 on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first
expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are
dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and
quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal
reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the
consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.
    Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up
against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found nowhere in the wind,
and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in nature. They were the notes of
Farmer Oak's flute.
    The tune was not floating unhindered into the open air: it seemed muffled in
some way, and was altogether too curtailed in power to spread high or wide. It
came from the direction of a small dark object under the plantation hedge - a
shepherd's hut - now presenting an outline to which an uninitiated person might
have been puzzled to attach either meaning or use.
    The image as a whole was that of a small Noah's Ark on a small Ararat,
allowing the traditionary outlines and general form of the Ark which are
followed by toy-makers - and by these means are established in men's
imaginations among their firmest, because earliest impressions - to pass as an
approximate pattern. The hut stood on little wheels, which raised its floor
about a foot from the ground. Such shepherds' huts are dragged into the fields
when the lambing season comes on, to shelter the shepherd in his enforced
nightly attendance.
    It was only latterly that people had begun to call Gabriel Farmer Oak.
During the twelvemonth preceding this time he had been enabled by sustained
efforts of industry and chronic good spirits to lease the small sheep-farm of
which Norcombe Hill was a portion, and stock it with two hundred sheep.
Previously he had been a bailiff for a short time, and earlier still a shepherd
only, having from his childhood assisted his father in tending the flocks of
large proprietors, till old Gabriel sank to rest.
    This venture, unaided and alone, into the paths of farming as master and not
as man, with an advance of sheep not yet paid for, was a critical juncture with
Gabriel Oak, and he recognized his position clearly. The first movement in his
new progress was the lambing of his ewes, and sheep having been his speciality
from his youth, he wisely refrained from deputing the task of tending them at
this season to a hireling or a
