I shall end my Idylls of the War with what I hope will not be called a
frivolous note.
At the end of the war, when men had to be taken away even from the
necessary work of agriculture, women, with that surprising capacity for
work of all kinds, which seems to be their privilege, took on every sort
of job and did them all remarkably well. Perhaps the most curious
instance of this is that women at once took up the work of shepherds,
and began to keep their flocks on bleak and lonely Downs; a function,
remember, which no women had performed in England for two or three
hundred years. Here is my account of the first shepherdess I ever saw,
written on October, 1918, and on the day of my encounter.
I had always longed to see a shepherdess, keeping her sheep on the
Downs, and watching them feed, in sober security. I think it was that
desire that made me, when at Oxford, contemplate a learned study of
Elizabethan pastoral plays--a work which, if I remember rightly, never
got beyond a dedication to a damsel who, "perchance to soothe my
youthful dreams," appeared too bright for common life and needed the
crook and the wreath. And now today I saw, as I was riding along the
Pilgrim's Way across the Downs, a shepherdess.
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