“No, the days do not seem long and tedious,” he says, “and troublesome boys keep me well employed. But I don’t want to blame them, they’ve nowhere else to play, and some of the ground is cut up for war gardens. Ye mun know the Commons, and ye mun know how to deal with folk. It is na like being in the mountains, and ye must just know how to gae on, and then its nae trouble; it’s part of your work.”
“And here’s a curious thing: You see those two ewes; well if boys come playing around to tease the sheep, those two will run forward and butt at them, and bump them. That’s strange, with an animal like a sheep, and they’re ewes, too.”
He tells me that one reason for moving the sheep from one feeding ground to another in the early morning is that they shall be well fed by eleven o’clock. After that time, they give little anxiety. “With sheep, if you keep still, they keep still, but if you move about, they get restless too.”
In answer to a question about sheep-stealing at night, he said that he had never missed a single sheep in London. “Would it not be easy for someone to dismount from a trap, lift a sheep into it, and be off in a few minutes?” He did not think so. There was first the policeman; then . . .