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+The Project Gutenberg Etext Under the Greenwood Tree, by Hardy
+#8 in our series by Thomas Hardy
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+Title:  Under the Greenwood Tree
+
+Author:  Thomas Hardy
+
+June, 2001  [Etext #2662]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext Under the Greenwood Tree, by Hardy
+*****This file should be named ungwt10.txt or ungwt10.zip*****
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+This etext was scanned by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1912 Macmillan and Co. ("Wessex") edition.  Proofing by
+Margaret Price.
+
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
+or
+THE MELLSTOCK QUIRE
+A RURAL PAINTING OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-
+gallery musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar
+officials in Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters, and other
+places, is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of
+the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such
+orchestral bodies in the villages of fifty or sixty years ago.
+
+One is inclined to regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical
+bandsmen by an isolated organist (often at first a barrel-organist)
+or harmonium player; and despite certain advantages in point of
+control and accomplishment which were, no doubt, secured by
+installing the single artist, the change has tended to stultify the
+professed aims of the clergy, its direct result being to curtail and
+extinguish the interest of parishioners in church doings.  Under the
+old plan, from half a dozen to ten full-grown players, in addition
+to the numerous more or less grown-up singers, were officially
+occupied with the Sunday routine, and concerned in trying their best
+to make it an artistic outcome of the combined musical taste of the
+congregation.  With a musical executive limited, as it mostly is
+limited now, to the parson's wife or daughter and the school-
+children, or to the school-teacher and the children, an important
+union of interests has disappeared.
+
+The zest of these bygone instrumentalists must have been keen and
+staying to take them, as it did, on foot every Sunday after a
+toilsome week, through all weathers, to the church, which often lay
+at a distance from their homes.  They usually received so little in
+payment for their performances that their efforts were really a
+labour of love.  In the parish I had in my mind when writing the
+present tale, the gratuities received yearly by the musicians at
+Christmas were somewhat as follows:  From the manor-house ten
+shillings and a supper; from the vicar ten shillings; from the
+farmers five shillings each; from each cottage-household one
+shilling; amounting altogether to not more than ten shillings a head
+annually--just enough, as an old executant told me, to pay for their
+fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which they mostly
+ruled themselves).  Their music in those days was all in their own
+manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, and their music-books
+were home-bound.
+
+It was customary to inscribe a few jigs, reels, horn-pipes, and
+ballads in the same book, by beginning it at the other end, the
+insertions being continued from front and back till sacred and
+secular met together in the middle, often with bizarre effect, the
+words of some of the songs exhibiting that ancient and broad humour
+which our grandfathers, and possibly grandmothers, took delight in,
+and is in these days unquotable.
+
+The aforesaid fiddle-strings, rosin, and music-paper were supplied
+by a pedlar, who travelled exclusively in such wares from parish to
+parish, coming to each village about every six months.  Tales are
+told of the consternation once caused among the church fiddlers
+when, on the occasion of their producing a new Christmas anthem, he
+did not come to time, owing to being snowed up on the downs, and the
+straits they were in through having to make shift with whipcord and
+twine for strings.  He was generally a musician himself, and
+sometimes a composer in a small way, bringing his own new tunes, and
+tempting each choir to adopt them for a consideration.  Some of
+these compositions which now lie before me, with their repetitions
+of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their fugues and their
+intermediate symphonies, are good singing still, though they would
+hardly be admitted into such hymn-books as are popular in the
+churches of fashionable society at the present time.
+
+August 1896.
+
+Under the Greenwood Tree was first brought out in the summer of 1872
+in two volumes.  The name of the story was originally intended to
+be, more appropriately, The Mellstock Quire, and this has been
+appended as a sub-title since the early editions, it having been
+thought unadvisable to displace for it the title by which the book
+first became known.
+
+In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the
+inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun
+were material for another kind of study of this little group of
+church musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so
+lightly, even so farcically and flippantly at times.  But
+circumstances would have rendered any aim at a deeper, more
+essential, more transcendent handling unadvisable at the date of
+writing; and the exhibition of the Mellstock Quire in the following
+pages must remain the only extant one, except for the few glimpses
+of that perished band which I have given in verse elsewhere.
+
+T. H.
+
+April 1912.
+
+
+
+
+PART THE FIRST--WINTER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I:  MELLSTOCK-LANE
+
+
+
+To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as
+well as its feature.  At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob
+and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it
+battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech
+rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.  And winter, which
+modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not
+destroy its individuality.
+
+On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was
+passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a
+plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence.
+All the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of
+his footsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and
+by the liveliness of his voice as he sang in a rural cadence:
+
+
+"With the rose and the lily
+And the daffodowndilly,
+The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go."
+
+
+The lonely lane he was following connected one of the hamlets of
+Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes,
+casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with
+their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-
+creviced elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the
+sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their
+flickering seemed like the flapping of wings.  Within the woody
+pass, at a level anything lower than the horizon, all was dark as
+the grave.  The copse-wood forming the sides of the bower interlaced
+its branches so densely, even at this season of the year, that the
+draught from the north-east flew along the channel with scarcely an
+interruption from lateral breezes.
+
+After passing the plantation and reaching Mellstock Cross the white
+surface of the lane revealed itself between the dark hedgerows like
+a ribbon jagged at the edges; the irregularity being caused by
+temporary accumulations of leaves extending from the ditch on either
+side.
+
+The song (many times interrupted by flitting thoughts which took the
+place of several bars, and resumed at a point it would have reached
+had its continuity been unbroken) now received a more palpable
+check, in the shape of "Ho-i-i-i-i-i!" from the crossing lane to
+Lower Mellstock, on the right of the singer who had just emerged
+from the trees.
+
+"Ho-i-i-i-i-i!" he answered, stopping and looking round, though with
+no idea of seeing anything more than imagination pictured.
+
+"Is that thee, young Dick Dewy?" came from the darkness.
+
+"Ay, sure, Michael Mail."
+
+"Then why not stop for fellow-craters--going to thy own father's
+house too, as we be, and knowen us so well?"
+
+Dick Dewy faced about and continued his tune in an under-whistle,
+implying that the business of his mouth could not be checked at a
+moment's notice by the placid emotion of friendship.
+
+Having come more into the open he could now be seen rising against
+the sky, his profile appearing on the light background like the
+portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard.  It assumed the form of
+a low-crowned hat, an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an
+ordinary neck, and ordinary shoulders.  What he consisted of further
+down was invisible from lack of sky low enough to picture him on.
+
+Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds were now
+heard coming up the hill, and presently there emerged from the shade
+severally five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working
+villagers of the parish of Mellstock.  They, too, had lost their
+rotundity with the daylight, and advanced against the sky in flat
+outlines, which suggested some processional design on Greek or
+Etruscan pottery.  They represented the chief portion of Mellstock
+parish choir.
+
+The first was a bowed and bent man, who carried a fiddle under his
+arm, and walked as if engaged in studying some subject connected
+with the surface of the road.  He was Michael Mail, the man who had
+hallooed to Dick.
+
+The next was Mr. Robert Penny, boot- and shoemaker; a little man,
+who, though rather round-shouldered, walked as if that fact had not
+come to his own knowledge, moving on with his back very hollow and
+his face fixed on the north-east quarter of the heavens before him,
+so that his lower waist-coat-buttons came first, and then the
+remainder of his figure.  His features were invisible; yet when he
+occasionally looked round, two faint moons of light gleamed for an
+instant from the precincts of his eyes, denoting that he wore
+spectacles of a circular form.
+
+The third was Elias Spinks, who walked perpendicularly and
+dramatically.  The fourth outline was Joseph Bowman's, who had now
+no distinctive appearance beyond that of a human being.  Finally
+came a weak lath-like form, trotting and stumbling along with one
+shoulder forward and his bead inclined to the left, his arms
+dangling nervelessly in the wind as if they were empty sleeves.
+This was Thomas Leaf.
+
+"Where be the boys?" said Dick to this somewhat indifferently-
+matched assembly.
+
+The eldest of the group, Michael Mail, cleared his throat from a
+great depth.
+
+"We told them to keep back at home for a time, thinken they wouldn't
+be wanted yet awhile; and we could choose the tuens, and so on."
+
+"Father and grandfather William have expected ye a little sooner.  I
+have just been for a run round by Ewelease Stile and Hollow Hill to
+warm my feet."
+
+"To be sure father did!  To be sure 'a did expect us--to taste the
+little barrel beyond compare that he's going to tap."
+
+"'Od rabbit it all!  Never heard a word of it!" said Mr. Penny,
+gleams of delight appearing upon his spectacle-glasses, Dick
+meanwhile singing parenthetically--"The lads and the lasses a-sheep-
+shearing go."
+
+"Neighbours, there's time enough to drink a sight of drink now afore
+bedtime?" said Mail.
+
+"True, true--time enough to get as drunk as lords!" replied Bowman
+cheerfully.
+
+This opinion being taken as convincing they all advanced between the
+varying hedges and the trees dotting them here and there, kicking
+their toes occasionally among the crumpled leaves.  Soon appeared
+glimmering indications of the few cottages forming the small hamlet
+of Upper Mellstock for which they were bound, whilst the faint sound
+of church-bells ringing a Christmas peal could be heard floating
+over upon the breeze from the direction of Longpuddle and
+Weatherbury parishes on the other side of the hills.  A little
+wicket admitted them to the garden, and they proceeded up the path
+to Dick's house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II:  THE TRANTER'S
+
+
+
+It was a long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having
+dormer windows breaking up into the eaves, a chimney standing in the
+middle of the ridge and another at each end.  The window-shutters
+were not yet closed, and the fire- and candle-light within radiated
+forth upon the thick bushes of box and laurestinus growing in clumps
+outside, and upon the bare boughs of several codlin-trees hanging
+about in various distorted shapes, the result of early training as
+espaliers combined with careless climbing into their boughs in later
+years.  The walls of the dwelling were for the most part covered
+with creepers, though these were rather beaten back from the
+doorway--a feature which was worn and scratched by much passing in
+and out, giving it by day the appearance of an old keyhole.  Light
+streamed through the cracks and joints of outbuildings a little way
+from the cottage, a sight which nourished a fancy that the purpose
+of the erection must be rather to veil bright attractions than to
+shelter unsightly necessaries.  The noise of a beetle and wedges and
+the splintering of wood was periodically heard from this direction;
+and at some little distance further a steady regular munching and
+the occasional scurr of a rope betokened a stable, and horses
+feeding within it.
+
+The choir stamped severally on the door-stone to shake from their
+boots any fragment of earth or leaf adhering thereto, then entered
+the house and looked around to survey the condition of things.
+Through the open doorway of a small inner room on the right hand, of
+a character between pantry and cellar, was Dick Dewy's father
+Reuben, by vocation a "tranter," or irregular carrier.  He was a
+stout florid man about forty years of age, who surveyed people up
+and down when first making their acquaintance, and generally smiled
+at the horizon or other distant object during conversations with
+friends, walking about with a steady sway, and turning out his toes
+very considerably.  Being now occupied in bending over a hogshead,
+that stood in the pantry ready horsed for the process of broaching,
+he did not take the trouble to turn or raise his eyes at the entry
+of his visitors, well knowing by their footsteps that they were the
+expected old comrades.
+
+The main room, on the left, was decked with bunches of holly and
+other evergreens, and from the middle of the beam bisecting the
+ceiling hung the mistletoe, of a size out of all proportion to the
+room, and extending so low that it became necessary for a full-grown
+person to walk round it in passing, or run the risk of entangling
+his hair.  This apartment contained Mrs. Dewy the tranter's wife,
+and the four remaining children, Susan, Jim, Bessy, and Charley,
+graduating uniformly though at wide stages from the age of sixteen
+to that of four years--the eldest of the series being separated from
+Dick the firstborn by a nearly equal interval.
+
+Some circumstance had apparently caused much grief to Charley just
+previous to the entry of the choir, and he had absently taken down a
+small looking-glass, holding it before his face to learn how the
+human countenance appeared when engaged in crying, which survey led
+him to pause at the various points in each wail that were more than
+ordinarily striking, for a thorough appreciation of the general
+effect.  Bessy was leaning against a chair, and glancing under the
+plaits about the waist of the plaid frock she wore, to notice the
+original unfaded pattern of the material as there preserved, her
+face bearing an expression of regret that the brightness had passed
+away from the visible portions.  Mrs. Dewy sat in a brown settle by
+the side of the glowing wood fire--so glowing that with a heedful
+compression of the lips she would now and then rise and put her hand
+upon the hams and flitches of bacon lining the chimney, to reassure
+herself that they were not being broiled instead of smoked--a
+misfortune that had been known to happen now and then at Christmas-
+time.
+
+"Hullo, my sonnies, here you be, then!" said Reuben Dewy at length,
+standing up and blowing forth a vehement gust of breath.  "How the
+blood do puff up in anybody's head, to be sure, a-stooping like
+that!  I was just going out to gate to hark for ye."  He then
+carefully began to wind a strip of brown paper round a brass tap he
+held in his hand.  "This in the cask here is a drop o' the right
+sort" (tapping the cask); "'tis a real drop o' cordial from the best
+picked apples--Sansoms, Stubbards, Five-corners, and such--like--you
+d'mind the sort, Michael?" (Michael nodded.)  "And there's a
+sprinkling of they that grow down by the orchard-rails--streaked
+ones--rail apples we d'call 'em, as 'tis by the rails they grow, and
+not knowing the right name.  The water-cider from 'em is as good as
+most people's best cider is."
+
+"Ay, and of the same make too," said Bowman.  "'It rained when we
+wrung it out, and the water got into it,' folk will say.  But 'tis
+on'y an excuse.  Watered cider is too common among us."
+
+"Yes, yes; too common it is!" said Spinks with an inward sigh,
+whilst his eyes seemed to be looking at the case in an abstract form
+rather than at the scene before him.  "Such poor liquor do make a
+man's throat feel very melancholy--and is a disgrace to the name of
+stimmilent."
+
+"Come in, come in, and draw up to the fire; never mind your shoes,"
+said Mrs. Dewy, seeing that all except Dick had paused to wipe them
+upon the door-mat.  "I am glad that you've stepped up-along at last;
+and, Susan, you run down to Grammer Kaytes's and see if you can
+borrow some larger candles than these fourteens.  Tommy Leaf, don't
+ye be afeard!  Come and sit here in the settle."
+
+This was addressed to the young man before mentioned, consisting
+chiefly of a human skeleton and a smock-frock, who was very awkward
+in his movements, apparently on account of having grown so very fast
+that before he had had time to get used to his height he was higher.
+
+"Hee--hee--ay!" replied Leaf, letting his mouth continue to smile
+for some time after his mind had done smiling, so that his teeth
+remained in view as the most conspicuous members of his body.
+
+"Here, Mr. Penny," resumed Mrs. Dewy, "you sit in this chair.  And
+how's your daughter, Mrs. Brownjohn?"
+
+"Well, I suppose I must say pretty fair."  He adjusted his
+spectacles a quarter of an inch to the right.  "But she'll be worse
+before she's better, 'a b'lieve."
+
+"Indeed--poor soul!  And how many will that make in all, four or
+five?"
+
+"Five; they've buried three.  Yes, five; and she not much more than
+a maid yet.  She do know the multiplication table onmistakable well.
+However, 'twas to be, and none can gainsay it."
+
+Mrs. Dewy resigned Mr. Penny.  "Wonder where your grandfather James
+is?" she inquired of one of the children.  "He said he'd drop in to-
+night."
+
+"Out in fuel-house with grandfather William," said Jimmy.
+
+"Now let's see what we can do," was heard spoken about this time by
+the tranter in a private voice to the barrel, beside which he had
+again established himself, and was stooping to cut away the cork.
+
+"Reuben, don't make such a mess o' tapping that barrel as is mostly
+made in this house," Mrs. Dewy cried from the fireplace.  "I'd tap a
+hundred without wasting more than you do in one.  Such a squizzling-
+-and squirting job as 'tis in your hands!  There, he always was such
+a clumsy man indoors."
+
+"Ay, ay; I know you'd tap a hundred beautiful, Ann--I know you
+would; two hundred, perhaps.  But I can't promise.  This is a' old
+cask, and the wood's rotted away about the tap-hole.  The husbird of
+a feller Sam Lawson--that ever I should call'n such, now he's dead
+and gone, poor heart!--took me in completely upon the feat of buying
+this cask.  'Reub,' says he--'a always used to call me plain Reub,
+poor old heart!--'Reub,' he said, says he, 'that there cask, Reub,
+is as good as new; yes, good as new.  'Tis a wine-hogshead; the best
+port-wine in the commonwealth have been in that there cask; and you
+shall have en for ten shillens, Reub,'--'a said, says he--'he's
+worth twenty, ay, five-and-twenty, if he's worth one; and an iron
+hoop or two put round en among the wood ones will make en worth
+thirty shillens of any man's money, if--'"
+
+"I think I should have used the eyes that Providence gave me to use
+afore I paid any ten shillens for a jimcrack wine-barrel; a saint is
+sinner enough not to be cheated.  But 'tis like all your family was,
+so easy to be deceived."
+
+"That's as true as gospel of this member," said Reuben.
+
+Mrs. Dewy began a smile at the answer, then altering her lips and
+refolding them so that it was not a smile, commenced smoothing
+little Bessy's hair; the tranter having meanwhile suddenly become
+oblivious to conversation, occupying himself in a deliberate cutting
+and arrangement of some more brown paper for the broaching
+operation.
+
+"Ah, who can believe sellers!" said old Michael Mail in a carefully-
+cautious voice, by way of tiding-over this critical point of
+affairs.
+
+"No one at all," said Joseph Bowman, in the tone of a man fully
+agreeing with everybody.
+
+"Ay," said Mail, in the tone of a man who did not agree with
+everybody as a rule, though he did now; "I knowed a' auctioneering
+feller once--a very friendly feller 'a was too.  And so one hot day
+as I was walking down the front street o' Casterbridge, jist below
+the King's Arms, I passed a' open winder and see him inside, stuck
+upon his perch, a-selling off.  I jist nodded to en in a friendly
+way as I passed, and went my way, and thought no more about it.
+Well, next day, as I was oilen my boots by fuel-house door, if a
+letter didn't come wi' a bill charging me with a feather--bed,
+bolster, and pillers, that I had bid for at Mr. Taylor's sale.  The
+shim-faced martel had knocked 'em down to me because I nodded to en
+in my friendly way; and I had to pay for 'em too.  Now, I hold that
+that was coming it very close, Reuben?"
+
+"'Twas close, there's no denying," said the general voice.
+
+"Too close, 'twas," said Reuben, in the rear of the rest.  "And as
+to Sam Lawson--poor heart! now he's dead and gone too!--I'll
+warrant, that if so be I've spent one hour in making hoops for that
+barrel, I've spent fifty, first and last.  That's one of my hoops'--
+touching it with his elbow--'that's one of mine, and that, and that,
+and all these."
+
+"Ah, Sam was a man," said Mr. Penny, contemplatively.
+
+"Sam was!" said Bowman.
+
+"Especially for a drap o' drink," said the tranter.
+
+"Good, but not religious--good," suggested Mr. Penny.
+
+The tranter nodded.  Having at last made the tap and hole quite
+ready, "Now then, Suze, bring a mug," he said.  "Here's luck to us,
+my sonnies!"
+
+The tap went in, and the cider immediately squirted out in a
+horizontal shower over Reuben's hands, knees, and leggings, and into
+the eyes and neck of Charley, who, having temporarily put off his
+grief under pressure of more interesting proceedings, was squatting
+down and blinking near his father.
+
+"There 'tis again!" said Mrs. Dewy.
+
+"Devil take the hole, the cask, and Sam Lawson too, that good cider
+should be wasted like this!" exclaimed the tranter.  "Your thumb!
+Lend me your thumb, Michael!  Ram it in here, Michael!  I must get a
+bigger tap, my sonnies."
+
+"Idd it cold inthide te hole?" inquired Charley of Michael, as he
+continued in a stooping posture with his thumb in the cork-hole.
+
+"What wonderful odds and ends that chiel has in his head to be
+sure!" Mrs. Dewy admiringly exclaimed from the distance.  "I lay a
+wager that he thinks more about how 'tis inside that barrel than in
+all the other parts of the world put together."
+
+All persons present put on a speaking countenance of admiration for
+the cleverness alluded to, in the midst of which Reuben returned.
+The operation was then satisfactorily performed; when Michael arose
+and stretched his head to the extremest fraction of height that his
+body would allow of, to re-straighten his back and shoulders--
+thrusting out his arms and twisting his features to a mass of
+wrinkles to emphasize the relief aquired.  A quart or two of the
+beverage was then brought to table, at which all the new arrivals
+reseated themselves with wide-spread knees, their eyes meditatively
+seeking out any speck or knot in the board upon which the gaze might
+precipitate itself.
+
+"Whatever is father a-biding out in fuel-house so long for?" said
+the tranter.  "Never such a man as father for two things--cleaving
+up old dead apple-tree wood and playing the bass-viol.  'A'd pass
+his life between the two, that 'a would."  He stepped to the door
+and opened it.
+
+"Father!"
+
+"Ay!" rang thinly from round the corner.
+
+"Here's the barrel tapped, and we all a-waiting!"
+
+A series of dull thuds, that had been heard without for some time
+past, now ceased; and after the light of a lantern had passed the
+window and made wheeling rays upon the ceiling inside the eldest of
+the Dewy family appeared.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III:  THE ASSEMBLED QUIRE
+
+
+
+William Dewy--otherwise grandfather William--was now about seventy;
+yet an ardent vitality still preserved a warm and roughened bloom
+upon his face, which reminded gardeners of the sunny side of a ripe
+ribstone-pippin; though a narrow strip of forehead, that was
+protected from the weather by lying above the line of his hat-brim,
+seemed to belong to some town man, so gentlemanly was its whiteness.
+His was a humorous and kindly nature, not unmixed with a frequent
+melancholy; and he had a firm religious faith.  But to his
+neighbours he had no character in particular.  If they saw him pass
+by their windows when they had been bottling off old mead, or when
+they had just been called long-headed men who might do anything in
+the world if they chose, they thought concerning him, "Ah, there's
+that good-hearted man--open as a child!"  If they saw him just after
+losing a shilling or half-a-crown, or accidentally letting fall a
+piece of crockery, they thought, "There's that poor weak-minded man
+Dewy again!  Ah, he's never done much in the world either!"  If he
+passed when fortune neither smiled nor frowned on them, they merely
+thought him old William Dewy.
+
+"Ah, so's--here you be!--Ah, Michael and Joseph and John--and you
+too, Leaf! a merry Christmas all!  We shall have a rare log-wood
+fire directly, Reub, to reckon by the toughness of the job I had in
+cleaving 'em."  As he spoke he threw down an armful of logs which
+fell in the chimney-corner with a rumble, and looked at them with
+something of the admiring enmity he would have bestowed on living
+people who had been very obstinate in holding their own.  "Come in,
+grandfather James."
+
+Old James (grandfather on the maternal side) had simply called as a
+visitor.  He lived in a cottage by himself, and many people
+considered him a miser; some, rather slovenly in his habits.  He now
+came forward from behind grandfather William, and his stooping
+figure formed a well-illuminated picture as he passed towards the
+fire-place.  Being by trade a mason, he wore a long linen apron
+reaching almost to his toes, corduroy breeches and gaiters, which,
+together with his boots, graduated in tints of whitish-brown by
+constant friction against lime and stone.  He also wore a very stiff
+fustian coat, having folds at the elbows and shoulders as unvarying
+in their arrangement as those in a pair of bellows:  the ridges and
+the projecting parts of the coat collectively exhibiting a shade
+different from that of the hollows, which were lined with small
+ditch-like accumulations of stone and mortar-dust.  The extremely
+large side-pockets, sheltered beneath wide flaps, bulged out
+convexly whether empty or full; and as he was often engaged to work
+at buildings far away--his breakfasts and dinners being eaten in a
+strange chimney-corner, by a garden wall, on a heap of stones, or
+walking along the road--he carried in these pockets a small tin
+canister of butter, a small canister of sugar, a small canister of
+tea, a paper of salt, and a paper of pepper; the bread, cheese, and
+meat, forming the substance of his meals, hanging up behind him in
+his basket among the hammers and chisels.  If a passer-by looked
+hard at him when he was drawing forth any of these, "My buttery," he
+said, with a pinched smile.
+
+"Better try over number seventy-eight before we start, I suppose?"
+said William, pointing to a heap of old Christmas-carol books on a
+side table.
+
+"Wi' all my heart," said the choir generally.
+
+"Number seventy-eight was always a teaser--always.  I can mind him
+ever since I was growing up a hard boy-chap."
+
+"But he's a good tune, and worth a mint o' practice," said Michael.
+
+"He is; though I've been mad enough wi' that tune at times to seize
+en and tear en all to linnit.  Ay, he's a splendid carrel--there's
+no denying that."
+
+"The first line is well enough," said Mr. Spinks; "but when you come
+to 'O, thou man,' you make a mess o't."
+
+"We'll have another go into en, and see what we can make of the
+martel.  Half-an-hour's hammering at en will conquer the toughness
+of en; I'll warn it."
+
+"'Od rabbit it all!" said Mr. Penny, interrupting with a flash of
+his spectacles, and at the same time clawing at something in the
+depths of a large side-pocket.  "If so be I hadn't been as scatter-
+brained and thirtingill as a chiel, I should have called at the
+schoolhouse wi' a boot as I cam up along.  Whatever is coming to me
+I really can't estimate at all!"
+
+"The brain has its weaknesses," murmured Mr. Spinks, waving his head
+ominously.  Mr. Spinks was considered to be a scholar, having once
+kept a night-school, and always spoke up to that level.
+
+"Well, I must call with en the first thing tomorrow.  And I'll empt
+my pocket o' this last too, if you don't mind, Mrs. Dewy."  He drew
+forth a last, and placed it on a table at his elbow.  The eyes of
+three or four followed it.
+
+"Well," said the shoemaker, seeming to perceive that the interest
+the object had excited was greater than he had anticipated, and
+warranted the last's being taken up again and exhibited; "now, whose
+foot do ye suppose this last was made for?  It was made for Geoffrey
+Day's father, over at Yalbury Wood.  Ah, many's the pair o' boots
+he've had off the last!  Well, when 'a died, I used the last for
+Geoffrey, and have ever since, though a little doctoring was wanted
+to make it do.  Yes, a very queer natured last it is now, 'a
+b'lieve," he continued, turning it over caressingly.  "Now, you
+notice that there" (pointing to a lump of leather bradded to the
+toe), "that's a very bad bunion that he've had ever since 'a was a
+boy.  Now, this remarkable large piece" (pointing to a patch nailed
+to the side), "shows a' accident he received by the tread of a
+horse, that squashed his foot a'most to a pomace.  The horseshoe cam
+full-butt on this point, you see.  And so I've just been over to
+Geoffrey's, to know if he wanted his bunion altered or made bigger
+in the new pair I'm making."
+
+During the hatter part of this speech, Mr. Penny's left hand
+wandered towards the cider-cup, as if the hand had no connection
+with the person speaking; and bringing his sentence to an abrupt
+chose, all but the extreme margin of the bootmaker's face was
+eclipsed by the circular brim of the vessel.
+
+"However, I was going to say," continued Penny, putting down the
+cup, "I ought to have called at the school'--here he went groping
+again in the depths of his pocket--'to leave this without fail,
+though I suppose the first thing to-morrow will do."
+
+He now drew forth and placed upon the table a boot--small, light,
+and prettily shaped--upon the heel of which he had been operating.
+
+"The new schoolmistress's!"
+
+"Ay, no less, Miss Fancy Day; as neat a little figure of fun as ever
+I see, and just husband-high."
+
+"Never Geoffrey's daughter Fancy?" said Bowman, as all glances
+present converged like wheel-spokes upon the boot in the centre of
+them.
+
+"Yes, sure," resumed Mr. Penny, regarding the boot as if that alone
+were his auditor; "'tis she that's come here schoolmistress.  You
+knowed his daughter was in training?"
+
+"Strange, isn't it, for her to be here Christmas night, Master
+Penny?"
+
+"Yes; but here she is, 'a b'lieve."
+
+"I know how she comes here--so I do!" chirruped one of the children.
+
+"Why?" Dick inquired, with subtle interest.
+
+"Pa'son Maybold was afraid he couldn't manage us all to-morrow at
+the dinner, and he talked o' getting her jist to come over and help
+him hand about the plates, and see we didn't make pigs of ourselves;
+and that's what she's come for!"
+
+"And that's the boot, then," continued its mender imaginatively,
+"that she'll walk to church in tomorrow morning.  I don't care to
+mend boots I don't make; but there's no knowing what it may lead to,
+and her father always comes to me."
+
+There, between the cider--mug and the candle, stood this interesting
+receptacle of the little unknown's foot; and a very pretty boot it
+was.  A character, in fact--the flexible bend at the instep, the
+rounded localities of the small nestling toes, scratches from
+careless scampers now forgotten--all, as repeated in the tell-tale
+leather, evidencing a nature and a bias.  Dick surveyed it with a
+delicate feeling that he had no right to do so without having first
+asked the owner of the foot's permission.
+
+"Now, neighbours, though no common eye can see it," the shoemaker,
+went on, "a man in the trade can see the likeness between this boot
+and that last, although that is so deformed as hardly to recall one
+of God's creatures, and this is one of as pretty a pair as you'd get
+for ten-and-sixpence in Casterbridge.  To you, nothing; but 'tis
+father's voot and daughter's voot to me, as plain as houses."
+
+"I don't doubt there's a likeness, Master Penny--a mild likeness--a
+fantastical likeness," said Spinks.  "But _I_ han't got imagination
+enough to see it, perhaps."
+
+Mr. Penny adjusted his spectacles.
+
+"Now, I'll tell ye what happened to me once on this very point.  You
+used to know Johnson the dairyman, William?"
+
+"Ay, sure; I did."
+
+"Well, 'twasn't opposite his house, but a little lower down--by his
+paddock, in front o' Parkmaze Pool.  I was a-bearing across towards
+Bloom's End,--and ho and behold, there was a man just brought out o'
+the Pool, dead; he had un'rayed for a dip, but not being able to
+pitch it just there had gone in flop over his head.  Men looked at
+en; women looked at en; children looked at en; nobody knowed en.  He
+was covered wi' a sheet; but I catched sight of his voot, just
+showing out as they carried en along.  'I don't care what name that
+man went by,' I said, in my way, 'but he's John Woodward's brother;
+I can swear to the family voot.'  At that very moment up comes John
+Woodward, weeping and teaving, 'I've lost my brother!  I've lost my
+brother!'"
+
+"Only to think of that!" said Mrs. Dewy.
+
+"'Tis well enough to know this foot and that foot," said Mr. Spinks.
+"'Tis long-headed, in fact, as far as feet do go.  I know little,
+'tis true--I say no more; but show ME a man's foot, and I'll tell
+you that man's heart."
+
+"You must be a cleverer feller, then, than mankind in jineral," said
+the tranter.
+
+"Well, that's nothing for me to speak of," returned Mr. Spinks.  "A
+man hives and learns.  Maybe I've read a leaf or two in my time.  I
+don't wish to say anything large, mind you; but nevertheless, maybe
+I have."
+
+"Yes, I know," said Michael soothingly, "and all the parish knows,
+that ye've read sommat of everything a'most, and have been a great
+filler of young folks' brains.  Learning's a worthy thing, and ye've
+got it, Master Spinks."
+
+"I make no boast, though I may have read and thought a little; and I
+know--it may be from much perusing, but I make no boast--that by the
+time a man's head is finished, 'tis almost time for him to creep
+underground.  I am over forty-five."
+
+Mr. Spinks emitted a hook to signify that if his head was not
+finished, nobody's head ever could be.
+
+"Talk of knowing people by their feet!" said Reuben.  "Rot me, my
+sonnies, then, if I can tell what a man is from all his members put
+together, oftentimes."
+
+"But still, look is a good deal," observed grandfather William
+absently, moving and balancing his head till the tip of grandfather
+James's nose was exactly in a right line with William's eye and the
+mouth of a miniature cavern he was discerning in the fire.  "By the
+way," he continued in a fresher voice, and looking up, "that young
+crater, the schoolmis'ess, must be sung to to-night wi' the rest?
+If her ear is as fine as her face, we shall have enough to do to be
+up-sides with her."
+
+"What about her face?" said young Dewy.
+
+"Well, as to that," Mr. Spinks replied, "'tis a face you can hardly
+gainsay.  A very good pink face, as far as that do go.  Still, only
+a face, when all is said and done."
+
+"Come, come, Elias Spinks, say she's a pretty maid, and have done
+wi' her," said the tranter, again preparing to visit the cider-
+barrel.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV:  GOING THE ROUNDS
+
+
+
+Shortly after ten o'clock the singing-boys arrived at the tranter's
+house, which was invariably the place of meeting, and preparations
+were made for the start.  The older men and musicians wore thick
+coats, with stiff perpendicular collars, and coloured handkerchiefs
+wound round and round the neck till the end came to hand, over all
+which they just showed their ears and noses, like people looking
+over a wall.  The remainder, stalwart ruddy men and boys, were
+dressed mainly in snow-white smock-frocks, embroidered upon the
+shoulders and breasts, in ornamental forms of hearts, diamonds, and
+zigzags.  The cider-mug was emptied for the ninth time, the music-
+books were arranged, and the pieces finally decided upon.  The boys
+in the meantime put the old horn-lanterns in order, cut candles into
+short lengths to fit the lanterns; and, a thin fleece of snow having
+fallen since the early part of the evening, those who had no
+leggings went to the stable and wound wisps of hay round their
+ankles to keep the insidious flakes from the interior of their
+boots.
+
+Mellstock was a parish of considerable acreage, the hamlets
+composing it lying at a much greater distance from each other than
+is ordinarily the case.  Hence several hours were consumed in
+playing and singing within hearing of every family, even if but a
+single air were bestowed on each.  There was Lower Mellstock, the
+main village; half a mile from this were the church and vicarage,
+and a few other houses, the spot being rather lonely now, though in
+past centuries it had been the most thickly-populated quarter of the
+parish.  A mile north-east hay the hamlet of Upper Mellstock, where
+the tranter lived; and at other points knots of cottages, besides
+solitary farmsteads and dairies.
+
+Old William Dewy, with the violoncello, played the bass; his
+grandson Dick the treble violin; and Reuben and Michael Mail the
+tenor and second violins respectively.  The singers consisted of
+four men and seven boys, upon whom devolved the task of carrying and
+attending to the lanterns, and holding the books open for the
+players.  Directly music was the theme, old William ever and
+instinctively came to the front.
+
+"Now mind, neighbours," he said, as they all went out one by one at
+the door, he himself holding it ajar and regarding them with a
+critical face as they passed, like a shepherd counting out his
+sheep.  "You two counter-boys, keep your ears open to Michael's
+fingering, and don't ye go straying into the treble part along o'
+Dick and his set, as ye did last year; and mind this especially when
+we be in "Arise, and hail."  Billy Chimlen, don't you sing quite so
+raving mad as you fain would; and, all o' ye, whatever ye do, keep
+from making a great scuffle on the ground when we go in at people's
+gates; but go quietly, so as to strike up all of a sudden, like
+spirits."
+
+"Farmer Ledlow's first?"
+
+"Farmer Ledlow's first; the rest as usual."
+
+"And, Voss," said the tranter terminatively, "you keep house here
+till about half-past two; then heat the metheglin and cider in the
+warmer you'll find turned up upon the copper; and bring it wi' the
+victuals to church-hatch, as th'st know."
+
+
+Just before the chock struck twelve they lighted the lanterns and
+started.  The moon, in her third quarter, had risen since the
+snowstorm; but the dense accumulation of snow-cloud weakened her
+power to a faint twilight, which was rather pervasive of the
+landscape than traceable to the sky.  The breeze had gone down, and
+the rustle of their feet and tones of their speech echoed with an
+alert rebound from every post, boundary-stone, and ancient wall they
+passed, even where the distance of the echo's origin was less than a
+few yards.  Beyond their own slight noises nothing was to be heard,
+save the occasional bark of foxes in the direction of Yalbury Wood,
+or the brush of a rabbit among the grass now and then, as it
+scampered out of their way.
+
+Most of the outlying homesteads and hamlets had been visited by
+about two o'clock; they then passed across the outskirts of a wooded
+park toward the main village, nobody being at home at the Manor.
+Pursuing no recognized track, great care was necessary in walking
+lest their faces should come in contact with the low-hanging boughs
+of the old lime-trees, which in many spots formed dense over-growths
+of interlaced branches.
+
+"Times have changed from the times they used to be," said Mail,
+regarding nobody can tell what interesting old panoramas with an
+inward eye, and letting his outward glance rest on the ground,
+because it was as convenient a position as any.  "People don't care
+much about us now!  I've been thinking we must be almost the last
+left in the county of the old string players?  Barrel-organs, and
+the things next door to 'em that you blow wi' your foot, have come
+in terribly of late years."
+
+"Ay!" said Bowman, shaking his head; and old William, on seeing him,
+did the same thing.
+
+"More's the pity," replied another.  "Time was--long and merry ago
+now!--when not one of the varmits was to be heard of; but it served
+some of the quires right.  They should have stuck to strings as we
+did, and kept out clarinets, and done away with serpents.  If you'd
+thrive in musical religion, stick to strings, says I."
+
+"Strings be safe soul-lifters, as far as that do go," said Mr.
+Spinks.
+
+"Yet there's worse things than serpents," said Mr. Penny.  "Old
+things pass away, 'tis true; but a serpent was a good old note:  a
+deep rich note was the serpent."
+
+"Clar'nets, however, be bad at all times," said Michael Mail.  "One
+Christmas--years agone now, years--I went the rounds wi' the
+Weatherbury quire.  'Twas a hard frosty night, and the keys of all
+the clar'nets froze--ah, they did freeze!--so that 'twas like
+drawing a cork every time a key was opened; and the players o' 'em
+had to go into a hedger-and-ditcher's chimley-corner, and thaw their
+clar'nets every now and then.  An icicle o' spet hung down from the
+end of every man's clar'net a span long; and as to fingers--well,
+there, if ye'll believe me, we bad no fingers at all, to our
+knowing."
+
+"I can well bring back to my mind," said Mr. Penny, "what I said to
+poor Joseph Ryme (who took the treble part in Chalk-Newton Church
+for two-and-forty year) when they thought of having clar'nets there.
+"Joseph," I said, says I, "depend upon't, if so be you have them
+tooting clar'nets you'll spoil the whole set-out.  Clar'nets were
+not made for the service of the Lard; you can see it by looking at
+'em," I said.  And what came o't?  Why, souls, the parson set up a
+barrel-organ on his own account within two years o' the time I
+spoke, and the old quire went to nothing."
+
+"As far as look is concerned," said the tranter, "I don't for my
+part see that a fiddle is much nearer heaven than a clar'net.  'Tis
+further off.  There's always a rakish, scampish twist about a
+fiddle's looks that seems to say the Wicked One had a hand in making
+o'en; while angels be supposed to play clar'nets in heaven, or
+som'at like 'em, if ye may believe picters."
+
+"Robert Penny, you was in the right," broke in the eldest Dewy.
+"They should ha' stuck to strings.  Your brass-man is a rafting dog-
+-well and good; your reed-man is a dab at stirring ye--well and
+good; your drum-man is a rare bowel-shaker--good again.  But I don't
+care who hears me say it, nothing will spak to your heart wi' the
+sweetness o' the man of strings!"
+
+"Strings for ever!" said little Jimmy.
+
+"Strings alone would have held their ground against all the new
+comers in creation."  ("True, true!" said Bowman.)  "But clarinets
+was death."  ("Death they was!" said Mr. Penny.)  "And harmonions,"
+William continued in a louder voice, and getting excited by these
+signs of approval, "harmonions and barrel-organs"  ("Ah!" and groans
+from Spinks) "be miserable--what shall I call 'em?--miserable--"
+
+"Sinners," suggested Jimmy, who made large strides like the men, and
+did not lag behind like the other little boys.
+
+"Miserable dumbledores!"
+
+"Right, William, and so they be--miserable dumbledores!" said the
+choir with unanimity.
+
+By this time they were crossing to a gate in the direction of the
+school, which, standing on a slight eminence at the junction of
+three ways, now rose in unvarying and dark flatness against the sky.
+The instruments were retuned, and all the band entered the school
+enclosure, enjoined by old William to keep upon the grass.
+
+"Number seventy-eight," he softly gave out as they formed round in a
+semicircle, the boys opening the lanterns to get a clearer light,
+and directing their rays on the books.
+
+Then passed forth into the quiet night an ancient and time-worn
+hymn, embodying a quaint Christianity in words orally transmitted
+from father to son through several generations down to the present
+characters, who sang them out right earnestly:
+
+
+"Remember Adam's fall,
+O thou Man:
+Remember Adam's fall
+From Heaven to Hell.
+Remember Adam's fall
+How he hath condemn'd all
+In Hell perpetual
+There for to dwell.
+
+Remember God's goodnesse,
+O thou Man:
+Remember God's goodnesse,
+His promise made.
+Remember God's goodnesse;
+He sent His Son sinlesse
+Our ails for to redress;
+Be not afraid
+
+In Bethlehem He was born,
+O thou Man:
+In Bethlehem He was born,
+For mankind's sake.
+
+In Bethlehem He was born,
+Christmas-day i' the morn:
+Our Saviour thought no scorn
+Our faults to take.
+
+Give thanks to God alway,
+O thou Man:
+Give thanks to God alway
+With heart-most joy.
+Give thanks to God alway
+On this our joyful day:
+Let all men sing and say,
+Holy, Holy!"
+
+
+Having concluded the last note, they listened for a minute or two,
+but found that no sound issued from the schoolhouse.
+
+"Four breaths, and then, "O, what unbounded goodness!" number fifty-
+nine," said William.
+
+This was duly gone through, and no notice whatever seemed to be
+taken of the performance.
+
+"Good guide us, surely 'tisn't a' empty house, as befell us in the
+year thirty-nine and forty-three!" said old Dewy.
+
+"Perhaps she's jist come from some musical city, and sneers at our
+doings?" the tranter whispered.
+
+"'Od rabbit her!" said Mr. Penny, with an annihilating look at a
+corner of the school chimney, "I don't quite stomach her, if this is
+it.  Your plain music well done is as worthy as your other sort done
+bad, a' b'lieve, souls; so say I."
+
+"Four breaths, and then the last," said the leader authoritatively.
+"'Rejoice, ye Tenants of the Earth,' number sixty-four."
+
+At the close, waiting yet another minute, he said in a clear loud
+voice, as he had said in the village at that hour and season for the
+previous forty years--"A merry Christmas to ye!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V:  THE LISTENERS
+
+
+
+When the expectant stillness consequent upon the exclamation had
+nearly died out of them all, an increasing light made itself visible
+in one of the windows of the upper floor.  It came so close to the
+blind that the exact position of the flame could be perceived from
+the outside.  Remaining steady for an instant, the blind went upward
+from before it, revealing to thirty concentrated eyes a young girl,
+framed as a picture by the window architrave, and unconsciously
+illuminating her countenance to a vivid brightness by a candle she
+held in her left hand, close to her face, her right hand being
+extended to the side of the window.  She was wrapped in a white robe
+of some kind, whilst down her shoulders fell a twining profusion of
+marvellously rich hair, in a wild disorder which proclaimed it to be
+only during the invisible hours of the night that such a condition
+was discoverable.  Her bright eyes were looking into the grey world
+outside with an uncertain expression, oscillating between courage
+and shyness, which, as she recognized the semicircular group of dark
+forms gathered before her, transformed itself into pheasant
+resolution.
+
+Opening the window, she said lightly and warmly--"Thank you,
+singers, thank you!"
+
+Together went the window quickly and quietly, and the blind started
+downward on its return to its place.  Her fair forehead and eyes
+vanished; her little mouth; her neck and shoulders; all of her.
+Then the spot of candlelight shone nebulously as before; then it
+moved away.
+
+"How pretty!" exclaimed Dick Dewy.
+
+"If she'd been rale wexwork she couldn't ha' been comelier," said
+Michael Mail.
+
+"As near a thing to a spiritual vision as ever I wish to see!" said
+tranter Dewy.
+
+"O, sich I never, never see!" said Leaf fervently.
+
+All the rest, after clearing their threats and adjusting their hats,
+agreed that such a sight was worth singing for.
+
+"Now to Farmer Shiner's, and then replenish our insides, father?"
+said the tranter.
+
+"Wi' all my heart," said old William, shouldering his bass-viol.
+
+Farmer Shiner's was a queer lump of a house, standing at the corner
+of a lane that ran into the principal thoroughfare.  The upper
+windows were much wider than they were high, and this feature,
+together with a broad bay-window where the door might have been
+expected, gave it by day the aspect of a human countenance turned
+askance, and wearing a sly and wicked leer.  To-night nothing was
+visible but the outline of the roof upon the sky.
+
+The front of this building was reached, and the preliminaries
+arranged as usual.
+
+"Four breaths, and number thirty-two, 'Behold the Morning Star,'"
+said old William.
+
+They had reached the end of the second verse, and the fiddlers were
+doing the up bow-stroke previously to pouring forth the opening
+chord of the third verse, when, without a light appearing or any
+signal being given, a roaring voice exclaimed -
+
+"Shut up, woll 'ee!  Don't make your blaring row here!  A feller wi'
+a headache enough to split his skull likes a quiet night!"
+
+Slam went the window.
+
+"Hullo, that's a' ugly blow for we!" said the tranter, in a keenly
+appreciative voice, and turning to his companions.
+
+"Finish the carrel, all who be friends of harmony!" commanded old
+William; and they continued to the end.
+
+"Four breaths, and number nineteen!" said William firmly.  "Give it
+him well; the quire can't be insulted in this manner!"
+
+A light now flashed into existence, the window opened, and the
+farmer stood revealed as one in a terrific passion.
+
+"Drown en!--drown en!" the tranter cried, fiddling frantically.
+"Play fortissimy, and drown his spaking!"
+
+"Fortissimy!" said Michael Mail, and the music and singing waxed so
+loud that it was impossible to know what Mr. Shiner had said, was
+saying, or was about to say; but wildly flinging his arms and body
+about in the forms of capital Xs and Ys, he appeared to utter enough
+invectives to consign the whole parish to perdition.
+
+"Very onseemly--very!" said old William, as they retired.  "Never
+such a dreadful scene in the whole round o' my carrel practice--
+never!  And he a churchwarden!"
+
+"Only a drap o' drink got into his head," said the tranter.  "Man's
+well enough when he's in his religious frame.  He's in his worldly
+frame now.  Must ask en to our bit of a party to-morrow night, I
+suppose, and so put en in humour again.  We bear no mortal man ill-
+will."
+
+They now crossed Mellstock Bridge, and went along an embowered path
+beside the Froom towards the church and vicarage, meeting Voss with
+the hot mead and bread-and-cheese as they were approaching the
+churchyard.  This determined them to eat and drink before proceeding
+further, and they entered the church and ascended to the gallery.
+The lanterns were opened, and the whole body sat round against the
+walls on benches and whatever else was available, and made a hearty
+meal.  In the pauses of conversation there could be heard through
+the floor overhead a little world of undertones and creaks from the
+halting clockwork, which never spread further than the tower they
+were born in, and raised in the more meditative minds a fancy that
+here hay the direct pathway of Time.
+
+Having done eating and drinking, they again tuned the instruments,
+and once more the party emerged into the night air.
+
+"Where's Dick?" said old Dewy.
+
+Every man hooked round upon every other man, as if Dick might have
+been transmuted into one or the other; and then they said they
+didn't know.
+
+"Well now, that's what I call very nasty of Master Dicky, that I
+do," said Michael Mail.
+
+"He've clinked off home-along, depend upon't," another suggested,
+though not quite believing that he had.
+
+"Dick!" exclaimed the tranter, and his voice rolled sonorously forth
+among the yews.
+
+He suspended his muscles rigid as stone whilst listening for an
+answer, and finding he listened in vain, turned to the assemblage.
+
+"The treble man too!  Now if he'd been a tenor or counter chap, we
+might ha' contrived the rest o't without en, you see.  But for a
+quire to lose the treble, why, my sonnies, you may so well lose your
+. . . "  The tranter paused, unable to mention an image vast enough
+for the occasion.
+
+"Your head at once," suggested Mr. Penny.
+
+The tranter moved a pace, as if it were puerile of people to
+complete sentences when there were more pressing things to be done.
+
+"Was ever heard such a thing as a young man leaving his work half
+done and turning tail like this!"
+
+"Never," replied Bowman, in a tone signifying that he was the last
+man in the world to wish to withhold the formal finish required of
+him.
+
+"I hope no fatal tragedy has overtook the had!" said his
+grandfather.
+
+"O no," replied tranter Dewy placidly.  "Wonder where he's put that
+there fiddle of his.  Why that fiddle cost thirty shillings, and
+good words besides.  Somewhere in the damp, without doubt; that
+instrument will be unglued and spoilt in ten minutes--ten! ay, two."
+
+"What in the name o' righteousness can have happened?" said old
+William, more uneasily.  "Perhaps he's drownded!"
+
+"Leaving their lanterns and instruments in the belfry they retraced
+their steps along the waterside track.  "A strapping lad like Dick
+d'know better than let anything happen onawares," Reuben remarked.
+"There's sure to be some poor little scram reason for't staring us
+in the face all the while."  He lowered his voice to a mysterious
+tone:  'Neighbours, have ye noticed any sign of a scornful woman in
+his head, or suchlike?"
+
+"Not a glimmer of such a body.  He's as clear as water yet."
+
+"And Dicky said he should never marry," cried Jimmy, "but live at
+home always along wi' mother and we!"
+
+"Ay, ay, my sonny; every had has said that in his time."
+
+They had now again reached the precincts of Mr. Shiner's, but
+hearing nobody in that direction, one or two went across to the
+schoolhouse.  A light was still burning in the bedroom, and though
+the blind was down, the window had been slightly opened, as if to
+admit the distant notes of the carollers to the ears of the occupant
+of the room.
+
+Opposite the window, leaning motionless against a beech tree, was
+the lost man, his arms folded, his head thrown back, his eyes fixed
+upon the illuminated lattice.
+
+"Why, Dick, is that thee?  What b'st doing here?"
+
+Dick's body instantly flew into a more rational attitude, and his
+head was seen to turn east and west in the gloom, as if endeavouring
+to discern some proper answer to that question; and at last he said
+in rather feeble accents--"Nothing, father."
+
+"Th'st take long enough time about it then, upon my body," said the
+tranter, as they all turned anew towards the vicarage.
+
+"I thought you hadn't done having snap in the gallery," said Dick.
+
+"Why, we've been traypsing and rambling about, looking everywhere,
+and thinking you'd done fifty deathly things, and here have you been
+at nothing at all!"
+
+"The stupidness lies in that point of it being nothing at all,"
+murmured Mr. Spinks.
+
+The vicarage front was their next field of operation, and Mr.
+Maybold, the lately-arrived incumbent, duly received his share of
+the night's harmonies.  It was hoped that by reason of his
+profession he would have been led to open the window, and an extra
+carol in quick time was added to draw him forth.  But Mr. Maybold
+made no stir.
+
+"A bad sign!" said old William, shaking his head.
+
+However, at that same instant a musical voice was heard exclaiming
+from inner depths of bedclothes--"Thanks, villagers!"
+
+"What did he say?" asked Bowman, who was rather dull of hearing.
+Bowman's voice, being therefore loud, had been heard by the vicar
+within.
+
+"I said, 'Thanks, villagers!'" cried the vicar again.
+
+"Oh, we didn't hear 'ee the first time!" cried Bowman.
+
+"Now don't for heaven's sake spoil the young man's temper by
+answering like that!" said the tranter.
+
+"You won't do that, my friends!" the vicar shouted.
+
+"Well to be sure, what ears!" said Mr. Penny in a whisper.  "Beats
+any horse or dog in the parish, and depend upon't, that's a sign
+he's a proper clever chap."
+
+"We shall see that in time," said the tranter.
+
+Old William, in his gratitude for such thanks from a comparatively
+new inhabitant, was anxious to play all the tunes over again; but
+renounced his desire on being reminded by Reuben that it would be
+best to leave well alone.
+
+"Now putting two and two together," the tranter continued, as they
+went their way over the hill, and across to the last remaining
+houses; "that is, in the form of that young female vision we zeed
+just now, and this young tenor-voiced parson, my belief is she'll
+wind en round her finger, and twist the pore young feller about like
+the figure of 8--that she will so, my sonnies."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI:  CHRISTMAS MORNING
+
+
+
+The choir at last reached their beds, and slept like the rest of the
+parish.  Dick's slumbers, through the three or four hours remaining
+for rest, were disturbed and slight; an exhaustive variation upon
+the incidents that had passed that night in connection with the
+school-window going on in his brain every moment of the time.
+
+In the morning, do what he would--go upstairs, downstairs, out of
+doors, speak of the wind and weather, or what not--he could not
+refrain from an unceasing renewal, in imagination, of that
+interesting enactment.  Tilted on the edge of one foot he stood
+beside the fireplace, watching his mother grilling rashers; but
+there was nothing in grilling, he thought, unless the Vision
+grilled.  The limp rasher hung down between the bars of the gridiron
+like a cat in a child's arms; but there was nothing in similes,
+unless She uttered them.  He looked at the daylight shadows of a
+yellow hue, dancing with the firelight shadows in blue on the
+whitewashed chimney corner, but there was nothing in shadows.
+"Perhaps the new young wom--sch--Miss Fancy Day will sing in church
+with us this morning," he said.
+
+The tranter looked a long time before he replied, "I fancy she will;
+and yet I fancy she won't."
+
+Dick implied that such a remark was rather to be tolerated than
+admired; though deliberateness in speech was known to have, as a
+rule, more to do with the machinery of the tranter's throat than
+with the matter enunciated.
+
+They made preparations for going to church as usual; Dick with
+extreme alacrity, though he would not definitely consider why he was
+so religious.  His wonderful nicety in brushing and cleaning his
+best light boots had features which elevated it to the rank of an
+art.  Every particle and speck of last week's mud was scraped and
+brushed from toe and heel; new blacking from the packet was
+carefully mixed and made use of, regardless of expense.  A coat was
+laid on and polished; then another coat for increased blackness; and
+lastly a third, to give the perfect and mirror-like jet which the
+hoped-for rencounter demanded.
+
+It being Christmas-day, the tranter prepared himself with Sunday
+particularity.  Loud sousing and snorting noises were heard to
+proceed from a tub in the back quarters of the dwelling, proclaiming
+that he was there performing his great Sunday wash, lasting half-an-
+hour, to which his washings on working-day mornings were mere
+flashes in the pan.  Vanishing into the outhouse with a large brown
+towel, and the above-named bubblings and snortings being carried on
+for about twenty minutes, the tranter would appear round the edge of
+the door, smelling like a summer fog, and looking as if he had just
+narrowly escaped a watery grave with the loss of much of his
+clothes, having since been weeping bitterly till his eyes were red;
+a crystal drop of water hanging ornamentally at the bottom of each
+ear, one at the tip of his nose, and others in the form of spangles
+about his hair.
+
+After a great deal of crunching upon the sanded stone floor by the
+feet of father, son, and grandson as they moved to and fro in these
+preparations, the bass-viol and fiddles were taken from their nook,
+and the strings examined and screwed a little above concert-pitch,
+that they might keep their tone when the service began, to obviate
+the awkward contingency of having to retune them at the back of the
+gallery during a cough, sneeze, or amen--an inconvenience which had
+been known to arise in damp wintry weather.
+
+The three left the door and paced down Mellstock-lane and across the
+ewe-lease, bearing under their arms the instruments in faded green-
+baize bags, and old brown music-books in their hands; Dick
+continually finding himself in advance of the other two, and the
+tranter moving on with toes turned outwards to an enormous angle.
+
+At the foot of an incline the church became visible through the
+north gate, or 'church hatch,' as it was called here.  Seven agile
+figures in a clump were observable beyond, which proved to be the
+choristers waiting; sitting on an altar-tomb to pass the time, and
+letting their heels dangle against it.  The musicians being now in
+sight, the youthful party scampered off and rattled up the old
+wooden stairs of the gallery like a regiment of cavalry; the other
+boys of the parish waiting outside and observing birds, cats, and
+other creatures till the vicar entered, when they suddenly subsided
+into sober church-goers, and passed down the aisle with echoing
+heels.
+
+The gallery of Mellstock Church had a status and sentiment of its
+own.  A stranger there was regarded with a feeling altogether
+differing from that of the congregation below towards him.  Banished
+from the nave as an intruder whom no originality could make
+interesting, he was received above as a curiosity that no unfitness
+could render dull.  The gallery, too, looked down upon and knew the
+habits of the nave to its remotest peculiarity, and had an extensive
+stock of exclusive information about it; whilst the nave knew
+nothing of the gallery folk, as gallery folk, beyond their loud-
+sounding minims and chest notes.  Such topics as that the clerk was
+always chewing tobacco except at the moment of crying amen; that he
+had a dust-hole in his pew; that during the sermon certain young
+daughters of the village had left off caring to read anything so
+mild as the marriage service for some years, and now regularly
+studied the one which chronologically follows it; that a pair of
+lovers touched fingers through a knot-hole between their pews in the
+manner ordained by their great exemplars, Pyramus and Thisbe; that
+Mrs. Ledlow, the farmer's wife, counted her money and reckoned her
+week's marketing expenses during the first lesson--all news to those
+below--were stale subjects here.
+
+Old William sat in the centre of the front row, his violoncello
+between his knees and two singers on each hand.  Behind him, on the
+left, came the treble singers and Dick; and on the right the tranter
+and the tenors.  Farther back was old Mail with the altos and
+supernumeraries.
+
+But before they had taken their places, and whilst they were
+standing in a circle at the back of the gallery practising a psalm
+or two, Dick cast his eyes over his grandfather's shoulder, and saw
+the vision of the past night enter the porch-door as methodically as
+if she had never been a vision at all.  A new atmosphere seemed
+suddenly to be puffed into the ancient edifice by her movement,
+which made Dick's body and soul tingle with novel sensations.
+Directed by Shiner, the churchwarden, she proceeded to the small
+aisle on the north side of the chancel, a spot now allotted to a
+throng of Sunday-school girls, and distinctly visible from the
+gallery-front by looking under the curve of the furthermost arch on
+that side.
+
+Before this moment the church had seemed comparatively empty--now it
+was thronged; and as Miss Fancy rose from her knees and looked
+around her for a permanent place in which to deposit herself--
+finally choosing the remotest corner--Dick began to breathe more
+freely the warm new air she had brought with her; to feel rushings
+of blood, and to have impressions that there was a tie between her
+and himself visible to all the congregation.
+
+Ever afterwards the young man could recollect individually each part
+of the service of that bright Christmas morning, and the trifling
+occurrences which took place as its minutes slowly drew along; the
+duties of that day dividing themselves by a complete line from the
+services of other times.  The tunes they that morning essayed
+remained with him for years, apart from all others; also the text;
+also the appearance of the layer of dust upon the capitals of the
+piers; that the holly-bough in the chancel archway was hung a little
+out of the centre--all the ideas, in short, that creep into the mind
+when reason is only exercising its lowest activity through the eye.
