old. In the solemn calm of the awakening morn
that note was heard by Gabriel, beating with unusual violence and
rapidity. This exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways--by
the rapid feeding of the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock
breaks into new pasture, which gives it an intermittent rapidity,
or by the sheep starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular
palpitation. The experienced ear of Oak knew the sound he now heard
to be caused by the running of the flock with great velocity.

He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a foggy
dawn, and ascended the hill. The forward ewes were kept apart from
those among which the fall of lambs would be later, there being two
hundred of the latter class in Gabriel's flock. These two hundred
seemed to have absolutely vanished from the hill. There were the
fifty with their lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left
them, but the rest, forming the bulk of the flock, were nowhere.
Gabriel called at the top of his voice the shepherd's call:

"Ovey, ovey, ovey!"

Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken
through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep. Rather
surprised to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it
down instantly to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of
which a great deal grew in the plantation, he followed through the
hedge. They were not in the plantation. He called again: the
valleys and farthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the
lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep. He passed through the
trees and along the ridge of the hill. On the extreme summit, where
the ends of the two converging hedges of which we have spoken were
stopped short by meeting the brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the
younger dog standing against the sky--dark and motionless as Napoleon
at St. Helena.

A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation of bodily
faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through,
and there he saw the footprints of his ewes. The dog came up, licked
his hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward
for signal services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The
ewes lay dead and dying at its foot--a heap of two hundred mangled
carcasses, representing in their condition just now at least two
hundred more.

Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in
pieces any politic i