keep as much good stock as the farm would carry, and had at one time as many as 1,000 ewes and over 150 head of cattle. During the early eighties, especially in '82 and '83, the price of sheep was very high and wool still fetched a price which made it worth consideration as well as mutton. I soon realised that sheep were the mainstay of a Cotswold farm and paid a great deal of attention to their breeding and management. At that time the Cotswold breed, though not enjoying quite so large a proportion of popular favour as formerly, still made good prices, and I improved the flock which my grandfather had formed with such success that I began to try my hand at breeding rams. For a few years I had Cotswold sheep on the brain, went to all the shows and ram sales, read a paper before the Cirencester Chamber of Agriculture in which I showed to the satisfaction of the older farmers that long-wooled sheep were superior to short-wooled in their own country, and generally began to think myself, in sheep at least, rather a knowing fellow. I gave high prices for Cotswold rams, and, as my father had been chaffed by some believer in the Hampshire down breed about the inferiority of the Cotswold in point of early maturity, determined to show people what the breed could do.
We had a very clever but cantankerous old shepherd who knew how to fat sheep as well as any man in England, and as he insisted that, given good sheep to start with, success would lie with who could feed hardest without losing the firmness and vigour of the sheep, I went to my dear old friend William Lane of Broadfield, the best specimen of a Cotswold farmer I ever knew and only rivalled as a ram-breeder by his neighbour Robert Game of Aldsworth, and hired for thirty guineas the best ram he could spare for my purpose, I then picked out seventy of my best ewes and put them in the park with him, so as to get some lambs as early as possible. I believe that about a hundred and twenty lambs were the result, and though they did not arrive before February I determined that they should not fail for want of stuffing, and, picking out about twenty of the best when they were weaned, gave them everything they would eat. It is wonderful what a lot healthy lambs will eat if you give them sufficient variety, and the shepherd was always thinking of some fresh delicacy to tempt these pampered appetites.
From week to week the changes were rung on vetches, sainfoin and clover, mangels, carrots and swedes, old hay, new hay, wheat, malt dust, oats, beans, peas and cake; all were lavished on these animals which left as much in their trough as would have fattened a lot of ordinary sheep. Everyone said that it was no use to half do it, and that if my lambs did not get all these luxuries they would be beat by others that did. So we damned the expense and from early morn till late at night the shepherd, who enjoyed this sort of thing thoroughly, was in and out with a bit of this and a bit of that. They certainly did grow amazingly. When the weather got very hot they seemed to feel their heavy fleeces very much and I suggested shearing them. The shepherd admitted that it was a good idea but then "it arn’t our custom.” No one had ever done such a thing with Cotswold lambs, and what would the judges say ? It seemed to me that as the object of a fat-stock show was to show how much good meat