+
+By chance or by fate, another young man who attended Mellstock
+Church on that Christmas morning had towards the end of the service
+the same instinctive perception of an interesting presence, in the
+shape of the same bright maiden, though his emotion reached a far
+less developed stage.  And there was this difference, too, that the
+person in question was surprised at his condition, and sedulously
+endeavoured to reduce himself to his normal state of mind.  He was
+the young vicar, Mr. Maybold.
+
+The music on Christmas mornings was frequently below the standard of
+church-performances at other times.  The boys were sleepy from the
+heavy exertions of the night; the men were slightly wearied; and
+now, in addition to these constant reasons, there was a dampness in
+the atmosphere that still further aggravated the evil.  Their
+strings, from the recent long exposure to the night air, rose whole
+semitones, and snapped with a loud twang at the most silent moment;
+which necessitated more retiring than ever to the back of the
+gallery, and made the gallery throats quite husky with the quantity
+of coughing and hemming required for tuning in.  The vicar looked
+cross.
+
+When the singing was in progress there was suddenly discovered to be
+a strong and shrill reinforcement from some point, ultimately found
+to be the school-girls' aisle.  At every attempt it grew bolder and
+more distinct.  At the third time of singing, these intrusive
+feminine voices were as mighty as those of the regular singers; in
+fact, the flood of sound from this quarter assumed such an
+individuality, that it had a time, a key, almost a tune of its own,
+surging upwards when the gallery plunged downwards, and the reverse.
+
+Now this had never happened before within the memory of man.  The
+girls, like the rest of the congregation, had always been humble and
+respectful followers of the gallery; singing at sixes and sevens if
+without gallery leaders; never interfering with the ordinances of
+these practised artists--having no will, union, power, or proclivity
+except it was given them from the established choir enthroned above
+them.
+
+A good deal of desperation became noticeable in the gallery throats
+and strings, which continued throughout the musical portion of the
+service.  Directly the fiddles were laid down, Mr. Penny's
+spectacles put in their sheath, and the text had been given out, an
+indignant whispering began.
+
+"Did ye hear that, souls?" Mr. Penny said, in a groaning breath.
+
+"Brazen-faced hussies!" said Bowman.
+
+"True; why, they were every note as loud as we, fiddles and all, if
+not louder!"
+
+"Fiddles and all!" echoed Bowman bitterly.
+
+"Shall anything saucier be found than united 'ooman?" Mr. Spinks
+murmured.
+
+"What I want to know is," said the tranter (as if he knew already,
+but that civilization required the form of words), "what business
+people have to tell maidens to sing like that when they don't sit in
+a gallery, and never have entered one in their lives?  That's the
+question, my sonnies."
+
+"'Tis the gallery have got to sing, all the world knows," said Mr.
+Penny.  "Why, souls, what's the use o' the ancients spending scores
+of pounds to build galleries if people down in the lowest depths of
+the church sing like that at a moment's notice?"
+
+"Really, I think we useless ones had better march out of church,
+fiddles and all!" said Mr. Spinks, with a laugh which, to a
+stranger, would have sounded mild and real.  Only the initiated body
+of men he addressed could understand the horrible bitterness of
+irony that lurked under the quiet words 'useless ones,' and the
+ghastliness of the laughter apparently so natural.
+
+"Never mind!  Let 'em sing too--'twill make it all the louder--hee,
+hee!" said Leaf.
+
+"Thomas Leaf, Thomas Leaf!  Where have you lived all your life?"
+said grandfather William sternly.
+
+The quailing Leaf tried to leek as if he had lived nowhere at all.
+
+"When all's said and done, my sonnies," Reuben said, "there'd have
+been no real harm in their singing if they had let nobody hear 'em,
+and only jined in now and then."
+
+"None at all," said Mr. Penny.  "But though I don't wish to accuse
+people wrongfully, I'd say before my lord judge that I could hear
+every note o' that last psalm come from 'em as much as from us--
+every note as if 'twas their own."
+
+"Know it! ah, I should think I did know it!"  Mr. Spinks was heard
+to observe at this moment, without reference to his fellow players--
+shaking his head at some idea he seemed to see floating before him,
+and smiling as if he were attending a funeral at the time.  "Ah, do
+I or don't I know it!"
+
+No one said "Know what?" because all were aware from experience that
+what he knew would declare itself in process of time.
+
+"I could fancy last night that we should have some trouble wi' that
+young man," said the tranter, pending the continuance of Spinks's
+speech, and looking towards the unconscious Mr. Maybold in the
+pulpit.
+
+"_I_ fancy," said old William, rather severely, "I fancy there's too
+much whispering going on to be of any spiritual use to gentle or
+simple."  Then folding his lips and concentrating his glance on the
+vicar, he implied that none but the ignorant would speak again; and
+accordingly there was silence in the gallery, Mr. Spinks's telling
+speech remaining for ever unspoken.
+
+Dick had said nothing, and the tranter little, on this episode of
+the morning; for Mrs. Dewy at breakfast expressed it as her
+intention to invite the youthful leader of the culprits to the small
+party it was customary with them to have on Christmas night--a piece
+of knowledge which had given a particular brightness to Dick's
+reflections since he had received it.  And in the tranter's
+slightly-cynical nature, party feeling was weaker than in the other
+members of the choir, though friendliness and faithful partnership
+still sustained in him a hearty earnestness on their account.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII:  THE TRANTER'S PARTY
+
+
+
+During the afternoon unusual activity was seen to prevail about the
+precincts of tranter Dewy's house.  The flagstone floor was swept of
+dust, and a sprinkling of the finest yellow sand from the innermost
+stratum of the adjoining sand-pit lightly scattered thereupon.  Then
+were produced large knives and forks, which had been shrouded in
+darkness and grease since the last occasion of the kind, and bearing
+upon their sides, "Shear-steel, warranted," in such emphatic letters
+of assurance, that the warranter's name was not required as further
+proof, and not given.  The key was left in the tap of the cider-
+barrel, instead of being carried in a pocket.  And finally the
+tranter had to stand up in the room and let his wife wheel him round
+like a turnstile, to see if anything discreditable was visible in
+his appearance.
+
+"Stand still till I've been for the scissors," said Mrs. Dewy.
+
+The tranter stood as still as a sentinel at the challenge.
+
+The only repairs necessary were a trimming of one or two whiskers
+that had extended beyond the general contour of the mass; a like
+trimming of a slightly-frayed edge visible on his shirt-collar; and
+a final tug at a grey hair--to all of which operations he submitted
+in resigned silence, except the last, which produced a mild "Come,
+come, Ann," by way of expostulation.
+
+"Really, Reuben, 'tis quite a disgrace to see such a man," said Mrs.
+Dewy, with the severity justifiable in a long-tried companion,
+giving him another turn round, and picking several of Smiler's hairs
+from the shoulder of his coat.  Reuben's thoughts seemed engaged
+elsewhere, and he yawned.  "And the cellar of your coat is a shame
+to behold--so plastered with dirt, or dust, or grease, or something.
+Why, wherever could you have got it?"
+
+"'Tis my warm nater in summer-time, I suppose.  I always did get in
+such a heat when I bustle about."
+
+"Ay, the Dewys always were such a coarse-skinned family.  There's
+your brother Bob just as bad--as fat as a porpoise--wi' his how,
+mean, "How'st do, Ann?" whenever he meets me.  I'd "How'st do" him
+indeed!  If the sun only shines out a minute, there be you all
+streaming in the face--I never see!"
+
+"If I be hot week-days, I must be hot Sundays."
+
+"If any of the girls should turn after their father 'twill be a bad
+look-out for 'em, poor things!  None of my family were sich vulgar
+sweaters, not one of 'em.  But, Lord-a-mercy, the Dewys!  I don't
+know how ever I cam' into such a family!"
+
+"Your woman's weakness when I asked ye to jine us.  That's how it
+was I suppose."  But the tranter appeared to have heard some such
+words from his wife before, and hence his answer had not the energy
+it might have shown if the inquiry had possessed the charm of
+novelty.
+
+"You never did hook so well in a pair o' trousers as in them," she
+continued in the same unimpassioned voice, so that the unfriendly
+criticism of the Dewy family seemed to have been mere normal than
+spontaneous.  "Such a cheap pair as 'twas too.  As big as any man
+could wish to have, and lined inside, and double-lined in the lower
+parts, and an extra piece of stiffening at the bottom.  And 'tis a
+nice high cut that comes up right under your armpits, and there's
+enough turned down inside the seams to make half a pair more,
+besides a piece of cloth heft that will make an honest waistcoat--
+all by my contriving in buying the stuff at a bargain, and having it
+made up under my eye.  It only shows what may be done by taking a
+little trouble, and not going straight to the rascally tailors."
+
+The discourse was cut short by the sudden appearance of Charley on
+the scene, with a face and hands of hideous blackness, and a nose
+like a guttering candle.  Why, on that particularly cleanly
+afternoon, he should have discovered that the chimney-crook and
+chain from which the hams were suspended should have possessed more
+merits and general interest as playthings than any other articles in
+the house, is a question for nursing mothers to decide.  However,
+the humour seemed to lie in the result being, as has been seen, that
+any given player with these articles was in the long-run daubed with
+soot.  The last that was seen of Charley by daylight after this
+piece of ingenuity was when in the act of vanishing from his
+father's presence round the corner of the house--looking back over
+his shoulder with an expression of great sin on his face, like Cain
+as the Outcast in Bible pictures.
+
+
+The guests had all assembled, and the tranter's party had reached
+that degree of development which accords with ten o'clock P.M. in
+rural assemblies.  At that hour the sound of a fiddle in process of
+tuning was heard from the inner pantry.
+
+"That's Dick," said the tranter.  "That lad's crazy for a jig."
+
+"Dick!  Now I cannot--really, I cannot have any dancing at all till
+Christmas-day is out," said old William emphatically.  "When the
+clock ha' done striking twelve, dance as much as ye like."
+
+"Well, I must say there's reason in that, William," said Mrs. Penny.
+"If you do have a party on Christmas-night, 'tis only fair and
+honourable to the sky-folk to have it a sit-still party.  Jigging
+parties be all very well on the Devil's holidays; but a jigging
+party looks suspicious now.  O yes; stop till the chock strikes,
+young folk--so say I."
+
+It happened that some warm mead accidentally got into Mr. Spinks's
+head about this time.
+
+"Dancing," he said, "is a most strengthening, livening, and courting
+movement, 'specially with a little beverage added!  And dancing is
+good.  But why disturb what is ordained, Richard and Reuben, and the
+company zhinerally?  Why, I ask, as far as that do go?"
+
+"Then nothing till after twelve," said William.
+
+Though Reuben and his wife ruled on social points, religious
+questions were mostly disposed of by the old man, whose firmness on
+this head quite counterbalanced a certain weakness in his handling
+of domestic matters.  The hopes of the younger members of the
+household were therefore relegated to a distance of one hour and
+three-quarters--a result that took visible shape in them by a remote
+and listless look about the eyes--the singing of songs being
+permitted in the interim.
+
+At five minutes to twelve the soft tuning was again heard in the
+back quarters; and when at length the clock had whizzed forth the
+last stroke, Dick appeared ready primed, and the instruments were
+boldly handled; old William very readily taking the bass-viol from
+its accustomed nail, and touching the strings as irreligiously as
+could be desired.
+
+The country-dance called the 'Triumph, or Follow my Lover,' was the
+figure with which they opened.  The tranter took for his partner
+Mrs. Penny, and Mrs. Dewy was chosen by Mr. Penny, who made so much
+of his limited height by a judicious carriage of the head,
+straightening of the back, and important flashes of his spectacle-
+glasses, that he seemed almost as tall as the tranter.  Mr. Shiner,
+age about thirty-five, farmer and church-warden, a character
+principally composed of a crimson stare, vigorous breath, and a
+watch-chain, with a mouth hanging on a dark smile but never smiling,
+had come quite willingly to the party, and showed a wondrous
+obliviousness of all his antics on the previous night.  But the
+comely, slender, prettily-dressed prize Fancy Day fell to Dick's
+hot, in spite of some private machinations of the farmer, for the
+reason that Mr. Shiner, as a richer man, had shown too much
+assurance in asking the favour, whilst Dick had been duly courteous.
+
+We gain a good view of our heroine as she advances to her place in
+the ladies' line.  She belonged to the taller division of middle
+height.  Flexibility was her first characteristic, by which she
+appeared to enjoy the most easeful rest when she was in gliding
+motion.  Her dark eyes--arched by brows of so keen, slender, and
+soft a curve, that they resembled nothing so much as two slurs in
+music--showed primarily a bright sparkle each.  This was softened by
+a frequent thoughtfulness, yet not so frequent as to do away, for
+more than a few minutes at a time, with a certain coquettishness;
+which in its turn was never so decided as to banish honesty.  Her
+lips imitated her brows in their clearly-cut outline and softness of
+bend; and her nose was well shaped--which is saying a great deal,
+when it is remembered that there are a hundred pretty mouths and
+eyes for one pretty nose.  Add to this, plentiful knots of dark-
+brown hair, a gauzy dress of white, with blue facings; and the
+slightest idea may be gained of the young maiden who showed, amidst
+the rest of the dancing-ladies, like a flower among vegetables.  And
+so the dance proceeded.  Mr. Shiner, according to the interesting
+rule laid down, deserted his own partner, and made off down the
+middle with this fair one of Dick's--the pair appearing from the top
+of the room like two persons tripping down a lane to be married.
+Dick trotted behind with what was intended to be a look of
+composure, but which was, in fact, a rather silly expression of
+feature--implying, with too much earnestness, that such an elopement
+could not be tolerated.  Then they turned and came back, when Dick
+grew more rigid around his mouth, and blushed with ingenuous ardour
+as he joined hands with the rival and formed the arch over his
+lady's head; which presumably gave the figure its name;
+relinquishing her again at setting to partners, when Mr. Shiner's
+new chain quivered in every link, and all the loose flesh upon the
+tranter--who here came into action again--shook like jelly.  Mrs.
+Penny, being always rather concerned for her personal safety when
+she danced with the tranter, fixed her face to a chronic smile of
+timidity the whole time it hasted--a peculiarity which filled her
+features with wrinkles, and reduced her eyes to little straight
+lines like hyphens, as she jigged up and down opposite him;
+repeating in her own person not only his proper movements, but also
+the minor flourishes which the richness of the tranter's imagination
+led him to introduce from time to time--an imitation which had about
+it something of slavish obedience, not unmixed with fear.
+
+The ear-rings of the ladies now flung themselves wildly about,
+turning violent summersaults, banging this way and that, and then
+swinging quietly against the ears sustaining them.  Mrs. Crumpler--a
+heavy woman, who, for some reason which nobody ever thought worth
+inquiry, danced in a clean apron--moved so smoothly through the
+figure that her feet were never seen; conveying to imaginative minds
+the idea that she rolled on castors.
+
+Minute after minute glided by, and the party reached the period when
+ladies' back-hair begins to look forgotten and dissipated; when a
+perceptible dampness makes itself apparent upon the faces even of
+delicate girls--a ghastly dew having for some time rained from the
+features of their masculine partners; when skirts begin to be torn
+out of their gathers; when elderly people, who have stood up to
+please their juniors, begin to feel sundry small tremblings in the
+region of the knees, and to wish the interminable dance was at
+Jericho; when (at country parties of the thorough sort)waistcoats
+begin to be unbuttoned, and when the fiddlers' chairs have been
+wriggled, by the frantic bowing of their occupiers, to a distance of
+about two feet from where they originally stood.
+
+Fancy was dancing with Mr. Shiner.  Dick knew that Fancy, by the law
+of good manners, was bound to dance as pleasantly with one partner
+as with another; yet he could not help suggesting to himself that
+she need not have put QUITE so much spirit into her steps, nor
+smiled QUITE so frequently whilst in the farmer's hands.
+
+"I'm afraid you didn't cast off," said Dick mildly to Mr. Shiner,
+before the latter man's watch-chain had done vibrating from a recent
+whirl.
+
+Fancy made a motion of accepting the correction; but her partner
+took no notice, and proceeded with the next movement, with an
+affectionate bend towards her.
+
+"That Shiner's too fond of her," the young man said to himself as he
+watched them.  They came to the top again, Fancy smiling warmly
+towards her partner, and went to their places.
+
+"Mr. Shiner, you didn't cast off," said Dick, for want of something
+else to demolish him with; casting off himself, and being put out at
+the farmer's irregularity.
+
+"Perhaps I sha'n't cast off for any man," said Mr. Shiner.
+
+"I think you ought to, sir."
+
+Dick's partner, a young lady of the name of Lizzy--called Lizz for
+short--tried to mollify.
+
+"I can't say that I myself have much feeling for casting off," she
+said.
+
+"Nor I," said Mrs. Penny, following up the argument, "especially if
+a friend and neighbour is set against it.  Not but that 'tis a
+terrible tasty thing in good hands and well done; yes, indeed, so
+say I."
+
+"All I meant was," said Dick, rather sorry that he had spoken
+correctingly to a guest, "that 'tis in the dance; and a man has
+hardly any right to hack and mangle what was ordained by the regular
+dance-maker, who, I daresay, got his living by making 'em, and
+thought of nothing else all his life."
+
+"I don't like casting off:  then very well; I cast off for no dance-
+maker that ever lived."
+
+Dick now appeared to be doing mental arithmetic, the act being
+really an effort to present to himself, in an abstract form, how far
+an argument with a formidable rival ought to be carried, when that
+rival was his mother's guest.  The dead-lock was put an end to by
+the stamping arrival up the middle of the tranter, who, despising
+minutiae on principle, started a theme of his own.
+
+"I assure you, neighbours," he said, "the heat of my frame no tongue
+can tell!"  He looked around and endeavoured to give, by a forcible
+gaze of self-sympathy, some faint idea of the truth.
+
+Mrs. Dewy formed one of the next couple.
+
+"Yes," she said, in an auxiliary tone, "Reuben always was such a hot
+man."
+
+Mrs. Penny implied the species of sympathy that such a class of
+affliction required, by trying to smile and to look grieved at the
+same time.
+
+"If he only walk round the garden of a Sunday morning, his shirt-
+collar is as limp as no starch at all," continued Mrs. Dewy, her
+countenance lapsing parenthetically into a housewifely expression of
+concern at the reminiscence.
+
+"Come, come, you women-folk; 'tis hands across--come, come!" said
+the tranter; and the conversation ceased for the present.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII:  THEY DANCE MORE WILDLY
+
+
+
+Dick had at length secured Fancy for that most delightful of
+country-dances, opening with six-hands-round.
+
+"Before we begin," said the tranter, "my proposal is, that 'twould
+be a right and proper plan for every mortal man in the dance to pull
+off his jacket, considering the heat."
+
+"Such low notions as you have, Reuben!  Nothing but strip will go
+down with you when you are a-dancing.  Such a hot man as he is!"
+
+"Well, now, look here, my sonnies," he argued to his wife, whom he
+often addressed in the plural masculine for economy of epithet
+merely; "I don't see that.  You dance and get hot as fire; therefore
+you lighten your clothes.  Isn't that nature and reason for gentle
+and simple?  If I strip by myself and not necessary, 'tis rather
+pot-housey I own; but if we stout chaps strip one and all, why, 'tis
+the native manners of the country, which no man can gainsay?  Hey--
+what did you say, my sonnies?"
+
+"Strip we will!" said the three other heavy men who were in the
+dance; and their coats were accordingly taken off and hung in the
+passage, whence the four sufferers from heat soon reappeared,
+marching in close column, with flapping shirt-sleeves, and having,
+as common to them all, a general glance of being now a match for any
+man or dancer in England or Ireland.  Dick, fearing to lose ground
+in Fancy's good opinion, retained his coat like the rest of the
+thinner men; and Mr. Shiner did the same from superior knowledge.
+
+And now a further phase of revelry had disclosed itself.  It was the
+time of night when a guest may write his name in the dust upon the
+tables and chairs, and a bluish mist pervades the atmosphere,
+becoming a distinct halo round the candles; when people's nostrils,
+wrinkles, and crevices in general, seem to be getting gradually
+plastered up; when the very fiddlers as well as the dancers get red
+in the face, the dancers having advanced further still towards
+incandescence, and entered the cadaverous phase; the fiddlers no
+longer sit down, but kick back their chairs and saw madly at the
+strings, with legs firmly spread and eyes closed, regardless of the
+visible world.  Again and again did Dick share his Love's hand with
+another man, and wheel round; then, more delightfully, promenade in
+a circle with her all to himself, his arm holding her waist more
+firmly each time, and his elbow getting further and further behind
+her back, till the distance reached was rather noticeable; and, most
+blissful, swinging to places shoulder to shoulder, her breath
+curling round his neck like a summer zephyr that had strayed from
+its proper date.  Threading the couples one by one they reached the
+bottom, when there arose in Dick's mind a minor misery lest the tune
+should end before they could work their way to the top again, and
+have anew the same exciting run down through.  Dick's feelings on
+actually reaching the top in spite of his doubts were supplemented
+by a mortal fear that the fiddling might even stop at this supreme
+moment; which prompted him to convey a stealthy whisper to the far-
+gone musicians, to the effect that they were not to leave off till
+he and his partner had reached the bottom of the dance once more,
+which remark was replied to by the nearest of those convulsed and
+quivering men by a private nod to the anxious young man between two
+semiquavers of the tune, and a simultaneous "All right, ay, ay,"
+without opening the eyes.  Fancy was now held so closely that Dick
+and she were practically one person.  The room became to Dick like a
+picture in a dream; all that he could remember of it afterwards
+being the look of the fiddlers going to sleep, as humming-tops
+sleep, by increasing their motion and hum, together with the figures
+of grandfather James and old Simon Crumpler sitting by the chimney-
+corner, talking and nodding in dumb-show, and beating the air to
+their emphatic sentences like people near a threshing machine.
+
+The dance ended.  "Piph-h-h-h!" said tranter Dewy, blowing out his
+breath in the very finest stream of vapour that a man's lips could
+form.  "A regular tightener, that one, sonnies!"  He wiped his
+forehead, and went to the cider and ale mugs on the table.
+
+"Well!" said Mrs. Penny, flopping into a chair, "my heart haven't
+been in such a thumping state of uproar since I used to sit up on
+old Midsummer-eves to see who my husband was going to be."
+
+"And that's getting on for a good few years ago now, from what I've
+heard you tell," said the tranter, without lifting his eyes from the
+cup he was filling.  Being now engaged in the business of handing
+round refreshments, he was warranted in keeping his coat off still,
+though the other heavy men had resumed theirs.
+
+"And a thing I never expected would come to pass, if you'll believe
+me, came to pass then," continued Mrs. Penny.  "Ah, the first spirit
+ever I see on a Midsummer-eve was a puzzle to me when he appeared, a
+hard puzzle, so say I!"
+
+"So I should have fancied," said Elias Spinks.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Penny, throwing her glance into past times, and
+talking on in a running tone of complacent abstraction, as if a
+listener were not a necessity.  "Yes; never was I in such a taking
+as on that Midsummer-eve!  I sat up, quite determined to see if John
+Wildway was going to marry me or no.  I put the bread-and-cheese and
+beer quite ready, as the witch's book ordered, and I opened the
+door, and I waited till the clock struck twelve, my nerves all alive
+and so strained that I could feel every one of 'em twitching like
+bell-wires.  Yes, sure! and when the clock had struck, ho and
+behold, I could see through the door a LITTLE SMALL man in the lane
+wi' a shoemaker's apron on."
+
+Here Mr. Penny stealthily enlarged himself half an inch.
+
+"Now, John Wildway," Mrs. Penny continued, "who courted me at that
+time, was a shoemaker, you see, but he was a very fair-sized man,
+and I couldn't believe that any such a little small man had anything
+to do wi' me, as anybody might.  But on he came, and crossed the
+threshold--not John, but actually the same little small man in the
+shoemaker's apron--"
+
+"You needn't be so mighty particular about little and small!" said
+her husband.
+
+"In he walks, and down he sits, and O my goodness me, didn't I flee
+upstairs, body and soul hardly hanging together!  Well, to cut a
+long story short, by-long and by-late.  John Wildway and I had a
+miff and parted; and lo and behold, the coming man came!  Penny
+asked me if I'd go snacks with him, and afore I knew what I was
+about a'most, the thing was done."
+
+"I've fancied you never knew better in your life; but I mid be
+mistaken," said Mr. Penny in a murmur.
+
+After Mrs. Penny had spoken, there being no new occupation for her
+eyes, she still let them stay idling on the past scenes just
+related, which were apparently visible to her in the centre of the
+room Mr. Penny's remark received no reply.
+
+During this discourse the tranter and his wife might have been
+observed standing in an unobtrusive corner, in mysterious closeness
+to each other, a just perceptible current of intelligence passing
+from each to each, which had apparently no relation whatever to the
+conversation of their guests, but much to their sustenance.  A
+conclusion of some kind having at length been drawn, the palpable
+confederacy of man and wife was once more obliterated, the tranter
+marching off into the pantry, humming a tune that he couldn't quite
+recollect, and then breaking into the words of a song of which he
+could remember about one line and a quarter.  Mrs. Dewy spoke a few
+words about preparations for a bit of supper.
+
+That elder portion of the company which loved eating and drinking
+put on a look to signify that till this moment they had quite
+forgotten that it was customary to expect suppers on these
+occasions; going even further than this politeness of feature, and
+starting irrelevant subjects, the exceeding flatness and forced tone
+of which rather betrayed their object.  The younger members said
+they were quite hungry, and that supper would be delightful though
+it was so late.
+
+Good luck attended Dick's love-passes during the meal.  He sat next
+Fancy, and had the thrilling pleasure of using permanently a glass
+which had been taken by Fancy in mistake; of letting the outer edge
+of the sole of his boot touch the lower verge of her skirt; and to
+add to these delights the cat, which had lain unobserved in her hap
+for several minutes, crept across into his own, touching him with
+fur that had touched her hand a moment before.  There were, besides,
+some little pleasures in the shape of helping her to vegetable she
+didn't want, and when it had nearly alighted on her plate taking it
+across for his own use, on the plea of waste not, want not.  He
+also, from time to time, sipped sweet sly glances at her profile;
+noticing the set of her head, the curve of her throat, and other
+artistic properties of the lively goddess, who the while kept up a
+rather free, not to say too free, conversation with Mr. Shiner
+sitting opposite; which, after some uneasy criticism, and much
+shifting of argument backwards and forwards in Dick's mind, he
+decided not to consider of alarming significance.
+
+"A new music greets our ears now," said Miss Fancy, alluding, with
+the sharpness that her position as village sharpener demanded, to
+the contrast between the rattle of knives and forks and the late
+notes of the fiddlers.
+
+"Ay; and I don't know but what 'tis sweeter in tone when you get
+above forty," said the tranter; "except, in faith, as regards father
+there.  Never such a mortal man as he for tunes.  They do move his
+soul; don't 'em, father?"
+
+The eldest Dewy smiled across from his distant chair an assent to
+Reuben's remark.
+
+"Spaking of being moved in soul," said Mr. Penny, "I shall never
+forget the first time I heard the "Dead March."  'Twas at poor
+Corp'l Nineman's funeral at Casterbridge.  It fairly made my hair
+creep and fidget about like a vlock of sheep--ah, it did, souls!
+And when they had done, and the last trump had sounded, and the guns
+was fired over the dead hero's grave, a' icy-cold drop o' moist
+sweat hung upon my forehead, and another upon my jawbone.  Ah, 'tis
+a very solemn thing!"
+
+"Well, as to father in the corner there," the tranter said, pointing
+to old William, who was in the act of filling his mouth; "he'd
+starve to death for music's sake now, as much as when he was a boy-
+chap of fifteen."
+
+"Truly, now," said Michael Mail, clearing the corner of his throat
+in the manner of a man who meant to be convincing; 'there's a
+friendly tie of some sort between music and eating."  He lifted the
+cup to his mouth, and drank himself gradually backwards from a
+perpendicular position to a slanting one, during which time his
+looks performed a circuit from the wall opposite him to the ceiling
+overhead.  Then clearing the other corner of his throat:  'Once I
+was a-setting in the little kitchen of the Dree Mariners at
+Casterbridge, having a bit of dinner, and a brass band struck up in
+the street.  Such a beautiful band as that were!  I was setting
+eating fried liver and lights, I well can mind--ah, I was! and to
+save my life, I couldn't help chawing to the tune.  Band played six-
+eight time; six-eight chaws I, willynilly.  Band plays common;
+common time went my teeth among the liver and lights as true as a
+hair.  Beautiful 'twere!  Ah, I shall never forget that there band!"
+
+"That's as tuneful a thing as ever I heard of," said grandfather
+James, with the absent gaze which accompanies profound criticism.
+
+"I don't like Michael's tuneful stories then," said Mrs. Dewy.
+"They are quite coarse to a person o' decent taste."
+
+Old Michael's mouth twitched here and there, as if he wanted to
+smile but didn't know where to begin, which gradually settled to an
+expression that it was not displeasing for a nice woman like the
+tranter's wife to correct him.
+
+"Well, now," said Reuben, with decisive earnestness, "that sort o'
+coarse touch that's so upsetting to Ann's feelings is to my mind a
+recommendation; for it do always prove a story to be true.  And for
+the same reason, I like a story with a bad moral.  My sonnies, all
+true stories have a coarse touch or a bad moral, depend upon't.  If
+the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true
+stories, who'd ha' troubled to invent parables?"  Saying this the
+tranter arose to fetch a new stock of cider, ale, mead, and home-
+made wines.
+
+Mrs. Dewy sighed, and appended a remark (ostensibly behind her
+husband's back, though that the words should reach his ears
+distinctly was understood by both):  "Such a man as Dewy is!  Nobody
+do know the trouble I have to keep that man barely respectable.  And
+did you ever hear too--just now at supper-time--talking about
+"taties" with Michael in such a work-folk way.  Well, 'tis what I
+was never brought up to!  With our family 'twas never less than
+"taters," and very often "pertatoes" outright; mother was so
+particular and nice with us girls there was no family in the parish
+that kept them selves up more than we."
