It was so far from
being Home to him that he never felt so far from home as when he
entered it; and as he seldom entered it except in the dark, it was
hardly a familiar place to him. Outside it might be home all over;
inside was a timber tomb and the far-away country of sleep. This
edifice stood on a low knoll from the heart of which issued a small
spring-fed stream which had cut itself a deep ditch or gully down to
the general level; and on the slope opposite to where the stream went
out was a narrow path where the sheep ran up. The little eminence,
with its structures, was a shanty acropolis to a universe otherwise
unimproved.

It was to this place he was at last coming, his blatant rabble moving
gradually together as they neared their familiar destination. Now that
he felt relieved of responsibility, his thoughts, which had hurried on
before him, as it were, dwelt with much satisfaction upon a certain
little prison-pen on the hill ahead. Once arrived here, the lamb,
could get a meal from his unwilling mother, who would be confined in
such straits in the narrow little pen that she could not move nor help
herself. The advantages of this arrangement the lamb would make full
use of; and thereafter he would get along very well, interrupting his
slumbers at any time and supping to his full satisfaction. There was a
row of the separate little stalls or sheep stocks along the outside of
the corral, this department being the orphan asylum of the community;
and hereabouts there galloped and capered, in springtime, lambs whose
mothers had died in "havin'" them, lambs whose own mothers were too
poor to support them, and most frequently the child of a ewe like this.

The sheep crowded still close