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for poverty. If you like to come with me, and be guided by my advice, we will get service somewhere. I have heard my father say that there were great shepherds living in old times beyond the hills; let us go and see if they will take us for sheep-boys.’

“Kind would rather have stayed and tilled his father’s wheat field, hard by the cottage; but since his eldest brother would go, he resolved to bear him company. Accordingly, next morning Clutch took his bag and shears, Kind took his crook and pipe, and away they went over the plain and up the hills. All who saw them thought that they had lost their senses, for no shepherd had gone there for a hundred years, and nothing was to be seen but wide moorlands, full of rugged rocks, and sloping up, it seemed, to the very sky. Kind persuaded his brother to take the direction the sheep had taken, but the ground was so rough and steep that after two hours’ climbing they would gladly have turned back, if it had not been that their sheep were gone, and the shepherds would laugh at them.

“By noon they came to the stony cleft, up which the three old ewes had scoured like deers; but both were tired, and sat down to rest. Their feet were sore, and their hearts were heavy; but as they sat there, there came a sound of music