Dennis had grown. He felt that something noble in the secret service awaited him. If he could not make himself famous, he could be a cause of success in others. That he would be, and this sense of manhood filled his ambition.
“It is only a matter of time,” he said, “between Shakespeare and the King and Dennis O’Hay. We will all go into oblivion at last, like the kings of the pyramids of Egypt. It is only what we do that lasts.”
So our shipwrecked mariner and rustic philosopher night after night mounted the stairs to the outlook window, and saw the stars rise and set, and was glad that he was living.
He shared his life with the shepherd-boy. He lived outside of himself, as it were—all did then.
Dennis often joined the story-tellers on the Alden green and in the war-office store. At the store the wayfarers bartered in a curious way: they swapped stories. The drovers were a pack of clever story-tellers, but also the wayfarers from the sea.
Dennis O’Hay, who had been used to the docks of Belfast, Liverpool, and London, saw some strange sights on his rides to secure stores for the army, and saltpeter among the hill towns.
One cold March day he stopped before the fence of a hillside farmhouse, and his eye rested upon the most curious object that he had ever beheld in his life. It seemed to be a sheep dressed in man’s clothing, eating old sprouts from cabbage stumps.
He sat on his horse and watched the man, or sheepman, as the case might be.
“Ye saints and sinners,” said he, “and did any one ever see the like o’ that before? Not a man in sheep’s clothing, but a sheep in a man’s clothing, browsing on last year’s second growth of cabbage. I must call at the door and find out the meaning o’ that.”
He called to the sheep: