AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 15 



had never any qualms of conscience ; but it is a faint 

 hope to entertain. I knew a single naively honest 

 one ; but to him I never offered anything for sale. I 

 feared he might succumb to that temptation. 



After the butter, (counting some forty odd pounds 

 in weight per week,) the next most important sale was 

 that of the lambs and wool. The lambs counted ordi- 

 narily leaving out the losses of the newly dropped 

 ones, by crows * and foxes some hundred or more. 

 And nice lambs they were ; far better than the half I 

 find in the markets to-day. Nothing puts sweeter and 

 more delicate flesh upon young lambs than that luxu- 

 riant growth of herbage which springs from freshly 

 cleared high-lying wood-lands. In piquancy and rich- 

 ness, it is as much beyond the lambs of stall-fed 

 sheep, as the racy mutton of the Dartmoors is beyond 

 the turnip-fatted wethers of the downs of Hampshire. 

 And yet these lambs were delivered to the butcher 

 at an ignoble price ; I think a dollar and a half a head 

 was all that could be secured for animals which in 



* Enthusiastic bird-lovers will learn, may be with surprise, that 

 crows are capable of this mischief, but it is even true. Their vil- 

 lainous method is to pluck out the eyes of the newly born innocents, 

 and then leave their prey until death and putrefaction shall have 

 ripened it to their taste. Only extreme hunger, however, will drive 

 the crow to such game. I think I have never felt more murderously 

 inclined than when I have seen upon a bleak day of April one of 

 these black harpies perched upon the head of its faintly struggling 

 victim, and deliberately plucking away the eyes from the socket. 



