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“Boys!” Dorothy’s clear voice called across the stream. ” Do hurry! She’s been in long enough, now! Keep her head up, can’t you, and squeeze the wool hard ! You’re not half washing! Oh, Reuby! thee’ll drown her! Keep her head up!”

Another unlucky douse and another half-smothered bleat,–Dorothy released the yearling and plunged to the rescue. “Go after that lamb, Reuby!” she cried, with exasperation in her voice. Reuby followed the yearling, which had disappeared over the orchard slope, upsetting an obstacle in its path, which happened to be Jimmy. He was now wailing on the bank, while Dorothy, with the ewe’s nose tucked comfortably in the bend of her arm, was parting and squeezing the fleece, with the water swirling round her. Her stout arms ached, and her ears were stunned with the incessant bleating; she counted with dismay the sheep still waiting in the pen. “Oh, Jimmy! do stop crying, or else go to the house!”

“He’d better go after Reuby,” said Sheppard Barton, who was now Dorothy’s sole dependence.

“Oh yes; do, Jimmy, that’s a good boy. Tell him to let the yearling go, and come back quick.”

The water had run low that morning in Evesham’s pond. He shut down the mill, and strode up the hills, across lots, to raise the gate of the lower Barton Pond, which had been heading up for his use. He passed the corn-field where, a month before, he had seen pretty Dorothy Barton dropping corn with her brothers. It made him ache to think of Dorothy, with her feeble mother, the boys, as wild as preacher’s sons proverbially are, and the old farm running down on her hands; the fences all needed mending, and there went Reuben Barton, now, careering over the fields in chase of a stray yearling. His mother’s house was big, and lonely, and empty; and he flushed as he thought of the “one ewe-lamb” he coveted, out of Friend Barton’s rugged pastures. As he raised the gate, and leaned to watch the water swirl and gurgle through the “trunk,” sucking the long weeds with it, and thickening with its tumult the clear current of the stream, the sound of voices and bleating of sheep came up from below. He had not the farming instincts in his blood;–the distant bleating, the hot June sunshine and cloudless sky, did not suggest to him sheep-washing;–but now came a boy’s voice shouting and a cry of distress, and he remembered, with a thrill, that Friend Barton used the stream for that peaceful purpose. He shut down the gate and tore along through the ferns and tangled grass till he came to the sheep-pen, where the bank was muddy and trampled. The prisoners were bleating drearily and looking with longing eyes across to the other side, where those who had suffered were now straying and cropping the short turf, through the lights and shadows of the orchard.

There was no other sign of life, except a broad hat with a brown ribbon, buffeted about in an eddy, among the stones. The stream dipped now below the hill, and the current, still racing fast with the impetus he had given it, shot away among the hazel thickets which crowded close to the brink. He was obliged to make a detour by the orchard, and come out at the “mill-head” below;–a black, deep pool, with an ugly ripple setting across it to the “head-gate.” He saw something white clinging there and ran round the brink. It was the sodden fleece of the old ewe which had been drifted against the “head-gate,” and held there to her death. Evesham, with a sickening contraction of the heart, threw off his jacket for a plunge, when Dorothy’s voice called rather faintly from the willows on the opposite bank.

“Don’t jump! I’m here,” she said. Evesham searched the willows, and found her seated in the sun just beyond, half buried in a bed of ferns.