eadily;
some are in a gateway, doing nothing, like their pastor; if they were
on the loneliest slope of the Downs he and they could not be more
unconcerned. Carriages go past, and neither the sheep nor the shepherd
turn to look.

Suddenly there comes a hollow booming sound--a roar, mellowed and
subdued by distance, with a peculiar beat upon the ear, as if a wave
struck the nerve and rebounded and struck again in an infinitesimal
fraction of time--such a sound as can only bellow from the mouth of
cannon. Another and another. The big guns at Woolwich are at work. The
shepherd takes no heed--neither he nor his sheep.

His ears must acknowledge the sound, but his mind pays no attention. He
knows of nothing but his sheep. You may brush by him along the footpath
and it is doubtful if he sees you. But stay and speak about the sheep,
and instantly he looks you in the face and answers with interest.

Round the corner of the straw-rick by the red-roofed barn there comes
another man, this time with smoke-blackened face, and bringing with him
an odour of cotton waste and oil. He is the driver of a steam ploughing
engine, whose broad wheels in summer leave their impression in the deep
white dust of the roads, and in moist weather sink into the soil at the
gateways and leave their mark as perfect as in wax. But though familiar
with valves, and tubes, and gauges, spending his hours polishing brass
and steel, and sometimes busy with spanner and hammer, his talk, too, is
of the fields.

He looks at the clouds, and hopes it will continue fine enough to work.
Like many others of the men who are employed on the farms about town he
came originally from a little village a hundred miles away, in the heart
of the country. The stamp of the land is on him, too.

Besides the Irish, who pass in gangs and generally have a settled
destination, many agricultural folk drift along the roads and lanes
searching for work. They are sometimes alone, or in couples, or they are
a man and his wife, and carry hoes. You can tell them as far as you can
see them, for they stop and look over every gateway to note how the crop
is progressing, and whether any labour is required.

On Saturday afternoons, among the crowd of customers at the shops in the
towns, under the very shadow of the almost palatial villas of wealthy
"City" men, there may be seen women whose dress and talk at once mark
them out as agricultural. They have come in on foot from distant farms