+
+The hour of parting came.  Fancy could not remain for the night,
+because she had engaged a woman to wait up for her.  She disappeared
+temporarily from the flagging party of dancers, and then came
+downstairs wrapped up and looking altogether a different person from
+whom she had been hitherto, in fact (to Dick's sadness and
+disappointment), a woman somewhat reserved and of a phlegmatic
+temperament--nothing left in her of the romping girl that she had
+seemed but a short quarter-hour before, who had not minded the
+weight of Dick's hand upon her waist, nor shirked the purlieus of
+the mistletoe.
+
+"What a difference!" thought the young man--hoary cynic pro tem.
+"What a miserable deceiving difference between the manners of a
+maid's life at dancing times and at others!  Look at this lovely
+Fancy!  Through the whole past evening touchable, squeezeable--even
+kissable!  For whole half-hours I held her so chose to me that not a
+sheet of paper could have been shipped between us; and I could feel
+her heart only just outside my own, her life beating on so close to
+mine, that I was aware of every breath in it.  A flit is made
+upstairs--a hat and a cloak put on--and I no more dare to touch her
+than--"  Thought failed him, and he returned to realities.
+
+But this was an endurable misery in comparison with what followed.
+Mr. Shiner and his watch-chain, taking the intrusive advantage that
+ardent bachelors who are going homeward along the same road as a
+pretty young woman always do take of that circumstance, came forward
+to assure Fancy--with a total disregard of Dick's emotions, and in
+tones which were certainly not frigid--that he (Shiner) was not the
+man to go to bed before seeing his Lady Fair safe within her own
+door--not he, nobody should say he was that;--and that he would not
+leave her side an inch till the thing was done--drown him if he
+would.  The proposal was assented to by Miss Day, in Dick's
+foreboding judgment, with one degree--or at any rate, an appreciable
+fraction of a degree--of warmth beyond that required by a
+disinterested desire for protection from the dangers of the night.
+
+All was over; and Dick surveyed the chair she had last occupied,
+looking now like a setting from which the gem has been torn.  There
+stood her glass, and the romantic teaspoonful of elder wine at the
+bottom that she couldn't drink by trying ever so hard, in obedience
+to the mighty arguments of the tranter (his hand coming down upon
+her shoulder the while, like a Nasmyth hammer); but the drinker was
+there no longer.  There were the nine or ten pretty little crumbs
+she had left on her plate; but the eater was no more seen.
+
+There seemed a disagreeable closeness of relationship between
+himself and the members of his family, now that they were left alone
+again face to face.  His father seemed quite offensive for appearing
+to be in just as high spirits as when the guests were there; and as
+for grandfather James (who had not yet left), he was quite fiendish
+in being rather glad they were gone.
+
+"Really," said the tranter, in a tone of placid satisfaction, "I've
+had so little time to attend to myself all the evenen, that I mean
+to enjoy a quiet meal now!  A slice of this here ham--neither too
+fat nor too lean--so; and then a drop of this vinegar and pickles--
+there, that's it--and I shall be as fresh as a lark again!  And to
+tell the truth, my sonny, my inside has been as dry as a lime-basket
+all night."
+
+"I like a party very well once in a while," said Mrs. Dewy, leaving
+off the adorned tones she had been bound to use throughout the
+evening, and returning to the natural marriage voice; "but, Lord,
+'tis such a sight of heavy work next day!  What with the dirty
+plates, and knives and forks, and dust and smother, and bits kicked
+off your furniture, and I don't know what all, why a body could
+a'most wish there were no such things as Christmases . . . Ah-h
+dear!" she yawned, till the chock in the corner had ticked several
+beats.  She cast her eyes round upon the displaced, dust-laden
+furniture, and sank down overpowered at the sight.
+
+"Well, I be getting all right by degrees, thank the Lord for't!"
+said the tranter cheerfully through a mangled mass of ham and bread,
+without lifting his eyes from his plate, and chopping away with his
+knife and fork as if he were felling trees.  "Ann, you may as well
+go on to bed at once, and not bide there making such sleepy faces;
+you look as long-favoured as a fiddle, upon my life, Ann.  There,
+you must be wearied out, 'tis true.  I'll do the doors and draw up
+the clock; and you go on, or you'll be as white as a sheet to-
+morrow."
+
+"Ay; I don't know whether I shan't or no."  The matron passed her
+hand across her eyes to brush away the film of sheep till she got
+upstairs.
+
+Dick wondered how it was that when people were married they could be
+so blind to romance; and was quite certain that if he ever took to
+wife that dear impossible Fancy, he and she would never be so
+dreadfully practical and undemonstrative of the Passion as his
+father and mother were.  The most extraordinary thing was, that all
+the fathers and mothers he knew were just as undemonstrative as his
+own.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX:  DICK CALLS AT THE SCHOOL
+
+
+
+The early days of the year drew on, and Fancy, having spent the
+holiday weeks at borne, returned again to Mellstock.
+
+Every spare minute of the week following her return was used by Dick
+in accidentally passing the schoolhouse in his journeys about the
+neighbourhood; but not once did she make herself visible.  A
+handkerchief belonging to her had been providentially found by his
+mother in clearing the rooms the day after that of the dance; and by
+much contrivance Dick got it handed over to him, to leave with her
+at any time he should be near the school after her return.  But he
+delayed taking the extreme measure of calling with it lest, had she
+really no sentiment of interest in him, it might be regarded as a
+slightly absurd errand, the reason guessed; and the sense of the
+ludicrous, which was rather keen in her, do his dignity considerable
+injury in her eyes; and what she thought of him, even apart from the
+question of her loving, was all the world to him now.
+
+But the hour came when the patience of love at twenty-one could
+endure no longer.  One Saturday he approached the school with a mild
+air of indifference, and had the satisfaction of seeing the object
+of his quest at the further end of her garden, trying, by the aid of
+a spade and gloves, to root a bramble that had intruded itself
+there.
+
+He disguised his feelings from some suspicious-looking cottage-
+windows opposite by endeavouring to appear like a man in a great
+hurry of business, who wished to leave the handkerchief and have
+done with such trifling errands.
+
+This endeavour signally failed; for on approaching the gate he found
+it locked to keep the children, who were playing 'cross-dadder' in
+the front, from running into her private grounds.
+
+She did not see him; and he could only think of one thing to be
+done, which was to shout her name.
+
+"Miss Day!"
+
+The words were uttered with a jerk and a look meant to imply to the
+cottages opposite that he was now simply one who liked shouting as a
+pheasant way of passing his time, without any reference to persons
+in gardens.  The name died away, and the unconscious Miss Day
+continued digging and pulling as before.
+
+He screwed himself up to enduring the cottage-windows yet more
+stoically, and shouted again.  Fancy took no notice whatever.
+
+He shouted the third time, with desperate vehemence, turning
+suddenly about and retiring a little distance, as if it were by no
+means for his own pleasure that he had come.
+
+This time she heard him, came down the garden, and entered the
+school at the back.  Footsteps echoed across the interior, the door
+opened, and three-quarters of the blooming young schoolmistress's
+face and figure stood revealed before him; a slice on her left-hand
+side being cut off by the edge of the door.  Having surveyed and
+recognized him, she came to the gate.
+
+At sight of him had the pink of her cheeks increased, lessened, or
+did it continue to cover its normal area of ground?  It was a
+question meditated several hundreds of times by her visitor in
+after-hours--the meditation, after wearying involutions, always
+ending in one way, that it was impossible to say.
+
+"Your handkerchief:  Miss Day:  I called with."  He held it out
+spasmodically and awkwardly.  "Mother found it:  under a chair."
+
+"O, thank you very much for bringing it, Mr. Dewy.  I couldn't think
+where I had dropped it."
+
+Now Dick, not being an experienced lover--indeed, never before
+having been engaged in the practice of love-making at all, except in
+a small schoolboy way--could not take advantage of the situation;
+and out came the blunder, which afterwards cost him so many bitter
+moments and a sleepless night:-
+
+"Good morning, Miss Day."
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Dewy."
+
+The gate was closed; she was gone; and Dick was standing outside,
+unchanged in his condition from what he had been before he called.
+Of course the Angel was not to blame--a young woman living alone in
+a house could not ask him indoors unless she had known him better--
+he should have kept her outside before floundering into that fatal
+farewell.  He wished that before he called he had realized more
+fully than he did the pleasure of being about to call; and turned
+away.
+
+
+
+
+PART THE SECOND--SPRING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I:  PASSING BY THE SCHOOL
+
+
+
+It followed that, as the spring advanced, Dick walked abroad much
+more frequently than had hitherto been usual with him, and was
+continually finding that his nearest way to or from home lay by the
+road which skirted the garden of the school.  The first-fruits of
+his perseverance were that, on turning the angle on the nineteenth
+journey by that track, he saw Miss Fancy's figure, clothed in a
+dark-gray dress, looking from a high open window upon the crown of
+his hat.  The friendly greeting resulting from this rencounter was
+considered so valuable an elixir that Dick passed still oftener; and
+by the time he had almost trodden a little path under the fence
+where never a path was before, he was rewarded with an actual
+meeting face to face on the open road before her gate.  This brought
+another meeting, and another, Fancy faintly showing by her bearing
+that it was a pleasure to her of some kind to see him there but the
+sort of pleasure she derived, whether exultation at the hope her
+exceeding fairness inspired, or the true feeling which was alone
+Dick's concern, he could not anyhow decide, although he meditated on
+her every little movement for hours after it was made.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II:  A MEETING OF THE QUIRE
+
+
+
+It was the evening of a fine spring day.  The descending sun
+appeared as a nebulous blaze of amber light, its outline being lost
+in cloudy masses hanging round it, like wild locks of hair.
+
+The chief members of Mellstock parish choir were standing in a group
+in front of Mr. Penny's workshop in the lower village.  They were
+all brightly illuminated, and each was backed up by a shadow as long
+as a steeple the lowness of the source of light rendering the brims
+of their hats of no use at all as a protection to the eyes.
+
+Mr. Penny's was the last house in that part of the parish, and stood
+in a hollow by the roadside so that cart-wheels and horses' legs
+were about level with the sill of his shop-window.  This was low and
+wide, and was open from morning till evening, Mr. Penny himself
+being invariably seen working inside, like a framed portrait of a
+shoemaker by some modern Moroni.  He sat facing the road, with a
+boot on his knees and the awl in his hand, only looking up for a
+moment as he stretched out his arms and bent forward at the pull,
+when his spectacles flashed in the passer's face with a shine of
+flat whiteness, and then returned again to the boot as usual.  Rows
+of lasts, small and large, stout and slender, covered the wall which
+formed the background, in the extreme shadow of which a kind of
+dummy was seen sitting, in the shape of an apprentice with a string
+tied round his hair (probably to keep it out of his eyes).  He
+smiled at remarks that floated in from without, but was never known
+to answer them in Mr. Penny's presence.  Outside the window the
+upper-leather of a Wellington-boot was usually hung, pegged to a
+board as if to dry.  No sign was over his door; in fact--as with old
+banks and mercantile houses--advertising in any shape was scorned,
+and it would have been felt as beneath his dignity to paint up, for
+the benefit of strangers, the name of an establishment whose trade
+came solely by connection based on personal respect.
+
+His visitors now came and stood on the outside of his window,
+sometimes leaning against the sill, sometimes moving a pace or two
+backwards and forwards in front of it.  They talked with deliberate
+gesticulations to Mr. Penny, enthroned in the shadow of the
+interior.
+
+"I do like a man to stick to men who be in the same line o' life--o'
+Sundays, anyway--that I do so."
+
+"'Tis like all the doings of folk who don't know what a day's work
+is, that's what I say."
+
+"My belief is the man's not to blame; 'tis SHE--she's the bitter
+weed!"
+
+"No, not altogether.  He's a poor gawk-hammer.  Look at his sermon
+yesterday."
+
+"His sermon was well enough, a very good guessable sermon, only he
+couldn't put it into words and speak it.  That's all was the matter
+wi' the sermon.  He hadn't been able to get it past his pen."
+
+"Well--ay, the sermon might have been good; for, 'tis true, the
+sermon of Old Eccl'iastes himself lay in Eccl'iastes's ink-bottle
+afore he got it out."
+
+Mr. Penny, being in the act of drawing the last stitch tight, could
+afford time to look up and throw in a word at this point.
+
+"He's no spouter--that must be said, 'a b'lieve."
+
+"'Tis a terrible muddle sometimes with the man, as far as spout do
+go," said Spinks.
+
+"Well, we'll say nothing about that," the tranter answered; "for I
+don't believe 'twill make a penneth o' difference to we poor martels
+here or hereafter whether his sermons be good or bad, my sonnies."
+
+Mr. Penny made another hole with his awl, pushed in the thread, and
+looked up and spoke again at the extension of arms.
+
+"'Tis his goings-on, souls, that's what it is."  He clenched his
+features for an Herculean addition to the ordinary pull, and
+continued, "The first thing he done when he came here was to be hot
+and strong about church business."
+
+"True," said Spinks; "that was the very first thing he done."
+
+Mr. Penny, having now been offered the ear of the assembly, accepted
+it, ceased stitching, swallowed an unimportant quantity of air as if
+it were a pill, and continued:
+
+"The next thing he do do is to think about altering the church,
+until he found 'twould be a matter o' cost and what not, and then
+not to think no more about it."
+
+"True:  that was the next thing he done."
+
+"And the next thing was to tell the young chaps that they were not
+on no account to put their hats in the christening font during
+service."
+
+"True."
+
+"And then 'twas this, and then 'twas that, and now 'tis--"
+
+Words were not forcible enough to conclude the sentence, and Mr.
+Penny gave a huge pull to signify the concluding word.
+
+"Now 'tis to turn us out of the quire neck and crop," said the
+tranter after an interval of half a minute, not by way of explaining
+the pause and pull, which had been quite understood, but as a means
+of keeping the subject well before the meeting.
+
+Mrs. Penny came to the door at this point in the discussion.  Like
+all good wives, however much she was inclined to play the Tory to
+her husband's Whiggism, and vice versa, in times of peace, she
+coalesced with him heartily enough in time of war.
+
+"It must be owned he's not all there," she replied in a general way
+to the fragments of talk she had heard from indoors.  "Far below
+poor Mr. Grinham" (the late vicar).
+
+"Ay, there was this to be said for he, that you were quite sure he'd
+never come mumbudgeting to see ye, just as you were in the middle of
+your work, and put you out with his fuss and trouble about ye."
+
+"Never.  But as for this new Mr. Maybold, though he mid be a very
+well-intending party in that respect, he's unbearable; for as to
+sifting your cinders, scrubbing your floors, or emptying your slops,
+why, you can't do it.  I assure you I've not been able to empt them
+for several days, unless I throw 'em up the chimley or out of
+winder; for as sure as the sun you meet him at the door, coming to
+ask how you are, and 'tis such a confusing thing to meet a gentleman
+at the door when ye are in the mess o' washing."
+
+"'Tis only for want of knowing better, poor gentleman," said the
+tranter.  "His meaning's good enough.  Ay, your pa'son comes by
+fate:  'tis heads or tails, like pitch-halfpenny, and no choosing;
+so we must take en as he is, my sonnies, and thank God he's no
+worse, I suppose."
+
+"I fancy I've seen him look across at Miss Day in a warmer way than
+Christianity asked for," said Mrs. Penny musingly; "but I don't
+quite like to say it."
+
+"O no; there's nothing in that," said grandfather William.
+
+"If there's nothing, we shall see nothing," Mrs. Penny replied, in
+the tone of a woman who might possibly have private opinions still.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Grinham was the man!" said Bowman.  "Why, he never troubled
+us wi' a visit from year's end to year's end.  You might go
+anywhere, do anything:  you'd be sure never to see him."
+
+"Yes, he was a right sensible pa'son," said Michael.  "He never
+entered our door but once in his life, and that was to tell my poor
+wife--ay, poor soul, dead and gone now, as we all shall I--that as
+she was such a' old aged person, and lived so far from the church,
+he didn't at all expect her to come any more to the service."
+
+"And 'a was a very jinerous gentleman about choosing the psalms and
+hymns o' Sundays.  'Confound ye,' says he, 'blare and scrape what ye
+will, but don't bother me!'"
+
+"And he was a very honourable man in not wanting any of us to come
+and hear him if we were all on-end for a jaunt or spree, or to bring
+the babies to be christened if they were inclined to squalling.
+There's good in a man's not putting a parish to unnecessary
+trouble."
+
+"And there's this here man never letting us have a bit o' peace; but
+keeping on about being good and upright till 'tis carried to such a
+pitch as I never see the like afore nor since!"
+
+"No sooner had he got here than he found the font wouldn't hold
+water, as it hadn't for years off and on; and when I told him that
+Mr. Grinham never minded it, but used to spet upon his vinger and
+christen 'em just as well, 'a said, 'Good Heavens!  Send for a
+workman immediate.  What place have I come to!'  Which was no
+compliment to us, come to that."
+
+"Still, for my part," said old William, "though he's arrayed against
+us, I like the hearty borussnorus ways of the new pa'son."
+
+"You, ready to die for the quire," said Bowman reproachfully, "to
+stick up for the quire's enemy, William!"
+
+"Nobody will feel the loss of our church-work so much as I," said
+the old man firmly; "that you d'all know.  I've a-been in the quire
+man and boy ever since I was a chiel of eleven.  But for all that
+'tisn't in me to call the man a bad man, because I truly and
+sincerely believe en to be a good young feller."
+
+Some of the youthful sparkle that used to reside there animated
+William's eye as he uttered the words, and a certain nobility of
+aspect was also imparted to him by the setting sun, which gave him a
+Titanic shadow at least thirty feet in length, stretching away to
+the east in outlines of imposing magnitude, his head finally
+terminating upon the trunk of a grand old oak-tree.
+
+"Mayble's a hearty feller enough," the tranter replied, "and will
+spak to you be you dirty or be you clane.  The first time I met en
+was in a drong, and though 'a didn't know me no more than the dead,
+'a passed the time of day.  'D'ye do?' he said, says he, nodding his
+head.  'A fine day.'  Then the second time I met en was full-buff in
+town street, when my breeches were tore into a long strent by
+getting through a copse of thorns and brimbles for a short cut home-
+along; and not wanting to disgrace the man by spaking in that state,
+I fixed my eye on the weathercock to let en pass me as a stranger.
+But no:  'How d'ye do, Reuben?' says he, right hearty, and shook my
+hand.  If I'd been dressed in silver spangles from top to toe, the
+man couldn't have been civiller."
+
+At this moment Dick was seen coming up the village-street, and they
+turned and watched him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III:  A TURN IN THE DISCUSSION
+
+
+
+"I'm afraid Dick's a lost man," said the tranter.
+
+"What?--no!" said Mail, implying by his manner that it was a far
+commoner thing for his ears to report what was not said than that
+his judgment should be at fault.
+
+"Ay," said the tranter, still gazing at Dick's unconscious advance.
+"I don't at all like what I see!  There's too many o' them looks out
+of the winder without noticing anything; too much shining of boots;
+too much peeping round corners; too much looking at the clock;
+telling about clever things SHE did till you be sick of it; and then
+upon a hint to that effect a horrible silence about her.  I've
+walked the path once in my life and know the country, neighbours;
+and Dick's a lost man!"  The tranter turned a quarter round and
+smiled a smile of miserable satire at the setting new moon, which
+happened to catch his eye.
+
+The others became far too serious at this announcement to allow them
+to speak; and they still regarded Dick in the distance.
+
+"'Twas his mother's fault," the tranter continued, "in asking the
+young woman to our party last Christmas.  When I eyed the blue frock
+and light heels o' the maid, I had my thoughts directly.  'God bless
+thee, Dicky my sonny,' I said to myself; 'there's a delusion for
+thee!'"
+
+"They seemed to be rather distant in manner last Sunday, I thought?"
+Mail tentatively observed, as became one who was not a member of the
+family.
+
+"Ay, that's a part of the zickness.  Distance belongs to it, slyness
+belongs to it, queerest things on earth belongs to it!  There, 'tmay
+as well come early as late s'far as I know.  The sooner begun, the
+sooner over; for come it will."
+
+"The question I ask is," said Mr. Spinks, connecting into one thread
+the two subjects of discourse, as became a man learned in rhetoric,
+and beating with his hand in a way which signified that the manner
+rather than the matter of his speech was to be observed, "how did
+Mr. Maybold know she could play the organ?  You know we had it from
+her own lips, as far as hips go, that she has never, first or last,
+breathed such a thing to him; much less that she ever would play."
+
+In the midst of this puzzle Dick joined the party, and the news
+which had caused such a convulsion among the ancient musicians was
+unfolded to him.  "Well," he said, blushing at the allusion to Miss
+Day, "I know by some words of hers that she has a particular wish
+not to play, because she is a friend of ours; and how the alteration
+comes, I don't know."
+
+"Now, this is my plan," said the tranter, reviving the spirit of the
+discussion by the infusion of new ideas, as was his custom--"this is
+my plan; if you don't like it, no harm's done.  We all know one
+another very well, don't we, neighbours?"
+
+That they knew one another very well was received as a statement
+which, though familiar, should not be omitted in introductory
+speeches.
+
+"Then I say this"--and the tranter in his emphasis slapped down his
+hand on Mr. Spinks's shoulder with a momentum of several pounds,
+upon which Mr. Spinks tried to look not in the least startled--"I
+say that we all move down-along straight as a line to Pa'son
+Mayble's when the clock has gone six to-morrow night.  There we one
+and all stand in the passage, then one or two of us go in and spak
+to en, man and man; and say, 'Pa'son Mayble, every tradesman d'like
+to have his own way in his workshop, and Mellstock Church is yours.
+Instead of turning us out neck and crop, let us stay on till
+Christmas, and we'll gie way to the young woman, Mr. Mayble, and
+make no more ado about it.  And we shall always be quite willing to
+touch our hats when we meet ye, Mr. Mayble, just as before.'  That
+sounds very well?  Hey?"
+
+"Proper well, in faith, Reuben Dewy."
+
+"And we won't sit down in his house; 'twould be looking too familiar
+when only just reconciled?"
+
+"No need at all to sit down.  Just do our duty man and man, turn
+round, and march out--he'll think all the more of us for it."
+
+"I hardly think Leaf had better go wi' us?" said Michael, turning to
+Leaf and taking his measure from top to bottom by the eye.  "He's so
+terrible silly that he might ruin the concern."
+
+"He don't want to go much; do ye, Thomas Leaf?" said William.
+
+"Hee-hee! no; I don't want to.  Only a teeny bit!"
+
+"I be mortal afeard, Leaf; that you'll never be able to tell how
+many cuts d'take to sharpen a spar," said Mail.
+
+"I never had no head, never! that's how it happened to happen, hee-
+hee!"
+
+They all assented to this, not with any sense of humiliating Leaf by
+disparaging him after an open confession, but because it was an
+accepted thing that Leaf didn't in the least mind having no head,
+that deficiency of his being an unimpassioned matter of parish
+history.
+
+"But I can sing my treble!" continued Thomas Leaf; quite delighted
+at being called a fool in such a friendly way; "I can sing my treble
+as well as any maid, or married woman either, and better!  And if
+Jim had lived, I should have had a clever brother!  To-morrow is
+poor Jim's birthday.  He'd ha' been twenty-six if he'd lived till
+to-morrow."
+
+"You always seem very sorry for Jim," said old William musingly.
+
+"Ah!  I do.  Such a stay to mother as he'd always ha' been!  She'd
+never have had to work in her old age if he had continued strong,
+poor Jim!"
+
+"What was his age when 'a died?"
+
+"Four hours and twenty minutes, poor Jim.  'A was born as might be
+at night; and 'a didn't last as might be till the morning.  No, 'a
+didn't last.  Mother called en Jim on the day that would ha' been
+his christening day if he had lived; and she's always thinking about
+en.  You see he died so very young."
+
+"Well, 'twas rather youthful," said Michael.
+
+"Now to my mind that woman is very romantical on the matter o'
+children?" said the tranter, his eye sweeping his audience.
+
+"Ah, well she mid be," said Leaf.  "She had twelve regular one after
+another, and they all, except myself; died very young; either before
+they was born or just afterwards."
+
+"Pore feller, too.  I suppose th'st want to come wi' us?" the
+tranter murmured.
+
+"Well, Leaf; you shall come wi' us as yours is such a melancholy
+family," said old William rather sadly.
+
+"I never see such a melancholy family as that afore in my life,"
+said Reuben.  "There's Leaf's mother, poor woman!  Every morning I
+see her eyes mooning out through the panes of glass like a pot-sick
+winder-flower; and as Leaf sings a very high treble, and we don't
+know what we should do without en for upper G, we'll let en come as
+a trate, poor feller."
+
+"Ay, we'll let en come, 'a b'lieve," said Mr. Penny, looking up, as
+the pull happened to be at that moment.
+
+"Now," continued the tranter, dispersing by a new tone of voice
+these digressions about Leaf; "as to going to see the pa'son, one of
+us might call and ask en his meaning, and 'twould be just as well
+done; but it will add a bit of flourish to the cause if the quire
+waits on him as a body.  Then the great thing to mind is, not for
+any of our fellers to be nervous; so before starting we'll one and
+all come to my house and have a rasher of bacon; then every man-jack
+het a pint of cider into his inside; then we'll warm up an extra
+drop wi' some mead and a bit of ginger; every one take a thimbleful-
+-just a glimmer of a drop, mind ye, no more, to finish off his inner
+man--and march off to Pa'son Mayble.  Why, sonnies, a man's not
+himself till he is fortified wi' a bit and a drop?  We shall be able
+to look any gentleman in the face then without shrink or shame."
+
+Mail recovered from a deep meditation and downward glance into the
+earth in time to give a cordial approval to this line of action, and
+the meeting adjourned.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV:  INTERVIEW WITH THE VICAR
+
+
+
+At six o'clock the next day, the whole body of men in the choir
+emerged from the tranter's door, and advanced with a firm step down
+the lane.  This dignity of march gradually became obliterated as
+they went on, and by the time they reached the hill behind the
+vicarage a faint resemblance to a flock of sheep might have been
+discerned in the venerable party.  A word from the tranter, however,
+set them right again; and as they descended the hill, the regular
+tramp, tramp, tramp of the united feet was clearly audible from the
+vicarage garden.  At the opening of the gate there was another short
+interval of irregular shuffling, caused by a rather peculiar habit
+the gate had, when swung open quickly, of striking against the bank
+and slamming back into the opener's face.
+
+"Now keep step again, will ye?" said the tranter.  "It looks better,
+and more becomes the high class of arrant which has brought us
+here."  Thus they advanced to the door.
+
+At Reuben's ring the more modest of the group turned aside, adjusted
+their hats, and looked critically at any shrub that happened to lie
+in the line of vision; endeavouring thus to give a person who
+chanced to look out of the windows the impression that their
+request, whatever it was going to be, was rather a casual thought
+occurring whilst they were inspecting the vicar's shrubbery and
+grass-plot than a predetermined thing.  The tranter, who, coming
+frequently to the vicarage with luggage, coals, firewood, etc., had
+none of the awe for its precincts that filled the breasts of most of
+the others, fixed his eyes firmly on the knocker during this
+interval of waiting.  The knocker having no characteristic worthy of
+notice, he relinquished it for a knot in one of the door-panels, and
+studied the winding lines of the grain.
+
+"O, sir, please, here's Tranter Dewy, and old William Dewy, and
+young Richard Dewy, O, and all the quire too, sir, except the boys,
+a-come to see you!" said Mr. Maybold's maid-servant to Mr. Maybold,
+the pupils of her eyes dilating like circles in a pond.
+
+"All the choir?" said the astonished vicar (who may be shortly
+described as a good-looking young man with courageous eyes, timid
+mouth, and neutral nose), abandoning his writing and looking at his
+parlour-maid after speaking, like a man who fancied he had seen her
+face before but couldn't recollect where.
+
+"And they looks very firm, and Tranter Dewy do turn neither to the
+right hand nor to the left, but stares quite straight and solemn
+with his mind made up!"
+
+"O, all the choir," repeated the vicar to himself; trying by that
+simple device to trot out his thoughts on what the choir could come
+for.
+
+"Yes; every man-jack of 'em, as I be alive!"  (The parlour-maid was
+rather local in manner, having in fact been raised in the same
+village.)  "Really, sir, 'tis thoughted by many in town and country
+that--"
+
+"Town and country!--Heavens, I had no idea that I was public
+property in this way!" said the vicar, his face acquiring a hue
+somewhere between that of the rose and the peony.  "Well, 'It is
+thought in town and country that--'"
+
+"It is thought that you be going to get it hot and strong--excusen
+my incivility, sir."
+
+The vicar suddenly recalled to his recollection that he had long ago
+settled it to be decidedly a mistake to encourage his servant Jane
+in giving personal opinions.  The servant Jane saw by the vicar's
+face that he recalled this fact to his mind; and removing her
+forehead from the edge of the door, and rubbing away the indent that
+edge had made, vanished into the passage as Mr. Maybold remarked,
+"Show them in, Jane."
+
+A few minutes later a shuffling and jostling (reduced to as refined
+a form as was compatible with the nature of shuffles and jostles)
+was heard in the passage; then an earnest and prolonged wiping of
+shoes, conveying the notion that volumes of mud had to be removed;
+but the roads being so clean that not a particle of dirt appeared on
+the choir's boots (those of all the elder members being newly oiled,
+and Dick's brightly polished), this wiping might have been set down
+simply as a desire to show that respectable men had no wish to take
+a mean advantage of clean roads for curtailing proper ceremonies.
