The shepherd said he had two cousins in America, William and Thomas Cook. He hadn’t heard from them in a great while, and he had lost the paper he had their address on and forgotten the name of the place where they lived. He didn’t know but I might have been acquainted with them.

Felling an Oak

A few days later I came on a party of sheep-shearers at work in a barn. The big doors were open, and the men were snipping away on the barn floor with their shining shears. The bay on one side was full of panting sheep still unsheared. On the other side were the bundles of fleeces and odds and ends of farm tools and rubbish. When a sheep had been relieved of its coat it was allowed to leap away to its mates in the near field. The shearers work in little bands of six or eight men, and go from farm to farm to do the work through a season that lasts rather over a month. At noon they went out under a tree with their baskets and ate dinner; and while they lunched and gossiped one of them cut a companion’s hair with his sheep-shears.

All the heaviest farm work is done by men, but the lighter field tasks are undertaken by women to a considerable extent, though I believe these are always intermittent, never continued week after week the year through. My first sight of women workers was on the newly ploughed grounds of early spring. They were going over the fields with forks and picking out all the witch-grass roots. These they piled in little heaps, which later were burned. Their working day was seven or eight hours long, and their pay a shilling. They were picturesque, but the close view that showed them to be nearly all old and stumpy-figured and slouchy in dress left no room for romance.

Nor were the men workers less rudely rustic than the women. Indeed, it seemed to me that all the English farm folk by the time they reached middle age became what we would call “characters.” In their looks they grew knotty and gnarled and earthy; and this outward appearance is more or less typical of their minds. In features the men are strongly individualized; no two are alike -- a result in part due to the many odd and old-fashioned ways they have of trimming and training their beards. Clothing is quaint, and their heavy footwear added to their laborious lives makes the movements of all except the more youthful and vigorous seem ungainly.