r Father when their Father was little. He did not talk like
their own people in the Weald of Sussex, and he used different names for
farm things, but he understood how they felt, and let them go with him.
He had a tiny cottage about half a mile from the village, where his wife
made mead from thyme honey, and nursed sick lambs in front of a coal
fire, while Old Jim, who was Mr Dudeney's sheep-dog's father, lay at
the door. They brought up beef bones for Old Jim (you must never give
a sheep-dog mutton bones), and if Mr Dudeney happened to be far in the
Downs, Mrs Dudeney would tell the dog to take them to him, and he did.

One August afternoon when the village water-cart had made the street
smell specially townified, they went to look for their shepherd as
usual, and, as usual, Old Jim crawled over the doorstep and took them
in charge. The sun was hot, the dry grass was very slippery, and the
distances were very distant.

'It's Just like the sea,' said Una, when Old Jim halted in the shade
of a lonely flint barn on a bare rise. 'You see where you're going,
and--you go there, and there's nothing between.'

Dan slipped off his shoes. 'When we get home I shall sit in the woods
all day,' he said.

'Whuff!' said Old Jim, to show he was ready, and struck across a long
rolling stretch of turf. Presently he asked for his beefbone.

'Not yet,' said Dan. 'Where's Mr Dudeney? Where's Master?' Old Jim
looked as if he thought they were mad, and asked again.

'Don't you give it him,' Una cried. 'I'm not going to be left howling in
a desert.'

'Show, boy! Show!' said Dan, for the Downs seemed as bare as the palm of
your hand.

Old Jim sighed, and trotted forward. Soon they spied the blob of Mr
Dudeney's hat against the sky a long way off.

'Right! All right!' said Dan. Old Jim wheeled round, took his bone
carefully between his blunted teeth, and returned to the shadow of the
old barn, looking just like a wolf. The children went on. Two kestrels
hung bivvering and squealing above them. A gull flapped lazily along the
white edge of the cliffs. The curves of the Downs shook a little in the
heat, and so did Mr Dudeney's distant head.

They walked toward it very slowly and found themselves staring into
a horseshoe-shaped hollow a hundred feet deep, whose steep sides were
laced with tangled sheep-tracks. The flock grazed on the flat at the
bottom, under charge of Young Jim. Mr Dudeney sat comfortably knitting
on the edge of the sl