The Christmas moon (he would say) was showing her cold face to the upland, the upland reflecting the radiance in frost-sparkles so minute as only to be discernible by an eye near at hand.  This eye, he said, was the eye of a shepherd lad, young for his occupation, who stood within a wheeled hut of the kind commonly in use among sheep-keepers during the early lambing season, and was abstractedly looking through the loophole at the scene without.

 

The spot was called Lambing Corner, and it was a sheltered portion of that wide expanse of rough pastureland known as the Marlbury Downs, which you directly traverse when following the turnpike-road across Mid-Wessex from London, through Aldbrickham, in the direction of Bath and Bristol.  Here, where the hut stood, the land was high and dry, open, except to the north, and commanding an undulating view for miles.  On the north side grew a tall belt of coarse furze, with enormous stalks, a clump³ of the same standing⁴ detached in front of the general mass.  The clump was hollow, and the interior had been ingeniously taken advantage of as a position for the before-mentioned hut, which was thus completely screened from winds, and almost invisible, except through the narrow approach.  But the furze twigs⁵ had been cut away from the two little windows of the hut, that the occupier might keep his eye on his sheep.

 

In the rear, the shelter afforded by the belt of furze bushes was artificially improved by an inclosure of upright stakes, interwoven with boughs⁶ of the same prickly vegetation, and within the inclosure lay a renowned⁷ Marlbury-Down breeding flock of eight hundred ewes.

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