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Seemingly, with this the story was ended, but I queried what eventually became of the five missing sheep.

‘All lost in the thaw,’ was the reply. ‘The beck flooded, and the drift sucked the water in till they were suffocated, poor things!’

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Under its canopy of leafless sycamores the sheep-farm stands high above the next most remote dwelling in the dale. It is a pleasant place to dwell in during summer: the great fells clothed with green, spreading beds of bracken rise close around. A great rib of rock and scree almost cuts off the tenement, so that it commands only a narrow view of the long, almost level valley. But, though so close confining it, the mountain protects neither the buildings nor the farm land immediately adjoining from the fury of winter storms. When the air becomes filled with sleet, the fields and rough mountain roads stand mid-leg-deep with half-liquid snow. A hundred feet above, the clouds fly in dense ragged beards; their damp breath penetrates nigh even to the cosy kitchen fire. The scene is cheerless: gray sky and grayer dale, relieved only with white where in the shelter of the rocks a small snowdrift resists the general thaw, or where in foamy spouting cataracts the flooded becks are gushing. Dimly seen through the sheets of snow and rain, the sheep are cowering in the dips of the intakes, and among them the shepherd is moving.