"You had better see to the traps yourself, John; there is always a fuss about them every summer since you gave them to Jack to attend to. You know, as Fairy says, he is so fond of birds, and he knows so much about them too, that he can't bear snaring them."
"Knows so much about them! I should think he did. Why Mr. Leslie says if Jack had only the means of getting himself some good books, he would be a first-rate ornithologist, which means a man learned in birds, John," said Fairy.
She had always called the shepherd John since she could speak, and Mrs. Shelley and John were quite content that she should do so, as he was not her father, though Fairy persisted in calling his wife mother, to Mrs. Shelley's secret joy. They were both greatly attached to their foster-daughter; as for the shepherd, he never contradicted her in anything, and though over-strict as his wife thought with his own boys, he never seemed to think Fairy could do wrong, and had never been heard even to rebuke her in the mildest way since he found her; and when Mrs. Shelley remonstrated with him, as she sometimes did, he excused himself by saying she was not his own child, so he did not feel the same responsibility about her.
Luckily for Fairy, Mrs. Shelley did not humour her and look upon her with the same excessive admiration the shepherd and the boys did; they regarded her as a superior being, and thought her way of queening it over them perfectly right and natural. Mrs. Shelley loved the child she had been a mother to tenderly, and was proud of her beauty and cleverness, and yet, while she constantly impressed on her boys that Fairy was a lady by birth and therefore in a very different position to any of them, and, moreover, might any day be claimed by her own parents and taken into her own sphere, she insisted on the same obedience from her as she expected from her own children.
"Jack had far better become a man learned in sheep than in birds, seeing he is to be a shepherd. I can't see the use of all the learning Jack gets hold of; it can't do him any good," said the shepherd.
"Oh! you dear, good old shepherd, I believe you think the world was made for sheep, and shepherds the only useful people in it," exclaimed Fairy.
"I think if Jack learns his business and his Bible and Prayer-book, he will do very well without any other learning. It is quite right and proper that my little Fairy should learn to play the spinnet and to speak French, which nobody here understands, and many other things of which I don't even know the names, but I don't think that kind of knowledge will make Jack a good shepherd or a good Christian, and that is all he is required to be," said John Shelley, stroking Fairy's golden head fondly as he spoke.
"But if he could be a very clever man some day and perhaps learn a profession, you would think that better than being a good shepherd, would you not?" said Fairy, who was in Jack's confidence, and knew that as he watched the sheep on the downs he dreamt dreams of this kind.
"No, Fairy, no; if God had meant Jack to be a gentleman he would not have given him a shepherd for his father. His duty is to labour hard to get his own living in that state of life in which it has pleased God to call him, as the Catechism says."
"But, John, why did God let me be brought up by a shepherd, then?" asked Fairy. "You see He does not always mean people to remain what they are born or I should not be here, should I?"