+Next there came a powerful whisper from the same quarter:-
+
+"Now stand stock-still there, my sonnies, one and all!  And don't
+make no noise; and keep your backs close to the wall, that company
+may pass in and out easy if they want to without squeezing through
+ye:  and we two are enough to go in." . . . The voice was the
+tranter's.
+
+"I wish I could go in too and see the sight!" said a reedy voice--
+that of Leaf.
+
+"'Tis a pity Leaf is so terrible silly, or else he might," said
+another.
+
+"I never in my life seed a quire go into a study to have it out
+about the playing and singing," pleaded Leaf; "and I should like to
+see it just once!"
+
+"Very well; we'll let en come in," said the tranter.  "You'll be
+like chips in porridge, {1} Leaf--neither good nor hurt.  All right,
+my sonny, come along;" and immediately himself, old William, and
+Leaf appeared in the room.
+
+"We took the liberty to come and see 'ee, sir," said Reuben, letting
+his hat hang in his left hand, and touching with his right the brim
+of an imaginary one on his head.  "We've come to see 'ee, sir, man
+and man, and no offence, I hope?"
+
+"None at all," said Mr. Maybold.
+
+"This old aged man standing by my side is father; William Dewy by
+name, sir."
+
+"Yes; I see it is," said the vicar, nodding aside to old William,
+who smiled.
+
+"I thought you mightn't know en without his bass-viol," the tranter
+apologized.  "You see, he always wears his best clothes and his
+bass-viol a-Sundays, and it do make such a difference in a' old
+man's look."
+
+"And who's that young man?" the vicar said.
+
+"Tell the pa'son yer name," said the tranter, turning to Leaf; who
+stood with his elbows nailed back to a bookcase.
+
+"Please, Thomas Leaf, your holiness!" said Leaf; trembling.
+
+"I hope you'll excuse his looks being so very thin," continued the
+tranter deprecatingly, turning to the vicar again.  "But 'tisn't his
+fault, poor feller.  He's rather silly by nature, and could never
+get fat; though he's a' excellent treble, and so we keep him on."
+
+"I never had no head, sir," said Leaf; eagerly grasping at this
+opportunity for being forgiven his existence.
+
+"Ah, poor young man!" said Mr. Maybold.
+
+"Bless you, he don't mind it a bit, if you don't, sir," said the
+tranter assuringly.  "Do ye, Leaf?"
+
+"Not I--not a morsel--hee, hee!  I was afeard it mightn't please
+your holiness, sir, that's all."
+
+The tranter, finding Leaf get on so very well through his negative
+qualities, was tempted in a fit of generosity to advance him still
+higher, by giving him credit for positive ones.  "He's very clever
+for a silly chap, good-now, sir.  You never knowed a young feller
+keep his smock-frocks so clane; very honest too.  His ghastly looks
+is all there is against en, poor feller; but we can't help our
+looks, you know, sir."
+
+"True:  we cannot.  You live with your mother, I think, Leaf?"
+
+The tranter looked at Leaf to express that the most friendly
+assistant to his tongue could do no more for him now, and that he
+must be left to his own resources.
+
+"Yes, sir:  a widder, sir.  Ah, if brother Jim had lived she'd have
+had a clever son to keep her without work!"
+
+"Indeed! poor woman.  Give her this half-crown.  I'll call and see
+your mother."
+
+"Say, 'Thank you, sir,'" the tranter whispered imperatively towards
+Leaf.
+
+"Thank you, sir!" said Leaf.
+
+"That's it, then; sit down, Leaf;" said Mr. Maybold.
+
+"Y-yes, sir!"
+
+The tranter cleared his throat after this accidental parenthesis
+about Leaf; rectified his bodily position, and began his speech.
+
+"Mr. Mayble," he said, "I hope you'll excuse my common way, but I
+always like to look things in the face."
+
+Reuben made a point of fixing this sentence in the vicar's mind by
+gazing hard at him at the conclusion of it, and then out of the
+window.
+
+Mr. Maybold and old William looked in the same direction, apparently
+under the impression that the things' faces alluded to were there
+visible.
+
+"What I have been thinking"--the tranter implied by this use of the
+past tense that he was hardly so discourteous as to be positively
+thinking it then--"is that the quire ought to be gie'd a little
+time, and not done away wi' till Christmas, as a fair thing between
+man and man.  And, Mr. Mayble, I hope you'll excuse my common way?"
+
+"I will, I will.  Till Christmas," the vicar murmured, stretching
+the two words to a great length, as if the distance to Christmas
+might be measured in that way.  "Well, I want you all to understand
+that I have no personal fault to find, and that I don't wish to
+change the church music by forcible means, or in a way which should
+hurt the feelings of any parishioners.  Why I have at last spoken
+definitely on the subject is that a player has been brought under--I
+may say pressed upon--my notice several times by one of the
+churchwardens.  And as the organ I brought with me is here waiting"
+(pointing to a cabinet-organ standing in the study), "there is no
+reason for longer delay."
+
+"We made a mistake I suppose then, sir?  But we understood the young
+woman didn't want to play particularly?"  The tranter arranged his
+countenance to signify that he did not want to be inquisitive in the
+least.
+
+"No, nor did she.  Nor did I definitely wish her to just yet; for
+your playing is very good.  But, as I said, one of the churchwardens
+has been so anxious for a change, that, as matters stand, I couldn't
+consistently refuse my consent."
+
+Now for some reason or other, the vicar at this point seemed to have
+an idea that he had prevaricated; and as an honest vicar, it was a
+thing he determined not to do.  He corrected himself; blushing as he
+did so, though why he should blush was not known to Reuben.
+
+"Understand me rightly," he said:  "the church-warden proposed it to
+me, but I had thought myself of getting--Miss Day to play."
+
+"Which churchwarden might that be who proposed her, sir?--excusing
+my common way."  The tranter intimated by his tone that, so far from
+being inquisitive, he did not even wish to ask a single question.
+
+"Mr. Shiner, I believe."
+
+"Clk, my sonny!--beg your pardon, sir, that's only a form of words
+of mine, and slipped out accidental--he nourishes enmity against us
+for some reason or another; perhaps because we played rather hard
+upon en Christmas night.  Anyhow 'tis certain sure that Mr. Shiner's
+real love for music of a particular kind isn't his reason.  He've no
+more ear than that chair.  But let that be."
+
+"I don't think you should conclude that, because Mr. Shiner wants a
+different music, he has any ill-feeling for you.  I myself; I must
+own, prefer organ-music to any other.  I consider it most proper,
+and feel justified in endeavouring to introduce it; but then,
+although other music is better, I don't say yours is not good."
+
+"Well then, Mr. Mayble, since death's to be, we'll die like men any
+day you name (excusing my common way)."
+
+Mr. Maybold bowed his head.
+
+"All we thought was, that for us old ancient singers to be choked
+off quiet at no time in particular, as now, in the Sundays after
+Easter, would seem rather mean in the eyes of other parishes, sir.
+But if we fell glorious with a bit of a flourish at Christmas, we
+should have a respectable end, and not dwindle away at some nameless
+paltry second-Sunday-after or Sunday-next-before something, that's
+got no name of his own."
+
+"Yes, yes, that's reasonable; I own it's reasonable."
+
+"You see, Mr. Mayble, we've got--do I keep you inconvenient long,
+sir?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+"We've got our feelings--father there especially."
+
+The tranter, in his earnestness, had advanced his person to within
+six inches of the vicar's.
+
+"Certainly, certainly!" said Mr. Maybold, retreating a little for
+convenience of seeing.  "You are all enthusiastic on the subject,
+and I am all the more gratified to find you so.  A Laodicean
+lukewarmness is worse than wrongheadedness itself."
+
+"Exactly, sir.  In fact now, Mr. Mayble," Reuben continued, more
+impressively, and advancing a little closer still to the vicar,
+"father there is a perfect figure o' wonder, in the way of being
+fond of music!"
+
+The vicar drew back a little further, the tranter suddenly also
+standing back a foot or two, to throw open the view of his father,
+and pointing to him at the same time.
+
+Old William moved uneasily in the large chair, and with a minute
+smile on the mere edge of his lips, for good-manners, said he was
+indeed very fond of tunes.
+
+"Now, you see exactly how it is," Reuben continued, appealing to Mr.
+Maybold's sense of justice by looking sideways into his eyes.  The
+vicar seemed to see how it was so well that the gratified tranter
+walked up to him again with even vehement eagerness, so that his
+waistcoat-buttons almost rubbed against the vicar's as he continued:
+"As to father, if you or I, or any man or woman of the present
+generation, at the time music is a-playing, was to shake your fist
+in father's face, as may be this way, and say, "Don't you be
+delighted with that music!--the tranter went back to where Leaf was
+sitting, and held his fist so close to Leaf's face that the latter
+pressed his head back against the wall:  "All right, Leaf; my sonny,
+I won't hurt you; 'tis just to show my meaning to Mr. Mayble.--As I
+was saying, if you or I, or any man, was to shake your fist in
+father's face this way, and say, "William, your life or your music!"
+he'd say, "My life!"  Now that's father's nature all over; and you
+see, sir, it must hurt the feelings of a man of that kind for him
+and his bass-viol to be done away wi' neck and crop."
+
+The tranter went back to the vicar's front and again looked
+earnestly at his face.
+
+"True, true, Dewy," Mr. Maybold answered, trying to withdraw his
+head and shoulders without moving his feet; but finding this
+impracticable, edging back another inch.  These frequent retreats
+had at last jammed Mr. Maybold between his easy-chair and the edge
+of the table.
+
+And at the moment of the announcement of the choir, Mr. Maybold had
+just re-dipped the pen he was using; at their entry, instead of
+wiping it, he had laid it on the table with the nib overhanging.  At
+the last retreat his coat-tails came in contact with the pen, and
+down it rolled, first against the back of the chair, thence turning
+a summersault into the seat, thence falling to the floor with a
+rattle.
+
+The vicar stooped for his pen, and the tranter, wishing to show
+that, however great their ecclesiastical differences, his mind was
+not so small as to let this affect his social feelings, stooped
+also.
+
+"And have you anything else you want to explain to me, Dewy?" said
+Mr. Maybold from under the table.
+
+"Nothing, sir.  And, Mr. Mayble, you be not offended?  I hope you
+see our desire is reason?" said the tranter from under the chair.
+
+"Quite, quite; and I shouldn't think of refusing to listen to such a
+reasonable request," the vicar replied.  Seeing that Reuben had
+secured the pen, he resumed his vertical position, and added, "You
+know, Dewy, it is often said how difficult a matter it is to act up
+to our convictions and please all parties.  It may be said with
+equal truth, that it is difficult for a man of any appreciativeness
+to have convictions at all.  Now in my case, I see right in you, and
+right in Shiner.  I see that violins are good, and that an organ is
+good; and when we introduce the organ, it will not be that fiddles
+were bad, but that an organ was better.  That you'll clearly
+understand, Dewy?"
+
+"I will; and thank you very much for such feelings, sir.  Piph-h-h-
+h!  How the blood do get into my head, to be sure, whenever I quat
+down like that!" said Reuben, who having also risen to his feet
+stuck the pen vertically in the inkstand and almost through the
+bottom, that it might not roll down again under any circumstances
+whatever.
+
+Now the ancient body of minstrels in the passage felt their
+curiosity surging higher and higher as the minutes passed.  Dick,
+not having much affection for this errand, soon grew tired, and went
+away in the direction of the school.  Yet their sense of propriety
+would probably have restrained them from any attempt to discover
+what was going on in the study had not the vicar's pen fallen to the
+floor.  The conviction that the movement of chairs, etc.,
+necessitated by the search, could only have been caused by the
+catastrophe of a bloody fight beginning, overpowered all other
+considerations; and they advanced to the door, which had only just
+fallen to.  Thus, when Mr. Maybold raised his eyes after the
+stooping he beheld glaring through the door Mr. Penny in full-length
+portraiture, Mail's face and shoulders above Mr. Penny's head,
+Spinks's forehead and eyes over Mail's crown, and a fractional part
+of Bowman's countenance under Spinks's arm--crescent shaped portions
+of other heads and faces being visible behind these--the whole dozen
+and odd eyes bristling with eager inquiry.
+
+Mr. Penny, as is the case with excitable boot-makers and men, seeing
+the vicar look at him and hearing no word spoken, thought it
+incumbent upon himself to say something of any kind.  Nothing
+suggested itself till he had looked for about half a minute at the
+vicar.
+
+"You'll excuse my naming of it, sir," he said, regarding with much
+commiseration the mere surface of the vicar's face; "but perhaps you
+don't know that your chin have bust out a-bleeding where you cut
+yourself a-shaving this morning, sir."
+
+"Now, that was the stooping, depend upon't," the tranter suggested,
+also looking with much interest at the vicar's chin.  "Blood always
+will bust out again if you hang down the member that's been
+bleeding."
+
+Old William raised his eyes and watched the vicar's bleeding chin
+likewise; and Leaf advanced two or three paces from the bookcase,
+absorbed in the contemplation of the same phenomenon, with parted
+lips and delighted eyes.
+
+"Dear me, dear me!" said Mr. Maybold hastily, looking very red, and
+brushing his chin with his hand, then taking out his handkerchief
+and wiping the place.
+
+"That's it, sir; all right again now, 'a b'lieve--a mere nothing,"
+said Mr. Penny.  "A little bit of fur off your hat will stop it in a
+minute if it should bust out again."
+
+"I'll let 'ee have a bit off mine," said Reuben, to show his good
+feeling; "my hat isn't so new as yours, sir, and 'twon't hurt mine a
+bit."
+
+"No, no; thank you, thank you," Mr. Maybold again nervously replied.
+
+"'Twas rather a deep cut seemingly?" said Reuben, feeling these to
+be the kindest and best remarks he could make.
+
+"O, no; not particularly."
+
+"Well, sir, your hand will shake sometimes a-shaving, and just when
+it comes into your head that you may cut yourself; there's the
+blood."
+
+"I have been revolving in my mind that question of the time at which
+we make the change," said Mr. Maybold, "and I know you'll meet me
+half-way.  I think Christmas-day as much too late for me as the
+present time is too early for you.  I suggest Michaelmas or
+thereabout as a convenient time for both parties; for I think your
+objection to a Sunday which has no name is not one of any real
+weight."
+
+"Very good, sir.  I suppose mortal men mustn't expect their own way
+entirely; and I express in all our names that we'll make shift and
+be satisfied with what you say."  The tranter touched the brim of
+his imaginary hat again, and all the choir did the same.  "About
+Michaelmas, then, as far as you are concerned, sir, and then we make
+room for the next generation."
+
+"About Michaelmas," said the vicar.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V:  RETURNING HOME WARD
+
+
+
+"'A took it very well, then?" said Mail, as they all walked up the
+hill.
+
+"He behaved like a man, 'a did so," said the tranter.  "And I'm glad
+we've let en know our minds.  And though, beyond that, we ha'n't got
+much by going, 'twas worth while.  He won't forget it.  Yes, he took
+it very well.  Supposing this tree here was Pa'son Mayble, and I
+standing here, and thik gr't stone is father sitting in the easy-
+chair.  'Dewy,' says he, 'I don't wish to change the church music in
+a forcible way.'"
+
+"That was very nice o' the man, even though words be wind."
+
+"Proper nice--out and out nice.  The fact is," said Reuben
+confidentially, "'tis how you take a man.  Everybody must be
+managed.  Queens must be managed:  kings must be managed; for men
+want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good
+deal."
+
+"'Tis truly!" murmured the husbands.
+
+"Pa'son Mayble and I were as good friends all through it as if we'd
+been sworn brothers.  Ay, the man's well enough; 'tis what's put in
+his head that spoils him, and that's why we've got to go."
+
+"There's really no believing half you hear about people nowadays."
+
+"Bless ye, my sonnies! 'tisn't the pa'son's move at all.  That
+gentleman over there" (the tranter nodded in the direction of
+Shiner's farm) "is at the root of the mischty."
+
+"What!  Shiner?"
+
+"Ay; and I see what the pa'son don't see.  Why, Shiner is for
+putting forward that young woman that only last night I was saying
+was our Dick's sweet-heart, but I suppose can't be, and making much
+of her in the sight of the congregation, and thinking he'll win her
+by showing her off.  Well, perhaps 'a woll."
+
+"Then the music is second to the woman, the other churchwarden is
+second to Shiner, the pa'son is second to the churchwardens, and God
+A'mighty is nowhere at all."
+
+"That's true; and you see," continued Reuben, "at the very beginning
+it put me in a stud as to how to quarrel wi' en.  In short, to save
+my soul, I couldn't quarrel wi' such a civil man without belying my
+conscience.  Says he to father there, in a voice as quiet as a
+lamb's, "William, you are a' old aged man, as all shall be, so sit
+down in my easy-chair, and rest yourself."  And down father zot.  I
+could fain ha' laughed at thee, father; for thou'st take it so
+unconcerned at first, and then looked so frightened when the chair-
+bottom sunk in."
+
+"You see," said old William, hastening to explain, "I was scared to
+find the bottom gie way--what should I know o' spring bottoms?--and
+thought I had broke it down:  and of course as to breaking down a
+man's chair, I didn't wish any such thing."
+
+"And, neighbours, when a feller, ever so much up for a miff, d'see
+his own father sitting in his enemy's easy-chair, and a poor chap
+like Leaf made the best of; as if he almost had brains--why, it
+knocks all the wind out of his sail at once:  it did out of mine."
+
+"If that young figure of fun--Fance Day, I mean," said Bowman,
+"hadn't been so mighty forward wi' showing herself off to Shiner and
+Dick and the rest, 'tis my belief we should never ha' left the
+gallery."
+
+"'Tis my belief that though Shiner fired the bullets, the parson
+made 'em," said Mr. Penny.  "My wife sticks to it that he's in love
+wi' her."
+
+"That's a thing we shall never know.  I can't onriddle her, nohow."
+
+"Thou'st ought to be able to onriddle such a little chiel as she,"
+the tranter observed.
+
+"The littler the maid, the bigger the riddle, to my mind.  And
+coming of such a stock, too, she may well be a twister."
+
+"Yes; Geoffrey Day is a clever man if ever there was one.  Never
+says anything:  not he."
+
+"Never."
+
+"You might live wi' that man, my sonnies, a hundred years, and never
+know there was anything in him."
+
+"Ay; one o' these up-country London ink-bottle chaps would call
+Geoffrey a fool."
+
+"Ye never find out what's in that man:  never," said Spinks.
+"Close? ah, he is close!  He can hold his tongue well.  That man's
+dumbness is wonderful to listen to."
+
+"There's so much sense in it.  Every moment of it is brimmen over
+wi' sound understanding."
+
+"'A can hold his tongue very clever--very clever truly," echoed
+Leaf.  "A do look at me as if 'a could see my thoughts running round
+like the works of a clock."
+
+"Well, all will agree that the man can halt well in his talk, be it
+a long time or be it a short time.  And though we can't expect his
+daughter to inherit his closeness, she may have a few dribblets from
+his sense."
+
+"And his pocket, perhaps."
+
+"Yes; the nine hundred pound that everybody says he's worth; but I
+call it four hundred and fifty; for I never believe more than half I
+hear."
+
+"Well, he've made a pound or two, and I suppose the maid will have
+it, since there's nobody else.  But 'tis rather sharp upon her, if
+she's been born to fortune, to bring her up as if not born for it,
+and letting her work so hard."
+
+"'Tis all upon his principle.  A long--headed feller!"
+
+"Ah," murmured Spinks, "'twould be sharper upon her if she were born
+for fortune, and not to it!  I suffer from that affliction."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI:  YALBURY WOOD AND THE KEEPER'S HOUSE
+
+
+
+A mood of blitheness rarely experienced even by young men was Dick's
+on the following Monday morning.  It was the week after the Easter
+holidays, and he was journeying along with Smart the mare and the
+light spring-cart, watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as
+they streamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled
+season shone on the grass with the freshness of an occasional
+inspector rather than as an accustomed proprietor.  His errand was
+to fetch Fancy, and some additional household goods, from her
+father's house in the neighbouring parish to her dwelling at
+Mellstock.  The distant view was darkly shaded with clouds; but the
+nearer parts of the landscape were whitely illumined by the visible
+rays of the sun streaming down across the heavy gray shade behind.
+
+The tranter had not yet told his son of the state of Shiner's heart
+that had been suggested to him by Shiner's movements.  He preferred
+to let such delicate affairs right themselves; experience having
+taught him that the uncertain phenomenon of love, as it existed in
+other people, was not a groundwork upon which a single action of his
+own life could be founded.
+
+Geoffrey Day lived in the depths of Yalbury Wood, which formed
+portion of one of the outlying estates of the Earl of Wessex, to
+whom Day was head game-keeper, timber-steward, and general
+overlooker for this district.  The wood was intersected by the
+highway from Casterbridge to London at a place not far from the
+house, and some trees had of late years been felled between its
+windows and the ascent of Yalbury Hill, to give the solitary
+cottager a glimpse of the passers-by.
+
+It was a satisfaction to walk into the keeper's house, even as a
+stranger, on a fine spring morning like the present.  A curl of
+wood-smoke came from the chimney, and drooped over the roof like a
+blue feather in a lady's hat; and the sun shone obliquely upon the
+patch of grass in front, which reflected its brightness through the
+open doorway and up the staircase opposite, lighting up each riser
+with a shiny green radiance, and leaving the top of each step in
+shade.
+
+The window-sill of the front room was between four and five feet
+from the floor, dropping inwardly to a broad low bench, over which,
+as well as over the whole surface of the wall beneath, there always
+hung a deep shade, which was considered objectionable on every
+ground save one, namely, that the perpetual sprinkling of seeds and
+water by the caged canary above was not noticed as an eyesore by
+visitors.  The window was set with thickly-leaded diamond glazing,
+formed, especially in the lower panes, of knotty glass of various
+shades of green.  Nothing was better known to Fancy than the
+extravagant manner in which these circular knots or eyes distorted
+everything seen through them from the outside--lifting hats from
+heads, shoulders from bodies; scattering the spokes of cart-wheels,
+and bending the straight fir-trunks into semicircles.  The ceiling
+was carried by a beam traversing its midst, from the side of which
+projected a large nail, used solely and constantly as a peg for
+Geoffrey's hat; the nail was arched by a rainbow--shaped stain,
+imprinted by the brim of the said hat when it was hung there
+dripping wet.
+
+The most striking point about the room was the furniture.  This was
+a repetition upon inanimate objects of the old principle introduced
+by Noah, consisting for the most part of two articles of every sort.
+The duplicate system of furnishing owed its existence to the
+forethought of Fancy's mother, exercised from the date of Fancy's
+birthday onwards.  The arrangement spoke for itself:  nobody who
+knew the tone of the household could look at the goods without being
+aware that the second set was a provision for Fancy, when she should
+marry and have a house of her own.  The most noticeable instance was
+a pair of green-faced eight-day clocks, ticking alternately, which
+were severally two and half minutes and three minutes striking the
+hour of twelve, one proclaiming, in Italian flourishes, Thomas Wood
+as the name of its maker, and the other--arched at the top, and
+altogether of more cynical appearance--that of Ezekiel Saunders.
+They were two departed clockmakers of Casterbridge, whose desperate
+rivalry throughout their lives was nowhere more emphatically
+perpetuated than here at Geoffrey's.  These chief specimens of the
+marriage provision were supported on the right by a couple of
+kitchen dressers, each fitted complete with their cups, dishes, and
+plates, in their turn followed by two dumb-waiters, two family
+Bibles, two warming-pans, and two intermixed sets of chairs.
+
+But the position last reached--the chimney-corner--was, after all,
+the most attractive side of the parallelogram.  It was large enough
+to admit, in addition to Geoffrey himself; Geoffrey's wife, her
+chair, and her work-table, entirely within the line of the mantel,
+without danger or even inconvenience from the heat of the fire; and
+was spacious enough overhead to allow of the insertion of wood poles
+for the hanging of bacon, which were cloaked with long shreds of
+soot, floating on the draught like the tattered banners on the walls
+of ancient aisles.
+
+These points were common to most chimney corners of the
+neighbourhood; but one feature there was which made Geoffrey's
+fireside not only an object of interest to casual aristocratic
+visitors--to whom every cottage fireside was more or less a
+curiosity--but the admiration of friends who were accustomed to
+fireplaces of the ordinary hamlet model.  This peculiarity was a
+little window in the chimney-back, almost over the fire, around
+which the smoke crept caressingly when it left the perpendicular
+course.  The window-board was curiously stamped with black circles,
+burnt thereon by the heated bottoms of drinking-cups, which had
+rested there after previously standing on the hot ashes of the
+hearth for the purpose of warming their contents, the result giving
+to the ledge the look of an envelope which has passed through
+innumerable post-offices.
+
+Fancy was gliding about the room preparing dinner, her head
+inclining now to the right, now to the left, and singing the tips
+and ends of tunes that sprang up in her mind like mushrooms.  The
+footsteps of Mrs. Day could be heard in the room overhead.  Fancy
+went finally to the door.
+
+"Father!  Dinner."
+
+A tall spare figure was seen advancing by the window with periodical
+steps, and the keeper entered from the garden.  He appeared to be a
+man who was always looking down, as if trying to recollect something
+he said yesterday.  The surface of his face was fissured rather than
+wrinkled, and over and under his eyes were folds which seemed as a
+kind of exterior eyelids.  His nose had been thrown backwards by a
+blow in a poaching fray, so that when the sun was low and shining in
+his face, people could see far into his head.  There was in him a
+quiet grimness, which would in his moments of displeasure have
+become surliness, had it not been tempered by honesty of soul, and
+which was often wrongheadedness because not allied with subtlety.
+
+Although not an extraordinarily taciturn man among friends slightly
+richer than himself, he never wasted words upon outsiders, and to
+his trapper Enoch his ideas were seldom conveyed by any other means
+than nods and shakes of the head.  Their long acquaintance with each
+other's ways, and the nature of their labours, rendered words
+between them almost superfluous as vehicles of thought, whilst the
+coincidence of their horizons, and the astonishing equality of their
+social views, by startling the keeper from time to time as very
+damaging to the theory of master and man, strictly forbade any
+indulgence in words as courtesies.
+
+Behind the keeper came Enoch (who had been assisting in the garden)
+at the well-considered chronological distance of three minutes--an
+interval of non-appearance on the trapper's part not arrived at
+without some reflection.  Four minutes had been found to express
+indifference to indoor arrangements, and simultaneousness had
+implied too great an anxiety about meals.
+
+"A little earlier than usual, Fancy," the keeper said, as he sat
+down and looked at the clocks.  "That Ezekiel Saunders o' thine is
+tearing on afore Thomas Wood again."
+
+"I kept in the middle between them," said Fancy, also looking at the
+two clocks.
+
+"Better stick to Thomas," said her father.  "There's a healthy beat
+in Thomas that would lead a man to swear by en offhand.  He is as
+true as the town time.  How is it your stap-mother isn't here?"
+
+As Fancy was about to reply, the rattle of wheels was heard, and
+"Weh-hey, Smart!" in Mr. Richard Dewy's voice rolled into the
+cottage from round the corner of the house.
+
+"Hullo! there's Dewy's cart come for thee, Fancy--Dick driving--
+afore time, too.  Well, ask the lad to have pot-luck with us."
+
+Dick on entering made a point of implying by his general bearing
+that he took an interest in Fancy simply as in one of the same race
+and country as himself; and they all sat down.  Dick could have
+wished her manner had not been so entirely free from all apparent
+consciousness of those accidental meetings of theirs:  but he let
+the thought pass.  Enoch sat diagonally at a table afar off; under
+the corner cupboard, and drank his cider from a long perpendicular
+pint cup, having tall fir-trees done in brown on its sides, He threw
+occasional remarks into the general tide of conversation, and with
+this advantage to himself; that he participated in the pleasures of
+a talk (slight as it was) at meal-times, without saddling himself
+with the responsibility of sustaining it.
+
+"Why don't your stap-mother come down, Fancy?" said Geoffrey.
+"You'll excuse her, Mister Dick, she's a little queer sometimes."
+
+"O yes,--quite," said Richard, as if he were in the habit of
+excusing people every day.
+
+"She d'belong to that class of womankind that become second wives:
+a rum class rather."
+
+"Indeed," said Dick, with sympathy for an indefinite something.
+
+"Yes; and 'tis trying to a female, especially if you've been a first
+wife, as she hey."
+
+"Very trying it must be."
+
+"Yes:  you see her first husband was a young man, who let her go too
+far; in fact, she used to kick up Bob's-a-dying at the least thing
+in the world.  And when I'd married her and found it out, I thought,
+thinks I, "'Tis too late now to begin to cure 'e;" and so I let her
+bide.  But she's queer,--very queer, at times!"
+
+"I'm sorry to hear that."
+
+"Yes:  there; wives be such a provoking class o' society, because
+though they be never right, they be never more than half wrong."
+
+Fancy seemed uneasy under the infliction of this household
+moralizing, which might tend to damage the airy-fairy nature that
+Dick, as maiden shrewdness told her, had accredited her with.  Her
+dead silence impressed Geoffrey with the notion that something in
+his words did not agree with her educated ideas, and he changed the
+conversation.
+
+"Did Fred Shiner send the cask o' drink, Fancy?"
+
+"I think he did:  O yes, he did."
+
+"Nice solid feller, Fred Shiner!" said Geoffrey to Dick as he helped
+himself to gravy, bringing the spoon round to his plate by way of
+the potato-dish, to obviate a stain on the cloth in the event of a
+spill.
+
+Now Geoffrey's eyes had been fixed upon his plate for the previous
+four or five minutes, and in removing them he had only carried them
+to the spoon, which, from its fulness and the distance of its
+transit, necessitated a steady watching through the whole of the
+route.  Just as intently as the keeper's eyes had been fixed on the
+spoon, Fancy's had been fixed on her father's, without premeditation
+or the slightest phase of furtiveness; but there they were fastened.
