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spread beneath me; the soft fields in the valley floors, the grazing cattle, the rivers pebbled at their edges in places, thickly fringed with trees at others.
    The brilliant green of the walled pastures pushed up the sides of the fells until the heather and the harsh moor grass began, and only the endless pattern of walls was left, climbing to the mottled summits, disappearing over the bare ridges that marked the beginning of the wild country.
    I leaned back against the car and the wind blew the cold sweet air around me. I had been back in civilian life only a few weeks, and during my time in R.A.F. blue I had thought constantly of Yorkshire, but I had forgotten how beautiful it was. Just thinking from afar could not evoke the peace, the solitude, the sense of the nearness of the wild that makes the Dales thrilling and comforting at the same time. Among the crowds of men and the drabness and stale air of the towns, my imagination could not sufficiently conjure up a place where I could be quite alone on the wide green roof of England where every breath was filled with the grass scent.
    I had had a disturbing morning. Everywhere I had gone I was reminded that I had come back to a world of change, and I did not like change. One old farmer saying, “It’s all t’needle now, Mr. Herriot,” as I injected his cow had made me look down almost with surprise at the syringe in my hand, realising suddenly that this was what I was doing most of the time now.
    I knew what he meant. Only a few years ago I would more likely have “drenched” his cow. Grabbed it by the nose and poured a pint of medicine down its throat.
    We still carried a special drenching bottle around with us—an empty wine bottle because it had no shoulders and allowed the liquid to run more easily. Often we would mix the medicine with black treacle from the barrel that stood in the corner of most cow byres.
    All this was disappearing, and the farmer’s remark about “all t’needle” brought it home to me once more that things were never going to be the same again.
    A revolution had begun in agriculture and in veterinary practice. Farming had become more scientific, and concepts cherished for generations were being abandoned, while in the veterinary world the first rivulets of the flood of new advances were being felt.
    Previously undreamed-of surgical procedures were being carried out, the sulpha drugs were going full blast and, most exciting of all, the war, with its urgent need for better treatment of wounds, had given a tremendous impetus to the development of Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. This, the first of the antibiotics, was not yet in the hands of the profession except in the form of intramammary tubes for the treatment of mastitis, but it was the advance guard of the therapeutic army that was to sweep our old treatments into oblivion.
    There were signs, too, that the small farmer was on the way out. These men, some with only six cows, a few pigs and poultry, still made up most of our practice and they were the truly rich characters, but they were beginning to wonder if they could make a living on this scale, and one or two had sold out to the bigger men. In our practice now, in the eighties, there are virtually no small farmers left. I can think of only a handful — old men doggedly doing the things they have always done for the sole reason that they have always done it. They are the last remnants of the men I cherished, living by the ancient values, speaking the old Yorkshire dialect that television and radio have swamped.
    I took a last long breath and got into my car. The uncomfortable feeling of change was still with me but I looked through the window at the great fells thrusting their bald summits into the clouds, tier upon tier of them, timeless, indestructible, towering over the glories beneath, and I felt better immediately. The Dales had not changed at all.
    I did one more call, then drove back to Skeldale House to see