SOUTHDOWN SHEPHERD 2E 



ding and thickening around it ! But the melan- 

 choly is not in the fair the ploughboy likes 

 it ; it is in ourselves, in the thought that thus, 

 though the years go by, so much of human 

 life remains the same the same blatant dis- 

 cord, the same monotonous roundabout, the same 

 poor gingerbread. 



The ploughs are at work, travelling slowly at 

 the ox's pace up and down the hillside. The 

 South Down plough could scarcely have been in- 

 vented ; it must have been put together bit by 

 bit in the slow years slower than the ox ; it is 

 the completed structure of long experience. It is 

 made of many pieces, chiefly wood, fitted and shaped 

 and worked, as it were, together, well seasoned first, 

 built up, like a ship, by cunning of hand. 



None of these were struck out a hundred a 

 minute by irresistible machinery ponderously im- 

 pressing its will on iron as a seal on wax a hun- 

 dred a minute, and all exactly alike. These separate 

 pieces which compose the plough were cut, chosen, 

 and shaped in the wheelwright's workshop, chosen 

 by the eye, guided in its turn by long knowledge 

 of wood, and shaped by the living though hardened 

 hand of man. So complicated a structure could 

 no more have been struck out on paper in a de- 

 liberate and single plan than those separate pieces 

 could have been produced by a single blow. 

 -267- 