+This was the reason why:
+
+Dick was sitting next to her on the right side, and on the side of
+the table opposite to her father.  Fancy had laid her right hand
+lightly down upon the table-cloth for an instant, and to her alarm
+Dick, after dropping his fork and brushing his forehead as a reason,
+flung down his own left hand, overlapping a third of Fancy's with
+it, and keeping it there.  So the innocent Fancy, instead of pulling
+her hand from the trap, settled her eyes on her father's, to guard
+against his discovery of this perilous game of Dick's.  Dick
+finished his mouthful; Fancy finished, her crumb, and nothing was
+done beyond watching Geoffrey's eyes.  Then the hands slid apart;
+Fancy's going over six inches of cloth, Dick's over one.  Geoffrey's
+eye had risen.
+
+"I said Fred Shiner is a nice solid feller," he repeated, more
+emphatically.
+
+"He is; yes, he is," stammered Dick; "but to me he is little more
+than a stranger."
+
+"O, sure.  Now I know en as well as any man can be known.  And you
+know en very well too, don't ye, Fancy?"
+
+Geoffrey put on a tone expressing that these words signified at
+present about one hundred times the amount of meaning they conveyed
+literally.
+
+Dick looked anxious.
+
+"Will you pass me some bread?" said Fancy in a flurry, the red of
+her face becoming slightly disordered, and looking as solicitous as
+a human being could look about a piece of bread.
+
+"Ay, that I will," replied the unconscious Geoffrey.  "Ay," he
+continued, returning to the displaced idea, "we are likely to remain
+friendly wi' Mr. Shiner if the wheels d'run smooth."
+
+"An excellent thing--a very capital thing, as I should say," the
+youth answered with exceeding relevance, considering that his
+thoughts, instead of following Geoffrey's remark, were nestling at a
+distance of about two feet on his left the whole time.
+
+"A young woman's face will turn the north wind, Master Richard:  my
+heart if 'twon't."  Dick looked more anxious and was attentive in
+earnest at these words.  "Yes; turn the north wind," added Geoffrey
+after an impressive pause.  "And though she's one of my own flesh
+and blood . . . "
+
+"Will you fetch down a bit of raw-mil' cheese from pantry-shelf?"
+Fancy interrupted, as if she were famishing.
+
+"Ay, that I will, chiel; chiel, says I, and Mr. Shiner only asking
+last Saturday night . . . cheese you said, Fancy?"
+
+Dick controlled his emotion at these mysterious allusions to Mr.
+Shiner,--the better enabled to do so by perceiving that Fancy's
+heart went not with her father's--and spoke like a stranger to the
+affairs of the neighbourhood.  "Yes, there's a great deal to be said
+upon the power of maiden faces in settling your courses," he
+ventured, as the keeper retreated for the cheese.
+
+"The conversation is taking a very strange turn:  nothing that _I_
+have ever done warrants such things being said!" murmured Fancy with
+emphasis, just loud enough to reach Dick's ears.
+
+"You think to yourself; 'twas to be," cried Enoch from his distant
+corner, by way of filling up the vacancy caused by Geoffrey's
+momentary absence.  "And so you marry her, Master Dewy, and there's
+an end o't."
+
+"Pray don't say such things, Enoch," came from Fancy severely, upon
+which Enoch relapsed into servitude.
+
+"If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain
+single, we do," replied Dick.
+
+Geoffrey had by this time sat down again, and he now made his lips
+thin by severely straining them across his gums, and looked out of
+the window along the vista to the distant highway up Yalbury Hill.
+"That's not the case with some folk," he said at length, as if he
+read the words on a board at the further end of the vista.
+
+Fancy looked interested, and Dick said, "No?"
+
+"There's that wife o' mine.  It was her doom to be nobody's wife at
+all in the wide universe.  But she made up her mind that she would,
+and did it twice over.  Doom?  Doom is nothing beside a elderly
+woman--quite a chiel in her hands!"
+
+A movement was now heard along the upstairs passage, and footsteps
+descending.  The door at the foot of the stairs opened, and the
+second Mrs. Day appeared in view, looking fixedly at the table as
+she advanced towards it, with apparent obliviousness of the presence
+of any other human being than herself.  In short, if the table had
+been the personages, and the persons the table, her glance would
+have been the most natural imaginable.
+
+She showed herself to possess an ordinary woman's face, iron-grey
+hair, hardly any hips, and a great deal of cleanliness in a broad
+white apron-string, as it appeared upon the waist of her dark stuff
+dress.
+
+"People will run away with a story now, I suppose," she began
+saying, "that Jane Day's tablecloths are as poor and ragged as any
+union beggar's!"
+
+Dick now perceived that the tablecloth was a little the worse for
+wear, and reflecting for a moment, concluded that 'people' in step-
+mother language probably meant himself.  On lifting his eyes he
+found that Mrs. Day had vanished again upstairs, and presently
+returned with an armful of new damask-linen tablecloths, folded
+square and hard as boards by long compression.  These she flounced
+down into a chair; then took one, shook it out from its folds, and
+spread it on the table by instalments, transferring the plates and
+dishes one by one from the old to the new cloth.
+
+"And I suppose they'll say, too, that she ha'n't a decent knife and
+fork in her house!"
+
+"I shouldn't say any such ill-natured thing, I am sure--" began
+Dick.  But Mrs. Day had vanished into the next room.  Fancy appeared
+distressed.
+
+"Very strange woman, isn't she?" said Geoffrey, quietly going on
+with his dinner.  "But 'tis too late to attempt curing.  My heart!
+'tis so growed into her that 'twould kill her to take it out.  Ay,
+she's very queer:  you'd be amazed to see what valuable goods we've
+got stowed away upstairs."
+
+Back again came Mrs. Day with a box of bright steel horn-handled
+knives, silver-plated forks, carver, and all complete.  These were
+wiped of the preservative oil which coated them, and then a knife
+and fork were laid down to each individual with a bang, the carving
+knife and fork thrust into the meat dish, and the old ones they had
+hitherto used tossed away.
+
+Geoffrey placidly cut a slice with the new knife and fork, and asked
+Dick if he wanted any more.
+
+The table had been spread for the mixed midday meal of dinner and
+tea, which was common among frugal countryfolk.  "The parishioners
+about here," continued Mrs. Day, not looking at any living being,
+but snatching up the brown delf tea-things, "are the laziest,
+gossipest, poachest, jailest set of any ever I came among.  And
+they'll talk about my teapot and tea-things next, I suppose!"  She
+vanished with the teapot, cups, and saucers, and reappeared with a
+tea-service in white china, and a packet wrapped in brown paper.
+This was removed, together with folds of tissue-paper underneath;
+and a brilliant silver teapot appeared.
+
+"I'll help to put the things right," said Fancy soothingly, and
+rising from her seat.  "I ought to have laid out better things, I
+suppose.  But" (here she enlarged her looks so as to include Dick)
+"I have been away from home a good deal, and I make shocking
+blunders in my housekeeping."  Smiles and suavity were then
+dispensed all around by this bright little bird.
+
+After a little more preparation and modification, Mrs. Day took her
+seat at the head of the table, and during the latter or tea division
+of the meal, presided with much composure.  It may cause some
+surprise to learn that, now her vagary was over, she showed herself
+to be an excellent person with much common sense, and even a
+religious seriousness of tone on matters pertaining to her
+afflictions.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII:  DICK MAKES HIMSELF USEFUL
+
+
+
+The effect of Geoffrey's incidental allusions to Mr. Shiner was to
+restrain a considerable flow of spontaneous chat that would
+otherwise have burst from young Dewy along the drive homeward.  And
+a certain remark he had hazarded to her, in rather too blunt and
+eager a manner, kept the young lady herself even more silent than
+Dick.  On both sides there was an unwillingness to talk on any but
+the most trivial subjects, and their sentences rarely took a larger
+form than could be expressed in two or three words.
+
+Owing to Fancy being later in the day than she had promised, the
+charwoman had given up expecting her; whereupon Dick could do no
+less than stay and see her comfortably tided over the disagreeable
+time of entering and establishing herself in an empty house after an
+absence of a week.  The additional furniture and utensils that had
+been brought (a canary and cage among the rest) were taken out of
+the vehicle, and the horse was unharnessed and put in the plot
+opposite, where there was some tender grass.  Dick lighted the fire
+already laid; and activity began to loosen their tongues a little.
+
+"There!" said Fancy, "we forgot to bring the fire-irons!"
+
+She had originally found in her sitting-room, to bear out the
+expression 'nearly furnished' which the school-manager had used in
+his letter to her, a table, three chairs, a fender, and a piece of
+carpet.  This 'nearly' had been supplemented hitherto by a kind
+friend, who had lent her fire-irons and crockery until she should
+fetch some from home.
+
+Dick attended to the young lady's fire, using his whip-handle for a
+poker till it was spoilt, and then flourishing a hurdle stick for
+the remainder of the time.
+
+"The kettle boils; now you shall have a cup of tea," said Fancy,
+diving into the hamper she had brought.
+
+"Thank you," said Dick, whose drive had made him ready for some,
+especially in her company.
+
+"Well, here's only one cup-and-saucer, as I breathe!  Whatever could
+mother be thinking about?  Do you mind making shift, Mr. Dewy?"
+
+"Not at all, Miss Day," said that civil person.
+
+"--And only having a cup by itself? or a saucer by itself?"
+
+"Don't mind in the least."
+
+"Which do you mean by that?"
+
+"I mean the cup, if you like the saucer."
+
+"And the saucer, if I like the cup?"
+
+"Exactly, Miss Day."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Dewy, for I like the cup decidedly.  Stop a minute;
+there are no spoons now!"  She dived into the hamper again, and at
+the end of two or three minutes looked up and said, "I suppose you
+don't mind if I can't find a spoon?"
+
+"Not at all," said the agreeable Richard.
+
+"The fact is, the spoons have slipped down somewhere; right under
+the other things.  O yes, here's one, and only one.  You would
+rather have one than not, I suppose, Mr. Dewy?"
+
+"Rather not.  I never did care much about spoons."
+
+"Then I'll have it.  I do care about them.  You must stir up your
+tea with a knife.  Would you mind lifting the kettle off, that it
+may not boil dry?"
+
+Dick leapt to the fireplace, and earnestly removed the kettle.
+
+"There! you did it so wildly that you have made your hand black.  We
+always use kettle-holders; didn't you learn housewifery as far as
+that, Mr. Dewy?  Well, never mind the soot on your hand.  Come here.
+I am going to rinse mine, too."
+
+They went' to a basin she had placed in the back room.  "This is the
+only basin I have," she said.  "Turn up your sleeves, and by that
+time my hands will be washed, and you can come."
+
+Her hands were in the water now.  "O, how vexing!" she exclaimed.
+"There's not a drop of water left for you, unless you draw it, and
+the well is I don't know how many furlongs deep; all that was in the
+pitcher I used for the kettle and this basin.  Do you mind dipping
+the tips of your fingers in the same?"
+
+"Not at all.  And to save time I won't wait till you have done, if
+you have no objection?"
+
+Thereupon he plunged in his hands, and they paddled together.  It
+being the first time in his life that he had touched female fingers
+under water, Dick duly registered the sensation as rather a nice
+one.
+
+"Really, I hardly know which are my own hands and which are yours,
+they have got so mixed up together," she said, withdrawing her own
+very suddenly.
+
+"It doesn't matter at all," said Dick, "at least as far as I am
+concerned."
+
+"There! no towel!  Whoever thinks of a towel till the hands are
+wet?"
+
+"Nobody."
+
+"'Nobody.'  How very dull it is when people are so friendly!  Come
+here, Mr. Dewy.  Now do you think you could lift the lid of that box
+with your elbow, and then, with something or other, take out a towel
+you will find under the clean clothes?  Be SURE don't touch any of
+them with your wet hands, for the things at the top are all Starched
+and Ironed."
+
+Dick managed, by the aid of a knife and fork, to extract a towel
+from under a muslin dress without wetting the latter; and for a
+moment he ventured to assume a tone of criticism.
+
+"I fear for that dress," he said, as they wiped their hands
+together.
+
+"What?" said Miss Day, looking into the box at the dress alluded to.
+"O, I know what you mean--that the vicar will never let me wear
+muslin?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I know it is condemned by all orders in the church as
+flaunting, and unfit for common wear for girls who've their living
+to get; hut we'll see."
+
+"In the interest of the church, I hope you don't speak seriously."
+
+"Yes, I do; but we'll see."  There was a comely determination on her
+lip, very pleasant to a beholder who was neither bishop, priest, nor
+deacon.  "I think I can manage any vicar's views about me if he's
+under forty."
+
+Dick rather wished she had never thought of managing vicars.
+
+"I certainly shall be glad to get some of your delicious tea," he
+said in rather a free way, yet modestly, as became one in a position
+between that of visitor and inmate, and looking wistfully at his
+lonely saucer.
+
+"So shall I.  Now is there anything else we want, Mr Dewy?"
+
+"I really think there's nothing else, Miss Day."
+
+She prepared to sit down, looking musingly out of the window at
+Smart's enjoyment of the rich grass.  "Nobody seems to care about
+me," she murmured, with large lost eyes fixed upon the sky beyond
+Smart.
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Shiner does," said Dick, in the tone of a slightly
+injured man.
+
+"Yes, I forgot--he does, I know."  Dick precipitately regretted that
+he had suggested Shiner, since it had produced such a miserable
+result as this.
+
+"I'll warrant you'll care for somebody very much indeed another day,
+won't you, Mr. Dewy?" she continued, looking very feelingly into the
+mathematical centre of his eyes.
+
+"Ah, I'll warrant I shall," said Dick, feelingly too, and looking
+back into her dark pupils, whereupon they were turned aside.
+
+"I meant," she went on, preventing him from speaking just as he was
+going to narrate a forcible story about his feelings; "I meant that
+nobody comes to see if I have returned--not even the vicar."
+
+"If you want to see him, I'll call at the vicarage directly we have
+had some tea."
+
+"No, no!  Don't let him come down here, whatever you do, whilst I am
+in such a state of disarrangement.  Parsons look so miserable and
+awkward when one's house is in a muddle; walking about, and making
+impossible suggestions in quaint academic phrases till your flesh
+creeps and you wish them dead.  Do you take sugar?"
+
+Mr. Maybold was at this instant seen coming up the path.
+
+"There!  That's he coming!  How I wish you were not here I--that is,
+how awkward--dear, dear!" she exclaimed, with a quick ascent of
+blood to her face, and irritated with Dick rather than the vicar, as
+it seemed.
+
+"Pray don't be alarmed on my account, Miss Day--good-afternoon!"
+said Dick in a huff, putting on his hat, and leaving the room
+hastily by the back-door.
+
+The horse was caught and put in, and on mounting the shafts to start
+he saw through the window the vicar, standing upon some books piled
+in a chair, and driving a nail into the wall; Fancy, with a demure
+glance, holding the canary-cage up to him, as if she had never in
+her life thought of anything but vicars and canaries.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII:  DICK MEETS HIS FATHER
+
+
+
+For several minutes Dick drove along homeward, with the inner eye of
+reflection so anxiously set on his passages at arms with Fancy, that
+the road and scenery were as a thin mist over the real pictures of
+his mind.  Was she a coquette?  The balance between the evidence
+that she did love him and that she did not was so nicely struck,
+that his opinion had no stability.  She had let him put his hand
+upon hers; she had allowed her gaze to drop plumb into the depths of
+his--his into hers--three or four times; her manner had been very
+free with regard to the basin and towel; she had appeared vexed at
+the mention of Shiner.  On the other hand, she had driven him about
+the house like a quiet dog or cat, said Shiner cared for her, and
+seemed anxious that Mr. Maybold should do the same.
+
+Thinking thus as he neared the handpost at Mellstock Cross, sitting
+on the front board of the spring cart--his legs on the outside, and
+his whole frame jigging up and down like a candle-flame to the time
+of Smart's trotting--who should he see coming down the hill but his
+father in the light wagon, quivering up and down on a smaller scale
+of shakes, those merely caused by the stones in the road.  They were
+soon crossing each other's front.
+
+"Weh-hey!" said the tranter to Smiler.
+
+"Weh-hey!" said Dick to Smart, in an echo of the same voice.
+
+"Th'st hauled her back, I suppose?" Reuben inquired peaceably.
+
+"Yes," said Dick, with such a clinching period at the end that it
+seemed he was never going to add another word.  Smiler, thinking
+this the close of the conversation, prepared to move on.
+
+"Weh-hey!" said the tranter.  "I tell thee what it is, Dick.  That
+there maid is taking up thy thoughts more than's good for thee, my
+sonny.  Thou'rt never happy now unless th'rt making thyself
+miserable about her in one way or another."
+
+"I don't know about that, father," said Dick rather stupidly.
+
+"But I do--Wey, Smiler!--'Od rot the women, 'tis nothing else wi'
+'em nowadays but getting young men and leading 'em astray."
+
+"Pooh, father! you just repeat what all the common world says;
+that's all you do."
+
+"The world's a very sensible feller on things in jineral, Dick; very
+sensible indeed."
+
+Dick looked into the distance at a vast expanse of mortgaged estate.
+"I wish I was as rich as a squire when he's as poor as a crow," he
+murmured; "I'd soon ask Fancy something."
+
+"I wish so too, wi' all my heart, sonny; that I do.  Well, mind what
+beest about, that's all."
+
+Smart moved on a step or two.  "Supposing now, father,--We-hey,
+Smart!--I did think a little about her, and I had a chance, which I
+ha'n't; don't you think she's a very good sort of--of--one?"
+
+"Ay, good; she's good enough.  When you've made up your mind to
+marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand--she's as
+good as any other; they be all alike in the groundwork; 'tis only in
+the flourishes there's a difference.  She's good enough; but I can't
+see what the nation a young feller like you--wi a comfortable house
+and home, and father and mother to take care o' thee, and who sent
+'ee to a school so good that 'twas hardly fair to the other
+children--should want to go hollering after a young woman for, when
+she's quietly making a husband in her pocket, and not troubled by
+chick nor chiel, to make a poverty-stric' wife and family of her,
+and neither hat, cap, wig, nor waistcoat to set 'em up with:  be
+drowned if I can see it, and that's the long and the short o't, my
+sonny."
+
+Dick looked at Smart's ears, then up the hill; but no reason was
+suggested by any object that met his gaze.
+
+"For about the same reason that you did, father, I suppose."
+
+"Dang it, my sonny, thou'st got me there!"  And the tranter gave
+vent to a grim admiration, with the mien of a man who was too
+magnanimous not to appreciate artistically a slight rap on the
+knuckles, even if they were his own.
+
+"Whether or no," said Dick, "I asked her a thing going along the
+road."
+
+"Come to that, is it?  Turk! won't thy mother be in a taking!  Well,
+she's ready, I don't doubt?"
+
+"I didn't ask her anything about having me; and if you'll let me
+speak, I'll tell 'ee what I want to know.  I just said, Did she care
+about me?"
+
+"Piph-ph-ph!"
+
+"And then she said nothing for a quarter of a mile, and then she
+said she didn't know.  Now, what I want to know is, what was the
+meaning of that speech?"  The latter words were spoken resolutely,
+as if he didn't care for the ridicule of all the fathers in
+creation.
+
+"The meaning of that speech is," the tranter replied deliberately,
+"that the meaning is meant to be rather hid at present.  Well, Dick,
+as an honest father to thee, I don't pretend to deny what you d'know
+well enough; that is, that her father being rather better in the
+pocket than we, I should welcome her ready enough if it must be
+somebody."
+
+"But what d'ye think she really did mean?" said the unsatisfied
+Dick.
+
+"I'm afeard I am not o' much account in guessing, especially as I
+was not there when she said it, and seeing that your mother was the
+only 'ooman I ever cam' into such close quarters as that with."
+
+"And what did mother say to you when you asked her?" said Dick
+musingly.
+
+"I don't see that that will help 'ee."
+
+"The principle is the same."
+
+"Well--ay:  what did she say?  Let's see.  I was oiling my working-
+day boots without taking 'em off, and wi' my head hanging down, when
+she just brushed on by the garden hatch like a flittering leaf.
+"Ann," I said, says I, and then,--but, Dick I'm afeard 'twill be no
+help to thee; for we were such a rum couple, your mother and I,
+leastways one half was, that is myself--and your mother's charms was
+more in the manner than the material."
+
+"Never mind! "Ann," said you."
+
+"'Ann,' said I, as I was saying . . . 'Ann,' I said to her when I
+was oiling my working-day boots wi' my head hanging down, 'Woot hae
+me?' . . . What came next I can't quite call up at this distance o'
+time.  Perhaps your mother would know,--she's got a better memory
+for her little triumphs than I.  However, the long and the short o'
+the story is that we were married somehow, as I found afterwards.
+'Twas on White Tuesday,--Mellstock Club walked the same day, every
+man two and two, and a fine day 'twas,--hot as fire,--how the sun
+did strike down upon my back going to church!  I well can mind what
+a bath o' sweating I was in, body and soul!  But Fance will ha'
+thee, Dick--she won't walk with another chap--no such good luck."
+
+"I don't know about that," said Dick, whipping at Smart's flank in a
+fanciful way, which, as Smart knew, meant nothing in connection with
+going on.  "There's Pa'son Maybold, too--that's all against me."
+
+"What about he?  She's never been stuffing into thy innocent heart
+that he's in hove with her?  Lord, the vanity o' maidens!"
+
+"No, no.  But he called, and she looked at him in such a way, and at
+me in such a way--quite different the ways were,--and as I was
+coming off, there was he hanging up her birdcage."
+
+"Well, why shouldn't the man hang up her bird-cage?  Turk seize it
+all, what's that got to do wi' it?  Dick, that thou beest a white-
+lyvered chap I don't say, but if thou beestn't as mad as a cappel-
+faced bull, let me smile no more."
+
+"O, ay."
+
+"And what's think now, Dick?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Here's another pretty kettle o' fish for thee.  Who d'ye think's
+the bitter weed in our being turned out?  Did our party tell 'ee?"
+
+"No.  Why, Pa'son Maybold, I suppose."
+
+"Shiner,--because he's in love with thy young woman, and d'want to
+see her young figure sitting up at that queer instrument, and her
+young fingers rum-strumming upon the keys."
+
+A sharp ado of sweet and bitter was going on in Dick during this
+communication from his father.  "Shiner's a fool!--no, that's not
+it; I don't believe any such thing, father.  Why, Shiner would never
+take a bold step like that, unless she'd been a little made up to,
+and had taken it kindly.  Pooh!"
+
+"Who's to say she didn't?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"The more fool you."
+
+"Why, father of me?"
+
+"Has she ever done more to thee?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then she has done as much to he--rot 'em!  Now, Dick, this is how a
+maid is.  She'll swear she's dying for thee, and she is dying for
+thee, and she will die for thee; but she'll fling a look over
+t'other shoulder at another young feller, though never leaving off
+dying for thee just the same."
+
+"She's not dying for me, and so she didn't fling a look at him."
+
+"But she may be dying for him, for she looked at thee."
+
+"I don't know what to make of it at all," said Dick gloomily.
+
+"All I can make of it is," the tranter said, raising his whip,
+arranging his different joints and muscles, and motioning to the
+horse to move on, "that if you can't read a maid's mind by her
+motions, nature d'seem to say thou'st ought to be a bachelor.  Clk,
+clk!  Smiler!"  And the tranter moved on.
+
+Dick held Smart's rein firmly, and the whole concern of horse, cart,
+and man remained rooted in the lane.  Hew long this condition would
+have lasted is unknown, had not Dick's thoughts, after adding up
+numerous items of misery, gradually wandered round to the fact that
+as something must be done, it could not be done by staying there all
+night.
+
+Reaching home he went up to his bedroom, shut the door as if he were
+going to be seen no more in this life, and taking a sheet of paper
+and uncorking the ink-bottle, he began a letter.  The dignity of the
+writer's mind was so powerfully apparent in every line of this
+effusion that it obscured the logical sequence of facts and
+intentions to an appreciable degree; and it was not at all clear to
+a reader whether he there and then left off loving Miss Fancy Day;
+whether he had never loved her seriously, and never meant to;
+whether he had been dying up to the present moment, and now intended
+to get well again; or whether he had hitherto been in good health,
+and intended to die for her forthwith.
+
+He put this letter in an envelope, sealed it up, directed it in a
+stern handwriting of straight dashes--easy flourishes being
+rigorously excluded.  He walked with it in his pocket down the lane
+in strides not an inch less than three feet long.  Reaching her gate
+he put on a resolute expression--then put it off again, turned back
+homeward, tore up his letter, and sat down.
+
+That letter was altogether in a wrong tone--that he must own.  A
+heartless man-of-the-world tone was what the juncture required.
+That he rather wanted her, and rather did not want her--the latter
+for choice; hut that as a member of society he didn't mind making a
+query in jaunty terms, which could only be answered in the same way:
+did she mean anything by her bearing towards him, or did she not?
+
+This letter was considered so satisfactory in every way that, being
+put into the hands of a little boy, and the order given that he was
+to run with it to the school, he was told in addition not to look
+behind him if Dick called after him to bring it hack, but to run
+along with it just the same.  Having taken this precaution against
+vacillation, Dick watched his messenger down the road, and turned
+into the house whistling an air in such ghastly jerks and starts,
+that whistling seemed to be the act the very furthest removed from
+that which was instinctive in such a youth.
+
+The letter was left as ordered:  the next morning came and passed--
+and no answer.  The next.  The next.  Friday night came.  Dick
+resolved that if no answer or sign were given by her the next day,
+on Sunday he would meet her face to face, and have it all out by
+word of mouth.
+
+"Dick," said his father, coming in from the garden at that moment--
+in each hand a hive of bees tied in a cloth to prevent their egress-
+-"I think you'd better take these two swarms of bees to Mrs.
+Maybold's to-morrow, instead o' me, and I'll go wi' Smiler and the
+wagon."
+
+It was a relief; for Mrs. Maybold, the vicar's mother, who had just
+taken into her head a fancy for keeping bees (pleasantly disguised
+under the pretence of its being an economical wish to produce her
+own honey), lived near the watering-place of Budmouth-Regis, ten
+miles off, and the business of transporting the hives thither would
+occupy the whole day, and to some extent annihilate the vacant time
+between this evening and the coming Sunday.  The best spring-cart
+was washed throughout, the axles oiled, and the bees placed therein
+for the journey.
+
+
+
+
+PART THE THIRD--SUMMER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I:  DRIVING OUT OF BUDMOUTH
+
+
+
+An easy bend of neck and graceful set of head; full and wavy bundles
+of dark-brown hair; light fall of little feet; pretty devices on the
+skirt of the dress; clear deep eyes; in short, a bunch of sweets:
+it was Fancy!  Dick's heart went round to her with a rush.
+
+The scene was the corner of Mary Street in Budmouth-Regis, near the
+King's statue, at which point the white angle of the last house in
+the row cut perpendicularly an embayed and nearly motionless expanse
+of salt water projected from the outer ocean--to-day lit in bright
+tones of green and opal.  Dick and Smart had just emerged from the
+street, and there on the right, against the brilliant sheet of
+liquid colour, stood Fancy Day; and she turned and recognized him.
+
+Dick suspended his thoughts of the letter and wonder at how she came
+there by driving close to the chains of the Esplanade--incontinently
+displacing two chairmen, who had just come to life for the summer in
+new clean shirts and revivified clothes, and being almost displaced
+in turn by a rigid boy rattling along with a baker's cart, and
+looking neither to the right nor the left.  He asked if she were
+going to Mellstock that night.
+
+"Yes, I'm waiting for the carrier," she replied, seeming, too, to
+suspend thoughts of the letter.
+
+"Now I can drive you home nicely, and you save half an hour.  Will
+ye come with me?"
+
+As Fancy's power to will anything seemed to have departed in some
+mysterious manner at that moment, Dick settled the matter by getting
+out and assisting her into the vehicle without another word.
+
+The temporary flush upon her cheek changed to a lesser hue, which
+was permanent, and at length their eyes met; there was present
+between them a certain feeling of embarrassment, which arises at
+such moments when all the instinctive acts dictated by the position
+have been performed.  Dick, being engaged with the reins, thought
+less of this awkwardness than did Fancy, who had nothing to do but
+to feel his presence, and to be more and more conscious of the fact,
+that by accepting a seat beside him in this way she succumbed to the
+tone of his note.  Smart jogged along, and Dick jogged, and the
+helpless Fancy necessarily jogged, too; and she felt that she was in
+a measure capture I and made a prisoner.
+
+"I am so much obliged to you for your company, Miss Day," he
+observed, as they drove past the two semicircular bays of the Old
+Royal Hotel, where His Majesty King George the Third had many a time
+attended the balls of the burgesses.
+
+To Miss Day, crediting him with the same consciousness of mastery--a
+consciousness of which he was perfectly innocent--this remark
+sounded like a magnanimous intention to soothe her, the captive.
+
+"I didn't come for the pleasure of obliging you with my company,"
+she said.
+
+The answer had an unexpected manner of incivility in it that must
+have been rather surprising to young Dewy.  At the same time it may
+be observed, that when a young woman returns a rude answer to a
+young man's civil remark, her heart is in a state which argues
+rather hopefully for his case than otherwise.
+
+There was silence between them till they had left the sea-front and
+passed about twenty of the trees that ornamented the road leading up
+out of the town towards Casterbridge and Mellstock.
+
+"Though I didn't come for that purpose either, I would have done
+it," said Dick at the twenty-first tree.
+
+"Now, Mr. Dewy, no flirtation, because it's wrong, and I don't wish
+it."
+
+Dick seated himself afresh just as he had been sitting before,
+arranged his looks very emphatically, and cleared his throat.
+
+"Really, anybody would think you had met me on business and were
+just going to commence," said the lady intractably.
+
+"Yes, they would."
+
+"Why, you never have, to be sure!"
