CORRESPONDENCE.
LAMBING-TIME.
" SAVEZ-VOUS oi gite Mai, cc joli mois P" I often wondere& where Stevenson unearthed that haunting, delicious refrain. Yet even May's advent is hardly so enchanting as the days that March borrows of April, the Eden-time of lambs ; and they were ten times sweeter than ever after this frost-bound season when the snow lay visible on the Dublin hills till Easter Sunday. A most inclement spring it was ; but the first fortnight of March tempered its bitterness to the ewes that were yeaning in every field ; and I, back in the country for the first time since my boyhood, felt daily swelling and strengthening in me the aboriginal instinct that connects itself with the occupation of land ; there grew upon me the desire and delight of seeing increase of the ground, increase of beasts, till I began to wonder how I had ever contented myself to be a dweller in cities. However, a day came when March returned to his cruelty, bringing in a bitter, sleety wind. Late in the after- noon, I went to visit the farmer who neighbours us. Twilight. was falling, and the sheep were being driven in with the lambs ; the yard was a pool of mud, every rut beaten level, and the whole diapered over by the small sharp feet. It had been a. hard day for the household ; they had been up hours before daylight, tending ewes that were dropping their young in the cold ; a few lambs had been lost, and the house was full, they said, of others that needed warmth and care. They led the way into the kitchen, a low, smoke- blackened room ; nothing was visible except the fire and' a long table, from under which a sheep-dog growled; but faint bleatings seemed to come from every corner. A. candle was lighted, and showed a kind of pen near the chimney corner, and in it, piled one on top of the other, eight or ten lambs, scarcely able to stand. Sheep are good mothers enough, but when twins arrive they are apt to disown the first-comer; these were foundlings whose dams could by no persuasion be induced to recognise them. Some of them are bottle-fed like babies, and I was looking at the simple apparatus,—a common medicine-bottle with a roughly drilled stopper of wood projecting, which is forced into the nursling's month — when suddenly there broke out a perfect storm of "bass" from one of the bedrooms; some one opened the door, and in bounced a splendid, lusty lamb. "Surely not hand-reared P" I said. "Not at all, we have him on a foster-mother;" and the farmer's wife went to the door and gave a call. An immense goat walked in, with huge horns and preposterous udder. One of the lads took her by the horns. "Wait till you see him at her," they said ; and upon my word it seemed a serious matter for the goat ; such punching and pulling, and such rapturous waggling of the tail made one realise that maternal duties were a serious business for the deputy. However, this goat was furnishing four lambs with sustenance; and there- upon her mistress went off into a eulogy upon the virtues of the race ; how they tended themselves, fed themselves, and came home of themselves ; and how this one was so petted, it would come upstairs in the morning to stir her out of bed. Then she went across to the pen and tumbled over the heap of little woolly beasts, till at the bottom she disclosed a beautiful creature, clearest black and clearest white, infinitely more graceful and active than the lambs. "There," she said," take that home to your children for a toy; I do be often looking at them playing about." I took it gratefully, and went off mur- muring to myself Virgil's praise of the less-regarded flock :— " Theirs the more numerous offspring, theirs the bounteous yield of milk ; the more you drain them in the morning, the
higher will the milkpail froth at night ; yet their pasturage it is woodland and mountain-top, their food the rough bramble and cliff-clinging shrubs; of themselves they return punctually to the homestead, bringing their young, and the heavy udder can scarce drag across the threshold." Meanwhile, the kid, taking any human being for a mother, followed at my heel like a puppy, but skipping as only a kid can skip. Poor little martyr of a theological prejudice, people disdain your beauti- ful emerald eyes ! And all the while, with Virgil's lines, there ran in my head the good wife's last words "Well, you're on the land now, and you'll soon grow into it." That is the best commentary on the Georgics I ever heard. S. L. G.
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