Ch. 7: What The Shepherd Saw

A TALE OF FOUR MOONLIGHT NIGHTS

The genial Justice of the Peace--now, alas, no more--who made himself
responsible for the facts of this story, used to begin in the good old-
fashioned way with a bright moonlight night and a mysterious figure, an
excellent stroke for an opening, even to this day, if well followed up.

The Christmas moon (he would say) was showing her cold face to the
upland, the upland reflecting the radiance in frost-sparkles so minute as
only to be discernible by an eye near at hand. This eye, he said, was
the eye of a shepherd lad, young for his occupation, who stood within a
wheeled hut of the kind commonly in use among sheep-keepers during the
early lambing season, and was abstractedly looking through the loophole
at the scene without.

The spot was called Lambing Corner, and it was a sheltered portion of
that wide expanse of rough pastureland known as the Marlbury Downs, which
you directly traverse when following the turnpike-road across Mid-Wessex
from London, through Aldbrickham, in the direction of Bath and Bristol.
Here, where the hut stood, the land was high and dry, open, except to the
north, and commanding an undulating view for miles. On the north side
grew a tall belt of coarse furze, with enormous stalks, a clump of the
same standing detached in front of the general mass. The clump was
hollow, and the interior had been ingeniously taken advantage of as a
position for the before-mentioned hut, which was thus completely screened
from winds, and almost invisible, except through the narrow approach. But
the furze twigs had been cut away from the two little windows of the hut,
that the occupier might keep his eye on his sheep.

In the rear, the shelter afforded by the belt of furze bushes was
artificially improved by an inclosure of upright stakes, interwoven with
boughs of the same prickly vegetation, and within the inclosure lay a
renowned Marlbury-Down breeding flock of eight hundred ewes.

To the south, in the direction of the young shepherd's idle gaze, there
rose one conspicuous object above the uniform moonlit plateau, and only
one. It was a Druidical trilithon, consisting of three oblong stones in
the form of a doorway, two on end, and one across as a lintel. Each
stone had been worn, scratched, washed, nibbled, split, and otherwise
attacked by ten thousand different weathers; but now the blocks looked
shapely and little the worse for wear, so beautifully were they silvered
over by the light of the moon. The ruin was locally called the Devil's
Door.

An old shepherd presently entered the hut from the direction of the ewes,
and looked around in the gloom. 'Be ye sleepy?' he asked in cross
accents of the boy.

The lad replied rather timidly in