欧内斯特·西顿·汤普森/Ernest Seton Thompson
Away up in the Cheviots little Wully was born. He and one other of the litter were kept；his brother because he resembled the best dog in the vicinity, and himself because he was a little yellow beauty.
His early life was that of a sheep-dog, in company with an experienced collie who trained him, and an old shepherd who was scarcely inferior to them in intelligence. By the time he was two years old Wully was full grown and had taken a thorough course in sheep. He knew them from ram-horn to lamb-hoof, and old Robin, his master, at length had such confdence in his sagacity that he would frequently stay at the tavern all night while Wully guarded the woolly idiots in the hills. His education had been wisely bestowed and in most ways he was a very bright little dog with a future before him. Yet he never learned to despise that addle-pated Robin. The old shepherd, with all his faults, his continual striving after his ideal state-intoxication-and his mind-shrivelling life in general was rarely brutal to Wully, and Wully repaid him with an exaggerated worship that the greatest and wisest in the land would have aspired to in vain.
Wully could not have imagined any greater being than Robin, and yet for the sum of fve shillings a week all Robin‘s vital energy and mental force were pledged to the service of a not very great cattle and sheep dealer, the real proprietor of Wully’s charge, and when this man, really less great than the neighboring laird, ordered Robin to drive his fock by stages to the Yorkshire moors and markets, of all the 376 mentalities concerned, Wullys was the most interested and interesting.
The journey through Northumberland was uneventful. At the River Tyne the sheep were driven onto the ferry and landed safely in smoky South Shields. The great factory chimneys were just starting up for the day and belching out fogbanks and thunder-rollers of opaque leaden smoke that darkened the air and hung low like a storm-cloud over the streets. The sheep thought that they recognized the fuming dun of an unusually heavy Cheviot storm. They became alarmed, and in spite of their keepers stampeded through the town in 374 different directions.