him. In manner he was neither so austere and taciturn as his father,
nor so gentle and amiable as his mother. He was by no means a scholar,
and only the strong hand of his father had kept him as a boy in fear
of the penalties incurred by the truant. Courage and resolution were
his distinguishing characteristics.

On one occasion, when rambling over the fells with a company of
schoolfellows, a poor blind lamb ran bleating past them, a black cloud
of ravens, crows, and owl-eagles flying about it. The merciless birds
had fallen upon the innocent creature as it lay sleeping under the
shadow of a tree, had picked at its eyes and fed on them, and now, as
the blood trickled in red beads down its nose, they croaked and cried
and screamed to drive it to the edge of a precipice and then over to
its death in the gulf beneath, there to feast on its carcass. It was
no easy thing to fend off the cruel birds when in sight of their prey,
but, running and capturing the poor lamb, Ralph snatched it up in his
arms at the peril of his own eyes, and swung a staff about his head to
beat off the birds as they darted and plunged and shrieked about him.

It was natural that a boy like this should develop into the finest
shepherd on the hills. Ralph knew every path on the mountains, every
shelter the sheep sought from wind and rain, every haunt of the fox.
At the shearing, at the washing, at the marking, his hand was among
the best; and when the flocks had to be numbered as they rushed in
thousands through the gate, he could count them, not by ones and twos,
but by fours and sixes. At the shearing feasts he was not above the
pleasures of the country dance, the Ledder-te-spetch, as it was
called, with its one, two, three--heel and toe--cut and shuffle. And
his strong voice, that was answered oftenest by the echo of the
mountain cavern, was sometimes heard to troll out a snatch of a song