The black ewe with the white face

Hone retold a tale from the Hundred Merry Tales, the book known as Shakespeare’s Jest Book, of an Oxford scholar learned in astrology who met a herdsman. The herdsman told him to ride fast or be caught by rain, though the sky was clear, and the scholar was soaked within half a mile. He came back and paid the herdsman to teach him the art, and was shown a black ewe with a white face: when she danced and held up her tail, there would be rain within half an hour. The moral was that the weather craft of herdsmen and shepherds was surer than astrology.