NATURE AND SPORT IN BRITAIN 



Northamptonshire at that period — the early seventies 

 — the gallons of home-brewed ale that were drunk, 

 the general cheerfulness of the whole business. And 

 the way those mountains of boiled beef and acres of 

 pudding and hills of cheese and bread used to dis- 

 appear was something to behold and to remember. 

 But then the task was hard, and the labourer was 

 worthy of his reward. Sheep-shearing is tough work. 

 More than once, for the fun of the thing and the 

 acquiring of useful knowledge, I have shorn sheep 

 myself during a long day or two, and I can testify to 

 that fact, as well as to the fact that it is an operation 

 that needs apprenticeship and practice. To the novice 

 it is a backaching task, indeed, and the end of the 

 first day's labour means much stiffness, and hands, 

 arms, and clothing imbued with the strong-scented, 

 natural grease of the animal shorn. However, the trick 

 of it once mastered, shearing is an art that will not 

 soon be forgotten, and I fancy, even now — and it is 

 many years since I handled a sheep — I could open out 

 the fleece and strip it away neatly from its mild pos- 

 sessor without much difficulty. Like skating and 

 swimming, this art, once acquired, comes pretty readily 

 again to him that formerly practised it. 



Shearing has, of course, lost a good deal of the 

 high revel, festivity, and frolic of Shakespeare's time. 

 Shakespeare himself never displayed his marvellous 

 acquaintance with every phase of English life more 

 happily than in his portrait of the shearers and their 

 merrymaking in The Winter's Tale. A clown enters 

 to the crafty Autolycus, and begins to reckon up the 

 cost of his fairing. "Let me see," he mumbles to 

 himself in his slow way, " every 'leven wether — tods; 

 every tod yields — pound and odd shilling: fifteen 

 hundred shorn, — what comes the wool to?" 



224 



