If Wool Is Packed Damp It
Will Heat And Spoil; Therefore A Sufficient Number Of Sheep Must Be Left
Under
Cover through the night to last the shearers till the dew is off.
In a wool-shed the aisles would
Be called skilions (whence the name is
derived I know not, nor whether it has two l's in it or one). All the
sheep go into the skilions. The shearers shear in the centre, which is
large enough to leave room for the wool to be stowed away at one end.
The shearers pull the sheep out of the skilions as they want them. Each
picks the worst sheep, i.e. that with the least wool upon it, that
happens to be at hand at the time, trying to put the best-woolled sheep,
which are consequently the hardest to shear, upon someone else; and so
the heaviest-woolled and largest sheep get shorn the last.
A good man will shear 100 sheep in a day, some even more; but 100 is
reckoned good work. I have known 195 sheep to be shorn by one man in a
day; but I fancy these must have been from an old and bare mob, and that
this number of well-woolled sheep would be quite beyond one man's power.
Sheep are not shorn so neatly as at home. But supposing a man has a mob
of 20,000, he must get the wool off their backs as best he can without
carping at an occasional snip from a sheep's carcass.
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