Even such was the woolly tribe, from which the insatiate Jew was now preparing to select a victim. Ambitious of the sole credit of the enterprise, he desired Twm to stay below and leave him to follow his own plan. Scarcely thinking of the matter in hand, Twm took his seat on a gate, opposite to the lofty cliff of Allty Craig Llwyd, pondering in his mind about his distant home, the loved scenes which he had left for these, and above all, his mother, from whom he had been so long separated. Moses wound up the hill, and attained the top at the back of the cliff.
With the assistance of the farm-dog he soon drove one of the finest of the wethers into the angular nook formed by the hedge of the adjoining wood, and that which screened from the edge of the terrific cliff. The dog, being set on, barked and bit incessantly, while Moses shouted and bellowed with waving arms, till, worried by stupidity at last, the sheep bounded up, and sprang far over the hedge, and downward in the yielding air—ignorant of the yawning gulf behind the hedge, and the snare laid for his life! Moses set up a triumphant yell like that of a wild Indian, as he peered over the precipice and saw the downward movements of the poor sheep. Startled with the shout of Moses, at this moment Twm looked up, and saw the animal describing a rainbow sweep, and turning over and over in its descent through the air, and its ultimate fall into the quarry beneath, where it dropped lifeless.
So little did our hero relish this cruel affair that he would scarcely speak to Moses, when the latter expected high applause for his handywork. But the Jew-boy, nothing daunted, ran to the farmer, whom he found cobbling up an old plough in the yard, to save expense of paying a wheelwright.
“Oh dear! Oh dear!” whined Moses, with the greatest appearance of heart-touched concern, “a terrible accident has happened—one of the sheep—the fattest and finest of the whole flock—has just sprung over the hedge above Allty Craig, and broke its beautiful neck.” Morris threw down the axe he was using, and looked nearly as sorry, angry, and despondent as he felt. “Nothing but misfortunes!” cried he at last, “nothing but misfortunes for me, wretched man that I am!” his thoughts dwelling at that moment on the fine pig that he lately lost. “First a fine pig, and now my finest sheep. Verily, this must be the end of the world, such judgments could not come without reason!”