+
+This was a shaky beginning.  He chopped round, and said cheerily, as
+a man who had resolved never to spoil his jollity by loving one of
+womankind--"Well, how are you getting on, Miss Day, at the present
+time?  Gaily, I don't doubt for a moment."
+
+"I am not gay, Dick; you know that."
+
+"Gaily doesn't mean decked in gay dresses."
+
+"I didn't suppose gaily was gaily dressed.  Mighty me, what a
+scholar you've grown!"
+
+"Lots of things have happened to you this spring, I see."
+
+"What have you seen?"
+
+"O, nothing; I've heard, I mean!"
+
+"What have you heard?"
+
+"The name of a pretty man, with brass studs and a copper ring and a
+tin watch-chain, a little mixed up with your own.  That's all."
+
+"That's a very unkind picture of Mr. Shiner, for that's who you
+mean!  The studs are gold, as you know, and it's a real silver
+chain; the ring I can't conscientiously defend, and he only wore it
+once."
+
+"He might have worn it a hundred times without showing it half so
+much."
+
+"Well, he's nothing to me," she serenely observed.
+
+"Not any more than I am?"
+
+"Now, Mr. Dewy," said Fancy severely, "certainly he isn't any more
+to me than you are!"
+
+"Not so much?"
+
+She looked aside to consider the precise compass of that question.
+"That I can't exactly answer," she replied with soft archness.
+
+As they were going rather slowly, another spring-cart, containing a
+farmer, farmer's wife, and farmer's man, jogged past them; and the
+farmer's wife and farmer's man eyed the couple very curiously.  The
+farmer never looked up from the horse's tail.
+
+"Why can't you exactly answer?" said Dick, quickening Smart a
+little, and jogging on just behind the farmer and farmer's wife and
+man.
+
+As no answer came, and as their eyes had nothing else to do, they
+both contemplated the picture presented in front, and noticed how
+the farmer's wife sat flattened between the two men, who bulged over
+each end of the seat to give her room, till they almost sat upon
+their respective wheels; and they looked too at the farmer's wife's
+silk mantle, inflating itself between her shoulders like a balloon
+and sinking flat again, at each jog of the horse.  The farmer's
+wife, feeling their eyes sticking into her back, looked over her
+shoulder.  Dick dropped ten yards further behind.
+
+"Fancy, why can't you answer?" he repeated.
+
+"Because how much you are to me depends upon how much I am to you,"
+said she in low tones.
+
+"Everything," said Dick, putting his hand towards hers, and casting
+emphatic eyes upon the upper curve of her cheek.
+
+"Now, Richard Dewy, no touching me!  I didn't say in what way your
+thinking of me affected the question--perhaps inversely, don't you
+see?  No touching, sir!  Look; goodness me, don't, Dick!"
+
+The cause of her sudden start was the unpleasant appearance over
+Dick's right shoulder of an empty timber-wagon and four journeymen-
+carpenters reclining in lazy postures inside it, their eyes directed
+upwards at various oblique angles into the surrounding world, the
+chief object of their existence being apparently to criticize to the
+very backbone and marrow every animate object that came within the
+compass of their vision.  This difficulty of Dick's was overcome by
+trotting on till the wagon and carpenters were beginning to look
+rather misty by reason of a film of dust that accompanied their
+wagon-wheels, and rose around their heads like a fog.
+
+"Say you love me, Fancy."
+
+"No, Dick, certainly not; 'tisn't time to do that yet."
+
+"Why, Fancy?"
+
+"'Miss Day' is better at present--don't mind my saying so; and I
+ought not to have called you Dick."
+
+"Nonsense! when you know that I would do anything on earth for your
+love.  Why, you make any one think that loving is a thing that can
+be done and undone, and put on and put off at a mere whim."
+
+"No, no, I don't," she said gently; "but there are things which tell
+me I ought not to give way to much thinking about you, even if--"
+
+"But you want to, don't you?  Yes, say you do; it is best to be
+truthful.  Whatever they may say about a woman's right to conceal
+where her love lies, and pretend it doesn't exist, and things like
+that, it is not best; I do know it, Fancy.  And an honest woman in
+that, as well as in all her daily concerns, shines most brightly,
+and is thought most of in the long-run."
+
+"Well then, perhaps, Dick, I do love you a little," she whispered
+tenderly; "but I wish you wouldn't say any more now."
+
+"I won't say any more now, then, if you don't like it, dear.  But
+you do love me a little, don't you?"
+
+"Now you ought not to want me to keep saying things twice; I can't
+say any more now, and you must be content with what you have."
+
+"I may at any rate call you Fancy?  There's no harm in that."
+
+"Yes, you may."
+
+"And you'll not call me Mr. Dewy any more?"
+
+"Very well."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II:  FURTHER ALONG THE ROAD
+
+
+
+Dick's spirits having risen in the course of these admissions of his
+sweetheart, he now touched Smart with the whip; and on Smart's neck,
+not far behind his ears.  Smart, who had been lost in thought for
+some time, never dreaming that Dick could reach so far with a whip
+which, on this particular journey, had never been extended further
+than his flank, tossed his head, and scampered along with exceeding
+briskness, which was very pleasant to the young couple behind him
+till, turning a bend in the road, they came instantly upon the
+farmer, farmer's man, and farmer's wife with the flapping mantle,
+all jogging on just the same as ever.
+
+"Bother those people!  Here we are upon them again."
+
+"Well, of course.  They have as much right to the road as we."
+
+"Yes, but it is provoking to be overlooked so.  I like a road all to
+myself.  Look what a lumbering affair theirs is!"  The wheels of the
+farmer's cart, just at that moment, jogged into a depression running
+across the road, giving the cart a twist, whereupon all three nodded
+to the left, and on coming out of it all three nodded to the right,
+and went on jerking their backs in and out as usual.  "We'll pass
+them when the road gets wider."
+
+When an opportunity seemed to offer itself for carrying this
+intention into effect, they heard light flying wheels behind, and on
+their quartering there whizzed along past them a brand-new gig, so
+brightly polished that the spokes of the wheels sent forth a
+continual quivering light at one point in their circle, and all the
+panels glared like mirrors in Dick and Fancy's eyes.  The driver,
+and owner as it appeared, was really a handsome man; his companion
+was Shiner.  Both turned round as they passed Dick and Fancy, and
+stared with bold admiration in her face till they were obliged to
+attend to the operation of passing the farmer.  Dick glanced for an
+instant at Fancy while she was undergoing their scrutiny; then
+returned to his driving with rather a sad countenance.
+
+"Why are you so silent?" she said, after a while, with real concern.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Yes, it is, Dick.  I couldn't help those people passing."
+
+"I know that."
+
+"You look offended with me.  What have I done?"
+
+"I can't tell without offending you."
+
+"Better out."
+
+"Well," said Dick, who seemed longing to tell, even at the risk of
+offending her, "I was thinking how different you in love are from me
+in love.  Whilst those men were staring, you dismissed me from your
+thoughts altogether, and--"
+
+"You can't offend me further now; tell all!"
+
+"And showed upon your face a pleased sense of being attractive to
+'em."
+
+"Don't be silly, Dick!  You know very well I didn't."
+
+Dick shook his head sceptically, and smiled.
+
+"Dick, I always believe flattery IF POSSIBLE--and it was possible
+then.  Now there's an open confession of weakness.  But I showed no
+consciousness of it."
+
+Dick, perceiving by her look that she would adhere to her statement,
+charitably forbore saying anything that could make her prevaricate.
+The sight of Shiner, too, had recalled another branch of the subject
+to his mind; that which had been his greatest trouble till her
+company and words had obscured its probability.
+
+"By the way, Fancy, do you know why our quire is to be dismissed?"
+
+"No:  except that it is Mr. Maybold's wish for me to play the
+organ."
+
+"Do you know how it came to be his wish?"
+
+"That I don't."
+
+"Mr. Shiner, being churchwarden, has persuaded the vicar; who,
+however, was willing enough before.  Shiner, I know, is crazy to see
+you playing every Sunday; I suppose he'll turn over your music, for
+the organ will be close to his pew.  But--I know you have never
+encouraged him?"
+
+"Never once!" said Fancy emphatically, and with eyes full of earnest
+truth.  "I don't like him indeed, and I never heard of his doing
+this before!  I have always felt that I should like to play in a
+church, but I never wished to turn you and your choir out; and I
+never even said that I could play till I was asked.  You don't think
+for a moment that I did, surely, do you?"
+
+"I know you didn't, dear."
+
+"Or that I care the least morsel of a bit for him?"
+
+"I know you don't."
+
+The distance between Budmouth and Mellstock was ten or eleven miles,
+and there being a good inn, "The Ship," four miles out of Budmouth,
+with a mast and cross-trees in front, Dick's custom in driving
+thither was to divide the journey into three stages by resting at
+this inn going and coming, and not troubling the Budmouth stables at
+all, whenever his visit to the town was a mere call and deposit, as
+to-day.
+
+Fancy was ushered into a little tea-room, and Dick went to the
+stables to see to the feeding of Smart.  In face of the significant
+twitches of feature that were visible in the ostler and labouring
+men idling around, Dick endeavoured to look unconscious of the fact
+that there was any sentiment between him and Fancy beyond a
+tranter's desire to carry a passenger home.  He presently entered
+the inn and opened the door of Fancy's room.
+
+"Dick, do you know, it has struck me that it is rather awkward, my
+being here alone with you like this.  I don't think you had better
+come in with me."
+
+"That's rather unpleasant, dear."
+
+"Yes, it is, and I wanted you to have some tea as well as myself
+too, because you must be tired."
+
+"Well, let me have some with you, then.  I was denied once before,
+if you recollect, Fancy."
+
+"Yes, yes, never mind!  And it seems unfriendly of me now, but I
+don't know what to do."
+
+"It shall be as you say, then."  Dick began to retreat with a
+dissatisfied wrinkling of face, and a farewell glance at the cosy
+tea-tray.
+
+"But you don't see how it is, Dick, when you speak like that," she
+said, with more earnestness than she had ever shown before.  "You do
+know, that even if I care very much for you, I must remember that I
+have a difficult position to maintain.  The vicar would not like me,
+as his schoolmistress, to indulge in a tete-a-tete anywhere with
+anybody."
+
+"But I am not ANY body!" exclaimed Dick.
+
+"No, no, I mean with a young man;" and she added softly, "unless I
+were really engaged to be married to him."
+
+"Is that all?  Then, dearest, dearest, why we'll be engaged at once,
+to be sure we will, and down I sit!  There it is, as easy as a
+glove!"
+
+"Ah! but suppose I won't!  And, goodness me, what have I done!" she
+faltered, getting very red.  "Positively, it seems as if I meant you
+to say that!"
+
+"Let's do it!  I mean get engaged," said Dick.  "Now, Fancy, will
+you be my wife?"
+
+"Do you know, Dick, it was rather unkind of you to say what you did
+coming along the road," she remarked, as if she had not heard the
+latter part of his speech; though an acute observer might have
+noticed about her breast, as the word 'wife' fell from Dick's lips,
+a soft silent escape of breaths, with very short rests between each.
+
+"What did I say?"
+
+"About my trying to look attractive to those men in the gig."
+
+"You couldn't help looking so, whether you tried or no.  And, Fancy,
+you do care for me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Very much?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you'll be my own wife?"
+
+Her heart quickened, adding to and withdrawing from her cheek
+varying tones of red to match each varying thought.  Dick looked
+expectantly at the ripe tint of her delicate mouth, waiting for what
+was coming forth.
+
+"Yes--if father will let me."
+
+Dick drew himself close to her, compressing his lips and pouting
+them out, as if he were about to whistle the softest melody known.
+
+"O no!" said Fancy solemnly.
+
+The modest Dick drew back a little.
+
+"Dick, Dick, kiss me and let me go instantly!--here's somebody
+coming!" she whisperingly exclaimed.
+
+* * *
+
+Half an hour afterwards Dick emerged from the inn, and if Fancy's
+lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared
+deeply stained.  The landlord was standing in the yard.
+
+"Heu-heu! hay-hay, Master Dewy!  Ho-ho!" he laughed, letting the
+laugh slip out gently and by degrees that it might make little noise
+in its exit, and smiting Dick under the fifth rib at the same time.
+"This will never do, upon my life, Master Dewy! calling for tay for
+a feymel passenger, and then going in and sitting down and having
+some too, and biding such a fine long time!"
+
+"But surely you know?" said Dick, with great apparent surprise.
+"Yes, yes!  Ha-ha!" smiting the landlord under the ribs in return.
+
+"Why, what?  Yes, yes; ha-ha!"
+
+"You know, of course!"
+
+"Yes, of course!  But--that is--I don't."
+
+"Why about--between that young lady and me?" nodding to the window
+of the room that Fancy occupied.
+
+"No; not I!" said the innkeeper, bringing his eyes into circles.
+
+"And you don't!"
+
+"Not a word, I'll take my oath!"
+
+"But you laughed when I laughed."
+
+"Ay, that was me sympathy; so did you when I laughed!"
+
+"Really, you don't know?  Goodness--not knowing that!"
+
+"I'll take my oath I don't!"
+
+"O yes," said Dick, with frigid rhetoric of pitying astonishment,
+"we're engaged to be married, you see, and I naturally look after
+her."
+
+"Of course, of course!  I didn't know that, and I hope ye'll excuse
+any little freedom of mine, Mr. Dewy.  But it is a very odd thing; I
+was talking to your father very intimate about family matters only
+last Friday in the world, and who should come in but Keeper Day, and
+we all then fell a-talking o' family matters; but neither one o'
+them said a mortal word about it; knowen me too so many years, and I
+at your father's own wedding.  'Tisn't what I should have expected
+from an old neighbour!"
+
+"Well, to say the truth, we hadn't told father of the engagement at
+that time; in fact, 'twasn't settled."
+
+"Ah! the business was done Sunday.  Yes, yes, Sunday's the courting
+day.  Heu-heu!"
+
+"No, 'twasn't done Sunday in particular."
+
+"After school-hours this week?  Well, a very good time, a very
+proper good time."
+
+"O no, 'twasn't done then."
+
+"Coming along the road to-day then, I suppose?"
+
+"Not at all; I wouldn't think of getting engaged in a dog-cart."
+
+"Dammy--might as well have said at once, the WHEN be blowed!
+Anyhow, 'tis a fine day, and I hope next time you'll come as one."
+
+Fancy was duly brought out and assisted into the vehicle, and the
+newly affianced youth and maiden passed up the steep hill to the
+Ridgeway, and vanished in the direction of Mellstock.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III:  A CONFESSION
+
+
+
+It was a morning of the latter summer-time; a morning of lingering
+dews, when the grass is never dry in the shade.  Fuchsias and
+dahlias were laden till eleven o'clock with small drops and dashes
+of water, changing the colour of their sparkle at every movement of
+the air; and elsewhere hanging on twigs like small silver fruit.
+The threads of garden spiders appeared thick and polished.  In the
+dry and sunny places, dozens of long-legged crane-flies whizzed off
+the grass at every step the passer took.
+
+Fancy Day and her friend Susan Dewy the tranter's daughter, were in
+such a spot as this, pulling down a bough laden with early apples.
+Three months had elapsed since Dick and Fancy had journeyed together
+from Budmouth, and the course of their love had run on vigorously
+during the whole time.  There had been just enough difficulty
+attending its development, and just enough finesse required in
+keeping it private, to lend the passion an ever-increasing freshness
+on Fancy's part, whilst, whether from these accessories or not,
+Dick's heart had been at all times as fond as could be desired.  But
+there was a cloud on Fancy's horizon now.
+
+"She is so well off--better than any of us," Susan Dewy was saying.
+"Her father farms five hundred acres, and she might marry a doctor
+or curate or anything of that kind if she contrived a little."
+
+"I don't think Dick ought to have gone to that gipsy-party at all
+when he knew I couldn't go," replied Fancy uneasily.
+
+"He didn't know that you would not be there till it was too late to
+refuse the invitation," said Susan.
+
+"And what was she like?  Tell me."
+
+"Well, she was rather pretty, I must own."
+
+"Tell straight on about her, can't you!  Come, do, Susan.  How many
+times did you say he danced with her?"
+
+"Once."
+
+"Twice, I think you said?"
+
+"Indeed I'm sure I didn't."
+
+"Well, and he wanted to again, I expect."
+
+"No; I don't think he did.  She wanted to dance with him again bad
+enough, I know.  Everybody does with Dick, because he's so handsome
+and such a clever courter."
+
+"O, I wish!--How did you say she wore her hair?"
+
+"In long curls,--and her hair is light, and it curls without being
+put in paper:  that's how it is she's so attractive."
+
+"She's trying to get him away! yes, yes, she is!  And through
+keeping this miserable school I mustn't wear my hair in curls!  But
+I will; I don't care if I leave the school and go home, I will wear
+my curls!  Look, Susan, do! is her hair as soft and long as this?"
+Fancy pulled from its coil under her hat a twine of her own hair,
+and stretched it down her shoulder to show its length, looking at
+Susan to catch her opinion from her eyes.
+
+"It is about the same length as that, I think," said Miss Dewy.
+
+Fancy paused hopelessly.  "I wish mine was lighter, like hers!" she
+continued mournfully.  "But hers isn't so soft, is it?  Tell me,
+now."
+
+"I don't know."
+
+Fancy abstractedly extended her vision to survey a yellow butterfly
+and a red-and-black butterfly that were flitting along in company,
+and then became aware that Dick was advancing up the garden.
+
+"Susan, here's Dick coming; I suppose that's because we've been
+talking about him."
+
+"Well, then, I shall go indoors now--you won't want me;" and Susan
+turned practically and walked off.
+
+Enter the single-minded Dick, whose only fault at the gipsying, or
+picnic, had been that of loving Fancy too exclusively, and depriving
+himself of the innocent pleasure the gathering might have afforded
+him, by sighing regretfully at her absence,--who had danced with the
+rival in sheer despair of ever being able to get through that stale,
+flat, and unprofitable afternoon in any other way; but this she
+would not believe.
+
+Fancy had settled her plan of emotion.  To reproach Dick?  O no, no.
+"I am in great trouble," said she, taking what was intended to be a
+hopelessly melancholy survey of a few small apples lying under the
+tree; yet a critical ear might have noticed in her voice a tentative
+tone as to the effect of the words upon Dick when she uttered them.
+
+"What are you in trouble about?  Tell me of it," said Dick
+earnestly.  "Darling, I will share it with 'ee and help 'ee."
+
+"No, no:  you can't!  Nobody can!"
+
+"Why not?  You don't deserve it, whatever it is.  Tell me, dear."
+
+"O, it isn't what you think!  It is dreadful:  my own sin!"
+
+"Sin, Fancy! as if you could sin!  I know it can't be."
+
+"'Tis, 'tis!" said the young lady, in a pretty little frenzy of
+sorrow.  "I have done wrong, and I don't like to tell it!  Nobody
+will forgive me, nobody! and you above all will not! . . . I have
+allowed myself to--to--fl--"
+
+"What,--not flirt!" he said, controlling his emotion as it were by a
+sudden pressure inward from his surface.  "And you said only the day
+before yesterday that you hadn't flirted in your life!"
+
+"Yes, I did; and that was a wicked story!  I have let another love
+me, and--"
+
+"Good G--!  Well, I'll forgive you,--yes, if you couldn't help it,--
+yes, I will!" said the now dismal Dick.  "Did you encourage him?"
+
+"O,--I don't know,--yes--no.  O, I think so!"
+
+"Who was it?"  A pause.  "Tell me!"
+
+"Mr. Shiner."
+
+After a silence that was only disturbed by the fall of an apple, a
+long-checked sigh from Dick, and a sob from Fancy, he said with real
+austerity -
+
+"Tell it all;--every word!"
+
+"He looked at me, and I looked at him, and he said, "Will you let me
+show you how to catch bullfinches down here by the stream?"  And I--
+wanted to know very much--I did so long to have a bullfinch!  I
+couldn't help that and I said, "Yes!" and then he said, "Come here."
+And I went with him down to the lovely river, and then he said to
+me, "Look and see how I do it, and then you'll know:  I put this
+birdlime round this twig, and then I go here," he said, "and hide
+away under a hush; and presently clever Mister Bird comes and
+perches upon the twig, and flaps his wings, and you've got him
+before you can say Jack"--something; O, O, O, I forget what!"
+
+"Jack Sprat," mournfully suggested Dick through the cloud of his
+misery.
+
+"No, not Jack Sprat," she sobbed.
+
+"Then 'twas Jack Robinson!" he said, with the emphasis of a man who
+had resolved to discover every iota of the truth, or die.
+
+"Yes, that was it!  And then I put my hand upon the rail of the
+bridge to get across, and--That's all."
+
+"Well, that isn't much, either," said Dick critically, and more
+cheerfully.  "Not that I see what business Shiner has to take upon
+himself to teach you anything.  But it seems--it do seem there must
+have been more than that to set you up in such a dreadful taking?"
+
+He looked into Fancy's eyes.  Misery of miseries!--guilt was written
+there still.
+
+"Now, Fancy, you've not told me all!" said Dick, rather sternly for
+a quiet young man.
+
+"O, don't speak so cruelly!  I am afraid to tell now!  If you hadn't
+been harsh, I was going on to tell all; now I can't!"
+
+"Come, dear Fancy, tell:  come.  I'll forgive; I must,--by heaven
+and earth, I must, whether I will or no; I love you so!"
+
+"Well, when I put my hand on the bridge, he touched it--"
+
+"A scamp!" said Dick, grinding an imaginary human frame to powder.
+
+"And then he looked at me, and at last he said, 'Are you in love
+with Dick Dewy?'  And I said, 'Perhaps I am!' and then he said, 'I
+wish you weren't then, for I want to marry you, with all my soul.'"
+
+"There's a villain now!  Want to marry you!"  And Dick quivered with
+the bitterness of satirical laughter.  Then suddenly remembering
+that he might be reckoning without his host:  "Unless, to he sure,
+you are willing to have him,--perhaps you are," he said, with the
+wretched indifference of a castaway.
+
+"No, indeed I am not!" she said, her sobs just beginning to take a
+favourable turn towards cure.
+
+"Well, then," said Dick, coming a little to his senses, "you've been
+stretching it very much in giving such a dreadful beginning to such
+a mere nothing.  And I know what you've done it for,--just because
+of that gipsy-party!"  He turned away from her and took five paces
+decisively, as if he were tired of an ungrateful country, including
+herself "You did it to make me jealous, and I won't stand it!"  He
+flung the words to her over his shoulder and then stalked on,
+apparently very anxious to walk to the remotest of the Colonies that
+very minute.
+
+"O, O, O, Dick--Dick!" she cried, trotting after him like a pet
+lamb, and really seriously alarmed at last, "you'll kill me!  My
+impulses are bad--miserably wicked,--and I can't help it; forgive
+me, Dick!  And I love you always; and those times when you look
+silly and don't seem quite good enough for me,--just the same, I do,
+Dick!  And there is something more serious, though not concerning
+that walk with him."
+
+"Well, what is it?" said Dick, altering his mind about walking to
+the Colonies in fact, passing to the other extreme, and standing so
+rooted to the road that he was apparently not even going home.
+
+"Why this," she said, drying the beginning of a new flood of tears
+she had been going to shed, "this is the serious part.  Father has
+told Mr. Shiner that he would like him for a son-in-law, if he could
+get me;--that he has his right hearty consent to come courting me!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV:  AN ARRANGEMENT
+
+
+
+"That IS serious," said Dick, more intellectually than he had spoken
+for a long time.
+
+The truth was that Geoffrey knew nothing about his daughter's
+continued walks and meetings with Dick.  When a hint that there were
+symptoms of an attachment between them had first reached Geoffrey's
+ears, he stated so emphatically that he must think the matter over
+before any such thing could be allowed that, rather unwisely on
+Dick's part, whatever it might have been on the lady's, the lovers
+were careful to be seen together no more in public; and Geoffrey,
+forgetting the report, did not think over the matter at all.  So Mr.
+Shiner resumed his old position in Geoffrey's brain by mere flux of
+time.  Even Shiner began to believe that Dick existed for Fancy no
+more,--though that remarkably easy-going man had taken no active
+steps on his own account as yet.
+
+"And father has not only told Mr. Shiner that," continued Fancy,
+"but he has written me a letter, to say he should wish me to
+encourage Mr. Shiner, if 'twas convenient!"
+
+"I must start off and see your father at once!" said Dick, taking
+two or three vehement steps to the south, recollecting that Mr. Day
+lived to the north, and coming back again.
+
+"I think we had better see him together.  Not tell him what you come
+for, or anything of the kind, until he likes you, and so win his
+brain through his heart, which is always the way to manage people.
+I mean in this way:  I am going home on Saturday week to help them
+in the honey-taking.  You might come there to me, have something to
+eat and drink, and let him guess what your coming signifies, without
+saying it in so many words."
+
+"We'll do it, dearest.  But I shall ask him for you, flat and plain;
+not wait for his guessing."  And the lover then stepped close to
+her, and attempted to give her one little kiss on the cheek, his
+lips alighting however, on an outlying tract of her back hair by
+reason of an impulse that had caused her to turn her head with a
+jerk.  "Yes, and I'll put on my second-best suit and a clean shirt
+and collar, and black my boots as if 'twas a Sunday.  'Twill have a
+good appearance, you see, and that's a great deal to start with."
+
+"You won't wear that old waistcoat, will you, Dick?"
+
+"Bless you, no!  Why I--"
+
+"I didn't mean to be personal, dear Dick," she said, fearing she had
+hurt his feelings.  "'Tis a very nice waistcoat, but what I meant
+was, that though it is an excellent waistcoat for a settled-down
+man, it is not quite one for" (she waited, and a blush expanded over
+her face, and then she went on again)--"for going courting in."
+
+"No, I'll wear my best winter one, with the leather lining, that
+mother made.  It is a beautiful, handsome waistcoat inside, yes, as
+ever anybody saw.  In fact, only the other day, I unbuttoned it to
+show a chap that very lining, and he said it was the strongest,
+handsomest lining you could wish to see on the king's waistcoat
+himself."
+
+"_I_ don't quite know what to wear," she said, as if her habitual
+indifference alone to dress had kept back so important a subject
+till now.
+
+"Why, that blue frock you wore last week."
+
+"Doesn't set well round the neck.  I couldn't wear that."
+
+"But I shan't care."
+
+"No, you won't mind."
+
+"Well, then it's all right.  Because you only care how you look to
+me, do you, dear?  I only dress for you, that's certain."
+
+"Yes, but you see I couldn't appear in it again very well."
+
+"Any strange gentleman you mid meet in your journey might notice the
+set of it, I suppose.  Fancy, men in love don't think so much about
+how they look to other women."  It is difficult to say whether a
+tone of playful banter or of gentle reproach prevailed in the
+speech.
+
+"Well then, Dick," she said, with good-humoured frankness, "I'll own
+it.  I shouldn't like a stranger to see me dressed badly, even
+though I am in love.  'Tis our nature, I suppose."
+
+"You perfect woman!"
+
+"Yes; if you lay the stress on 'woman,'" she murmured, looking at a
+group of hollyhocks in flower, round which a crowd of butterflies
+had gathered like female idlers round a bonnet-shop.
+
+"But about the dress.  Why not wear the one you wore at our party?"
+
+"That sets well, but a girl of the name of Bet Tallor, who lives
+near our house, has had one made almost like it (only in pattern,
+though of miserably cheap stuff), and I couldn't wear it on that
+account.  Dear me, I am afraid I can't go now."
+
+"O yes, you must; I know you will!" said Dick, with dismay.  "Why
+not wear what you've got on?"
+
+"What! this old one!  After all, I think that by wearing my gray one
+Saturday, I can make the blue one do for Sunday.  Yes, I will.  A
+hat or a bonnet, which shall it be?  Which do I look best in?"
+
+"Well, I think the bonnet is nicest, more quiet and matronly."
+
+"What's the objection to the hat?  Does it make me look old?"
+
+"O no; the hat is well enough; but it makes you look rather too--you
+won't mind me saying it, dear?"
+
+"Not at all, for I shall wear the bonnet."
+
+"--Rather too coquettish and flirty for an engaged young woman."
+
+She reflected a minute.  "Yes; yes.  Still, after all, the hat would
+do best; hats ARE best, you see.  Yes, I must wear the hat, dear
+Dicky, because I ought to wear a hat, you know."
+
+
+
+
+PART THE FORTH--AUTUMN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I:  GOING NUTTING
+
+
+Dick, dressed in his 'second-best' suit, burst into Fancy's sitting-
+room with a glow of pleasure on his face.
+
+It was two o'clock on Friday, the day be fore her contemplated visit
+to her father, and for some reason connected with cleaning the
+school the children had been given this Friday afternoon for
+pastime, in addition to the usual Saturday.
+
+"Fancy! it happens just right that it is a leisure half day with
+you.  Smart is lame in his near-foot-afore, and so, as I can't do
+anything, I've made a holiday afternoon of it, and am come for you
+to go nutting with me!"
+
+She was sitting by the parlour window, with a blue frock lying
+across her lap and scissors in her hand.
+
+"Go nutting!  Yes.  But I'm afraid I can't go for an hour or so."
+
+"Why not?  'Tis the only spare afternoon we may both have together
+for weeks."
+
+"This dress of mine, that I am going to wear on Sunday at Yalbury;--
+I find it fits so badly that I must alter it a little, after all.  I
+told the dressmaker to make it by a pattern I gave her at the time;
+instead of that, she did it her own way, and made me look a perfect
+fright."
+
+"How long will you be?" he inquired, looking rather disappointed.
+
+"Not long.  Do wait and talk to me; come, do, dear."
+
+Dick sat down.  The talking progressed very favourably, amid the
+snipping and sewing, till about half-past two, at which time his
+conversation began to be varied by a slight tapping upon his toe
+with a walking-stick he had cut from the hedge as he came along.
