THE EWE-GATHERINGThey were gathering their sheep from the fells under Pengables, to bring them down into the warmer lands below. To a stranger it would have seemed odd that so many shepherds, and master-farmers with their hinds, should have chosen the same day. The farmers, indeed, might have done the work at haphazard, choosing a time here and there as occasion served; but their shepherds lived nearer the fell-tops where true weather-lore was taught by countless little signs and tokens. And the shepherds had decreed that within eight-and-forty hours the wind hounds of the north would be driving snow before them.
The Logie country, if it guessed what was to come, made merry with the time left it. Quiet wisps of cloud lay bosomed on a sky of blue. The belt of woodland under Pengables—larch