+Fancy talked and answered him, but sometimes the answers were so
+negligently given, that it was evident her thoughts lay for the
+greater part in her lap with the blue dress.
+
+The clock struck three.  Dick arose from his seat, walked round the
+room with his hands behind him, examined all the furniture, then
+sounded a few notes on the harmonium, then looked inside all the
+books he could find, then smoothed Fancy's head with his hand.
+Still the snipping and sewing went on.
+
+The clock struck four.  Dick fidgeted about, yawned privately;
+counted the knots in the table, yawned publicly; counted the flies
+on the ceiling, yawned horribly; went into the kitchen and scullery,
+and so thoroughly studied the principle upon which the pump was
+constructed that he could have delivered a lecture on the subject.
+Stepping back to Fancy, and finding still that she had not done, he
+went into her garden and looked at her cabbages and potatoes, and
+reminded himself that they seemed to him to wear a decidedly
+feminine aspect; then pulled up several weeds, and came in again.
+The clock struck five, and still the snipping and sewing went on.
+
+Dick attempted to kill a fly, peeled all the rind off his walking-
+stick, then threw the stick into the scullery because it was spoilt,
+produced hideous discords from the harmonium, and accidentally
+overturned a vase of flowers, the water from which ran in a rill
+across the table and dribbled to the floor, where it formed a lake,
+the shape of which, after the lapse of a few minutes, he began to
+modify considerably with his foot, till it was like a map of England
+and Wales.
+
+"Well, Dick, you needn't have made quite such a mess."
+
+"Well, I needn't, I suppose."  He walked up to the blue dress, and
+looked at it with a rigid gaze.  Then an idea seemed to cross his
+brain.
+
+"Fancy."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I thought you said you were going to wear your gray gown all day
+to-morrow on your trip to Yalbury, and in the evening too, when I
+shall be with you, and ask your father for you?"
+
+"So I am."
+
+"And the blue one only on Sunday?"
+
+"And the blue one Sunday."
+
+"Well, dear, I sha'n't be at Yalbury Sunday to see it."
+
+"No, but I shall walk to Longpuddle church in the afternoon with
+father, and such lots of people will be looking at me there, you
+know; and it did set so badly round the neck."
+
+"I never noticed it, and 'tis like nobody else would."
+
+"They might."
+
+"Then why not wear the gray one on Sunday as well?  'Tis as pretty
+as the blue one."
+
+"I might make the gray one do, certainly.  But it isn't so good; it
+didn't cost half so much as this one, and besides, it would be the
+same I wore Saturday."
+
+"Then wear the striped one, dear."
+
+"I might."
+
+"Or the dark one."
+
+"Yes, I might; but I want to wear a fresh one they haven't seen."
+
+"I see, I see," said Dick, in a voice in which the tones of love
+were decidedly inconvenienced by a considerable emphasis, his
+thoughts meanwhile running as follows:  "I, the man she loves best
+in the world, as she says, am to understand that my poor half-
+holiday is to be lost, because she wants to wear on Sunday a gown
+there is not the slightest necessity for wearing, simply, in fact,
+to appear more striking than usual in the eyes of Longpuddle young
+men; and I not there, either."
+
+"Then there are three dresses good enough for my eyes, but neither
+is good enough for the youths of Longpuddle," he said.
+
+"No, not that exactly, Dick.  Still, you see, I do want--to look
+pretty to them--there, that's honest!  But I sha'n't be much
+longer."
+
+"How much?"
+
+"A quarter of an hour."
+
+"Very well; I'll come in in a quarter of an hour."
+
+"Why go away?"
+
+"I mid as well."
+
+He went out, walked down the road, and sat upon a gate.  Here he
+meditated and meditated, and the more he meditated the more
+decidedly did he begin to fume, and the more positive was he that
+his time had been scandalously trifled with by Miss Fancy Day--that,
+so far from being the simple girl who had never had a sweetheart
+before, as she had solemnly assured him time after time, she was, if
+not a flirt, a woman who had had no end of admirers; a girl most
+certainly too anxious about her frocks; a girl, whose feelings,
+though warm, were not deep; a girl who cared a great deal too much
+how she appeared in the eyes of other men.  "What she loves best in
+the world," he thought, with an incipient spice of his father's
+grimness, "is her hair and complexion.  What she loves next best,
+her gowns and hats; what she loves next best, myself, perhaps!"
+
+Suffering great anguish at this disloyalty in himself and harshness
+to his darling, yet disposed to persevere in it, a horribly cruel
+thought crossed his mind.  He would not call for her, as he had
+promised, at the end of a quarter of an hour!  Yes, it would be a
+punishment she well deserved.  Although the best part of the
+afternoon had been wasted he would go nutting as he had intended,
+and go by himself.
+
+He leaped over the gate, and pushed up the lane for nearly two
+miles, till a winding path called Snail-Creep sloped up a hill and
+entered a hazel copse by a hole hike a rabbit's burrow.  In he
+plunged, vanished among the bushes, and in a short time there was no
+sign of his existence upon earth, save an occasional rustling of
+boughs and snapping of twigs in divers points of Grey's Wood.
+
+Never man nutted as Dick nutted that afternoon.  He worked like a
+galley slave.  Half-hour after half-hour passed away, and still he
+gathered without ceasing.  At last, when the sun had set, and
+bunches of nuts could not be distinguished from the leaves which
+nourished them, he shouldered his bag, containing quite two pecks of
+the finest produce of the wood, about as much use to him as two
+pecks of stones from the road, strolled down the woodland track,
+crossed the highway and entered the homeward lane, whistling as be
+went.
+
+Probably, Miss Fancy Day never before or after stood so low in Mr.
+Dewy's opinion as on that afternoon.  In fact, it is just possible
+that a few more blue dresses on the Longpuddle young men's account
+would have clarified Dick's brain entirely, and made him once more a
+free man.
+
+But Venus had planned other developments, at any rate for the
+present.  Cuckoo-Lane, the way he pursued, passed over a ridge which
+rose keenly against the sky about fifty yards in his van.  Here,
+upon the bright after-glow about the horizon, was now visible an
+irregular shape, which at first he conceived to be a bough standing
+a little beyond the line of its neighbours.  Then it seemed to move,
+and, as he advanced still further, there was no doubt that it was a
+living being sitting in the bank, head bowed on hand.  The grassy
+margin entirely prevented his footsteps from being heard, and it was
+not till he was close that the figure recognized him.  Up it sprang,
+and he was face to face with Fancy.
+
+"Dick, Dick!  O, is it you, Dick!"
+
+"Yes, Fancy," said Dick, in a rather repentant tone, and lowering
+his nuts.
+
+She ran up to him, flung her parasol on the grass, put her little
+head against his breast, and then there began a narrative,
+disjointed by such a hysterical weeping as was never surpassed for
+intensity in the whole history of love.
+
+"O Dick," she sobbed out, "where have you been away from me?  O, I
+have suffered agony, and thought you would never come any more!
+'Tis cruel, Dick; no 'tisn't, it is justice!  I've been walking
+miles and miles up and down Grey's Wood, trying to find you, till I
+was wearied and worn out, and I could walk no further, and had come
+back this far!  O Dick, directly you were gone, I thought I had
+offended you and I put down the dress; 'tisn't finished now, and I
+never will finish, it, and I'll wear an old one Sunday!  Yes, Dick,
+I will, because I don't care what I wear when you are not by my
+side--ha, you think I do, but I don't!--and I ran after you, and I
+saw you go up Snail-Creep and not look back once, and then you
+plunged in, and I after you; but I was too far behind.  O, I did
+wish the horrid bushes had been cut down, so that I could see your
+dear shape again!  And then I called out to you, and nobody
+answered, and I was afraid to call very loud, lest anybody else
+should hear me.  Then I kept wandering and wandering about, and it
+was dreadful misery, Dick.  And then I shut my eyes and fell to
+picturing you looking at some other woman, very pretty and nice, but
+with no affection or truth in her at all, and then imagined you
+saying to yourself, "Ah, she's as good as Fancy, for Fancy told me a
+story, and was a flirt, and cared for herself more than me, so now
+I'll have this one for my sweetheart."  O, you won't, will you,
+Dick, for I do love you so!"
+
+It is scarcely necessary to add that Dick renounced his freedom
+there and then, and kissed her ten times over, and promised that no
+pretty woman of the kind alluded to should ever engross his
+thoughts; in short, that though he had been vexed with her, all such
+vexation was past, and that henceforth and for ever it was simply
+Fancy or death for him.  And then they set about proceeding
+homewards, very slowly on account of Fancy's weariness, she leaning
+upon his shoulder, and in addition receiving support from his arm
+round her waist; though she had sufficiently recovered from her
+desperate condition to sing to him, "Why are you wandering here, I
+pray?" during the latter part of their walk.  Nor is it necessary to
+describe in detail how the bag of nuts was quite forgotten until
+three days later, when it was found among the brambles and restored
+empty to Mrs. Dewy, her initials being marked thereon in red cotton;
+and how she puzzled herself till her head ached upon the question of
+how on earth her meal-bag could have got into Cuckoo-Lane.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II:  HONEY-TAKING, AND AFTERWARDS
+
+
+
+Saturday evening saw Dick Dewy journeying on foot to Yalbury Wood,
+according to the arrangement with Fancy.
+
+The landscape being concave, at the going down of the sun everything
+suddenly assumed a uniform robe of shade.  The evening advanced from
+sunset to dusk long before Dick's arrival, and his progress during
+the latter portion of his walk through the trees was indicated by
+the flutter of terrified birds that had been roosting over the path.
+And in crossing the glades, masses of hot dry air, that had been
+formed on the hills during the day, greeted his cheeks alternately
+with clouds of damp night air from the valleys.  He reached the
+keeper-steward's house, where the grass-plot and the garden in front
+appeared light and pale against the unbroken darkness of the grove
+from which he had emerged, and paused at the garden gate.
+
+He had scarcely been there a minute when he beheld a sort of
+procession advancing from the door in his front.  It consisted first
+of Enoch the trapper, carrying a spade on his shoulder and a lantern
+dangling in his hand; then came Mrs. Day, the light of the lantern
+revealing that she bore in her arms curious objects about a foot
+long, in the form of Latin crosses (made of lath and brown paper
+dipped in brimstone--called matches by bee-masters); next came Miss
+Day, with a shawl thrown over her head; and behind all, in the
+gloom, Mr. Frederic Shiner.
+
+Dick, in his consternation at finding Shiner present, was at a loss
+how to proceed, and retired under a tree to collect his thoughts.
+
+"Here I be, Enoch," said a voice; and the procession advancing
+farther, the lantern's rays illuminated the figure of Geoffrey,
+awaiting their arrival beside a row of bee-hives, in front of the
+path.  Taking the spade from Enoch, he proceeded to dig two holes in
+the earth beside the hives, the others standing round in a circle,
+except Mrs. Day, who deposited her matches in the fork of an apple-
+tree and returned to the house.  The party remaining were now lit up
+in front by the lantern in their midst, their shadows radiating each
+way upon the garden-plot like the spokes of a wheel.  An apparent
+embarrassment of Fancy at the presence of Shiner caused a silence in
+the assembly, during which the preliminaries of execution were
+arranged, the matches fixed, the stake kindled, the two hives placed
+over the two holes, and the earth stopped round the edges.  Geoffrey
+then stood erect, and rather more, to straighten his backbone after
+the digging.
+
+"They were a peculiar family," said Mr. Shiner, regarding the hives
+reflectively.
+
+Geoffrey nodded.
+
+"Those holes will be the grave of thousands!" said Fancy.  "I think
+'tis rather a cruel thing to do."
+
+Her father shook his head.  "No," he said, tapping the hives to
+shake the dead bees from their cells, "if you suffocate 'em this
+way, they only die once:  if you fumigate 'em in the new way, they
+come to life again, and die o' starvation; so the pangs o' death be
+twice upon 'em."
+
+"I incline to Fancy's notion," said Mr. Shiner, laughing lightly.
+
+"The proper way to take honey, so that the bees be neither starved
+nor murdered, is a puzzling matter," said the keeper steadily.
+
+"I should like never to take it from them," said Fancy.
+
+"But 'tis the money," said Enoch musingly.  "For without money man
+is a shadder!"
+
+The lantern-light had disturbed many bees that had escaped from
+hives destroyed some days earlier, and, demoralized by affliction,
+were now getting a living as marauders about the doors of other
+hives.  Several flew round the head and neck of Geoffrey; then
+darted upon him with an irritated bizz.
+
+Enoch threw down the lantern, and ran off and pushed his head into a
+currant bush; Fancy scudded up the path; and Mr. Shiner floundered
+away helter-skelter among the cabbages.  Geoffrey stood his ground,
+unmoved and firm as a rock.  Fancy was the first to return, followed
+by Enoch picking up the lantern.  Mr. Shiner still remained
+invisible.
+
+"Have the craters stung ye?" said Enoch to Geoffrey.
+
+"No, not much--on'y a little here and there," he said with leisurely
+solemnity, shaking one bee out of his shirt sleeve, pulling another
+from among his hair, and two or three more from his neck.  The rest
+looked on during this proceeding with a complacent sense of being
+out of it,--much as a European nation in a state of internal
+commotion is watched by its neighbours.
+
+"Are those all of them, father?" said Fancy, when Geoffrey had
+pulled away five.
+
+"Almost all,--though I feel one or two more sticking into my
+shoulder and side.  Ah! there's another just begun again upon my
+backbone.  You lively young mortals, how did you get inside there?
+However, they can't sting me many times more, poor things, for they
+must be getting weak.  They mid as well stay in me till bedtime now,
+I suppose."
+
+As he himself was the only person affected by this arrangement, it
+seemed satisfactory enough; and after a noise of feet kicking
+against cabbages in a blundering progress among them, the voice of
+Mr. Shiner was heard from the darkness in that direction.
+
+"Is all quite safe again?"
+
+No answer being returned to this query, he apparently assumed that
+he might venture forth, and gradually drew near the lantern again.
+The hives were now removed from their position over the holes, one
+being handed to Enoch to carry indoors, and one being taken by
+Geoffrey himself.
+
+"Bring hither the lantern, Fancy:  the spade can bide."
+
+Geoffrey and Enoch then went towards the house, leaving Shiner and
+Fancy standing side by side on the garden-plot.
+
+"Allow me," said Shiner, stooping for the lantern and seizing it at
+the same time with Fancy.
+
+"I can carry it," said Fancy, religiously repressing all inclination
+to trifle.  She had thoroughly considered that subject after the
+tearful explanation of the bird-catching adventure to Dick, and had
+decided that it would be dishonest in her, as an engaged young
+woman, to trifle with men's eyes and hands any more.  Finding that
+Shiner still retained his hold of the lantern, she relinquished it,
+and he, having found her retaining it, also let go.  The lantern
+fell, and was extinguished.  Fancy moved on.
+
+"Where is the path?" said Mr. Shiner.
+
+"Here," said Fancy.  "Your eyes will get used to the dark in a
+minute or two."
+
+"Till that time will ye lend me your hand?"  Fancy gave him the
+extreme tips of her fingers, and they stepped from the plot into the
+path.
+
+"You don't accept attentions very freely."
+
+"It depends upon who offers them."
+
+"A fellow like me, for instance."  A dead silence.
+
+"Well, what do you say, Missie?"
+
+"It then depends upon how they are offered."
+
+"Not wildly, and yet not careless-like; not purposely, and yet not
+by chance; not too quick nor yet too slow."
+
+"How then?" said Fancy.
+
+"Coolly and practically," he said.  "How would that kind of love be
+taken?"
+
+"Not anxiously, and yet not indifferently; neither blushing nor
+pale; nor religiously nor yet quite wickedly."
+
+"Not at all."
+
+Geoffrey Day's storehouse at the back of his dwelling was hung with
+bunches of dried horehound, mint, and sage; brown-paper bags of
+thyme and lavender; and long ropes of clean onions.  On shelves were
+spread large red and yellow apples, and choice selections of early
+potatoes for seed next year;--vulgar crowds of commoner kind lying
+beneath in heaps.  A few empty beehives were clustered around a nail
+in one corner, under which stood two or three barrels of new cider
+of the first crop, each bubbling and squirting forth from the yet
+open bunghole.
+
+Fancy was now kneeling beside the two inverted hives, one of which
+rested against her lap, for convenience in operating upon the
+contents.  She thrust her sleeves above her elbows, and inserted her
+small pink hand edgewise between each white lobe of honeycomb,
+performing the act so adroitly and gently as not to unseal a single
+cell.  Then cracking the piece off at the crown of the hive by a
+slight backward and forward movement, she lifted each portion as it
+was loosened into a large blue platter, placed on a bench at her
+side.
+
+"Bother these little mortals!" said Geoffrey, who was holding the
+light to her, and giving his back an uneasy twist.  "I really think
+I may as well go indoors and take 'em out, poor things! for they
+won't let me alone.  There's two a stinging wi' all their might now.
+I'm sure I wonder their strength can last so long."
+
+"All right, friend; I'll hold the candle whilst you are gone," said
+Mr. Shiner, leisurely taking the light, and allowing Geoffrey to
+depart, which he did with his usual long paces.
+
+He could hardly have gone round to the house-door when other
+footsteps were heard approaching the outbuilding; the tip of a
+finger appeared in the hole through which the wood latch was lifted,
+and Dick Dewy came in, having been all this time walking up and down
+the wood, vainly waiting for Shiner's departure.
+
+Fancy looked up and welcomed him rather confusedly.  Shiner grasped
+the candlestick more firmly, and, lest doing this in silence should
+not imply to Dick with sufficient force that he was quite at home
+and cool, he sang invincibly -
+
+
+"'King Arthur he had three sons.'"
+
+
+"Father here?" said Dick.
+
+"Indoors, I think," said Fancy, looking pleasantly at him.
+
+Dick surveyed the scene, and did not seem inclined to hurry off just
+at that moment.  Shiner went on singing
+
+
+"'The miller was drown'd in his pond,
+The weaver was hung in his yarn,
+And the d- ran away with the little tail-or,
+With the broadcloth under his arm.'"
+
+
+"That's a terrible crippled rhyme, if that's your rhyme!" said Dick,
+with a grain of superciliousness in his tone.
+
+"It's no use your complaining to me about the rhyme!" said Mr.
+Shiner.  "You must go to the man that made it."
+
+Fancy by this time had acquired confidence.
+
+"Taste a bit, Mr. Dewy," she said, holding up to him a small
+circular piece of honeycomb that had been the last in the row of
+layers, remaining still on her knees and flinging back her head to
+look in his face; "and then I'll taste a bit too."
+
+"And I, if you please," said Mr. Shiner.  Nevertheless the farmer
+looked superior, as if he could even now hardly join the trifling
+from very importance of station; and after receiving the honeycomb
+from Fancy, he turned it over in his hand till the cells began to be
+crushed, and the liquid honey ran down from his fingers in a thin
+string.
+
+Suddenly a faint cry from Fancy caused them to gaze at her.
+
+"What's the matter, dear?" said Dick.
+
+"It is nothing, but O-o! a bee has stung the inside of my lip!  He
+was in one of the cells I was eating!"
+
+"We must keep down the swelling, or it may be serious!" said Shiner,
+stepping up and kneeling beside her.  "Let me see it."
+
+"No, no!"
+
+"Just let ME see it," said Dick, kneeling on the other side:  and
+after some hesitation she pressed down her lip with one finger to
+show the place.  "O, I hope 'twill soon he better!  I don't mind a
+sting in ordinary places, hut it is so bad upon your lip," she added
+with tears in her eyes, and writhing a little from the pain.
+
+Shiner held the light above his head and pushed his face close to
+Fancy's, as if the lip had been shown exclusively to himself, upon
+which Dick pushed closer, as if Shiner were not there at all.
+
+"It is swelling," said Dick to her right aspect.
+
+"It isn't swelling," said Shiner to her left aspect.
+
+"Is it dangerous on the lip?" cried Fancy.  "I know it is dangerous
+on the tongue."
+
+"O no, not dangerous!" answered Dick.
+
+"Rather dangerous," had answered Shiner simultaneously.
+
+"I must try to bear it!" said Fancy, turning again to the hives.
+
+"Hartshorn-and-oil is a good thing to put to it, Miss Day," said
+Shiner with great concern.
+
+"Sweet-oil-and-hartshorn I've found to be a good thing to cure
+stings, Miss Day," said Dick with greater concern.
+
+"We have some mixed indoors; would you kindly run and get it for
+me?" she said.
+
+Now, whether by inadvertence, or whether by mischievous intention,
+the individuality of the YOU was so carelessly denoted that both
+Dick and Shiner sprang to their feet like twin acrobats, and marched
+abreast to the door; both seized the latch and lifted it, and
+continued marching on, shoulder to shoulder, in the same manner to
+the dwelling-house.  Not only so, but entering the room, they
+marched as before straight up to Mrs. Day's chair, letting the door
+in the oak partition slam so forcibly, that the rows of pewter on
+the dresser rang like a bell.
+
+"Mrs. Day, Fancy has stung her lip, and wants you to give me the
+hartshorn, please," said Mr. Shiner, very close to Mrs. Day's face.
+
+"O, Mrs. Day, Fancy has asked me to bring out the hartshorn, please,
+because she has stung her lip!" said Dick, a little closer to Mrs.
+Day's face.
+
+"Well, men alive! that's no reason why you should eat me, I
+suppose!" said Mrs. Day, drawing back.
+
+She searched in the corner-cupboard, produced the bottle, and began
+to dust the cork, the rim, and every other part very carefully,
+Dick's hand and Shiner's hand waiting side by side.
+
+"Which is head man?" said Mrs. Day.  "Now, don't come mumbudgeting
+so close again.  Which is head man?"
+
+Neither spoke; and the bottle was inclined towards Shiner.  Shiner,
+as a high-class man, would not look in the least triumphant, and
+turned to go off with it as Geoffrey came downstairs after the
+search in his linen for concealed bees.
+
+"O--that you, Master Dewy?"
+
+Dick assured the keeper that it was; and the young man then
+determined upon a bold stroke for the attainment of his end,
+forgetting that the worst of bold strokes is the disastrous
+consequences they involve if they fail.
+
+"I've come on purpose to speak to you very particular, Mr. Day," he
+said, with a crushing emphasis intended for the ears of Mr. Shiner,
+who was vanishing round the door-post at that moment.
+
+"Well, I've been forced to go upstairs and unrind myself, and shake
+some bees out o' me" said Geoffrey, walking slowly towards the open
+door, and standing on the threshold.  "The young rascals got into my
+shirt and wouldn't be quiet nohow."
+
+Dick followed him to the door.
+
+"I've come to speak a word to you," he repeated, looking out at the
+pale mist creeping up from the gloom of the valley.  "You may
+perhaps guess what it is about."
+
+The keeper lowered his hands into the depths of his pockets, twirled
+his eyes, balanced himself on his toes, looked as perpendicularly
+downward as if his glance were a plumb-line, then horizontally,
+collecting together the cracks that lay about his face till they
+were all in the neighbourhood of his eyes.
+
+"Maybe I don't know," he replied.
+
+Dick said nothing; and the stillness was disturbed only by some
+small bird that was being killed by an owl in the adjoining wood,
+whose cry passed into the silence without mingling with it.
+
+"I've left my hat up in chammer," said Geoffrey; "wait while I step
+up and get en."
+
+"I'll be in the garden," said Dick.
+
+He went round by a side wicket into the garden, and Geoffrey went
+upstairs.  It was the custom in Mellstock and its vicinity to
+discuss matters of pleasure and ordinary business inside the house,
+and to reserve the garden for very important affairs:  a custom
+which, as is supposed, originated in the desirability of getting
+away at such times from the other members of the family when there
+was only one room for living in, though it was now quite as
+frequently practised by those who suffered from no such limitation
+to the size of their domiciles.
+
+The head-keeper's form appeared in the dusky garden, and Dick walked
+towards him.  The elder paused and leant over the rail of a piggery
+that stood on the left of the path, upon which Dick did the same;
+and they both contemplated a whitish shadowy shape that was moving
+about and grunting among the straw of the interior.
+
+"I've come to ask for Fancy," said Dick.
+
+"I'd as lief you hadn't."
+
+"Why should that be, Mr. Day?"
+
+"Because it makes me say that you've come to ask what ye be'n't
+likely to have.  Have ye come for anything else?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Then I'll just tell 'ee you've come on a very foolish errand.  D'ye
+know what her mother was?"
+
+"No."
+
+"A teacher in a landed family's nursery, who was foolish enough to
+marry the keeper of the same establishment; for I was only a keeper
+then, though now I've a dozen other irons in the fire as steward
+here for my lord, what with the timber sales and the yearly
+fellings, and the gravel and sand sales and one thing and 'tother.
+However, d'ye think Fancy picked up her good manners, the smooth
+turn of her tongue, her musical notes, and her knowledge of books,
+in a homely hole like this?"
+
+"No."
+
+"D'ye know where?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, when I went a-wandering after her mother's death, she lived
+with her aunt, who kept a boarding-school, till her aunt married
+Lawyer Green--a man as sharp as a needle--and the school was broke
+up.  Did ye know that then she went to the training-school, and that
+her name stood first among the Queen's scholars of her year?"
+
+"I've heard so."
+
+"And that when she sat for her certificate as Government teacher,
+she had the highest of the first class?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, and do ye know what I live in such a miserly way for when
+I've got enough to do without it, and why I make her work as a
+schoolmistress instead of living here?"
+
+"No."
+
+"That if any gentleman, who sees her to be his equal in polish,
+should want to marry her, and she want to marry him, he sha'n't be
+superior to her in pocket.  Now do ye think after this that you be
+good enough for her?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then good-night t'ee, Master Dewy."
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Day."
+
+Modest Dick's reply had faltered upon his tongue, and he turned away
+wondering at his presumption in asking for a woman whom he had seen
+from the beginning to be so superior to him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III:  FANCY IN THE RAIN
+
+
+
+The next scene is a tempestuous afternoon in the following month,
+and Fancy Day is discovered walking from her father's home towards
+Mellstock.
+
+A single vast gray cloud covered the country, from which the small
+rain and mist had just begun to blow down in wavy sheets,
+alternately thick and thin.  The trees of the fields and plantations
+writhed like miserable men as the air wound its way swiftly among
+them:  the lowest portions of their trunks, that had hardly ever
+been known to move, were visibly rocked by the fiercer gusts,
+distressing the mind by its painful unwontedness, as when a strong
+man is seen to shed tears.  Low-hanging boughs went up and down;
+high and erect boughs went to and fro; the blasts being so
+irregular, and divided into so many cross--currents, that
+neighbouring branches of the same tree swept the skies in
+independent motions, crossed each other, or became entangled.
+Across the open spaces flew flocks of green and yellowish leaves,
+which, after travelling a long distance from their parent trees,
+reached the ground, and lay there with their under--sides upward.
+
+As the rain and wind increased, and Fancy's bonnet--ribbons leapt
+more and more snappishly against her chin, she paused on entering
+Mellstock Lane to consider her latitude, and the distance to a place
+of shelter.  The nearest house was Elizabeth Endorfield's, in Higher
+Mellstock, whose cottage and garden stood not far from the junction
+of that hamlet with the road she followed.  Fancy hastened onward,
+and in five minutes entered a gate, which shed upon her toes a flood
+of water-drops as she opened it.
+
+"Come in, chiel!" a voice exclaimed, before Fancy had knocked:  a
+promptness that would have surprised her had she not known that Mrs.
+Endorfield was an exceedingly and exceptionally sharp woman in the
+use of her eyes and ears.
+
+Fancy went in and sat down.  Elizabeth was paring potatoes for her
+husband's supper.
+
+Scrape, scrape, scrape; then a toss, and splash went a potato into a
+bucket of water.
+
+Now, as Fancy listlessly noted these proceedings of the dame, she
+began to reconsider an old subject that hay uppermost in her heart.
+Since the interview between her father and Dick, the days had been
+melancholy days for her.  Geoffrey's firm opposition to the notion
+of Dick as a son-in-law was more than she had expected.  She had
+frequently seen her lover since that time, it is true, and had loved
+him more for the opposition than she would have otherwise dreamt of
+doing--which was a happiness of a certain kind.  Yet, though love is
+thus an end in itself, it must be believed to be the means to
+another end if it is to assume the rosy hues of an unalloyed
+pleasure.  And such a belief Fancy and Dick were emphatically denied
+just now.
+
+Elizabeth Endorfield had a repute among women which was in its
+nature something between distinction and notoriety.  It was founded
+on the following items of character.  She was shrewd and
+penetrating; her house stood in a lonely place; she never went to
+church; she wore a red cloak; she always retained her bonnet indoors
+and she had a pointed chin.  Thus far her attributes were distinctly
+Satanic; and those who looked no further called her, in plain terms
+a witch.  But she was not gaunt, nor ugly in the upper part of her
+face, nor particularly strange in manner; so that, when her more
+intimate acquaintances spoke of her the term was softened, and she
+became simply a Deep Body, who was as long-headed as she was high.
+It may be stated that Elizabeth, belonged to a class of suspects who
+were gradually losing their mysterious characteristics under the
+administration of the young vicar; though, during the long reign of
+Mr. Grinham, the parish of Mellstock had proved extremely favourable
+to the growth of witches.
+
+While Fancy was revolving all this in her mind, and putting it to
+herself whether it was worth while to tell her troubles to
+Elizabeth, and ask her advice in getting out of them, the witch
+spoke.
+
+"You be down--proper down," she said suddenly, dropping another
+potato into the bucket.
+
+Fancy took no notice.
+
+"About your young man."
+
+Fancy reddened.  Elizabeth seemed to be watching her thoughts.
+Really, one would almost think she must have the powers people
+ascribed to her.
+
+"Father not in the humour for't, hey?"  Another potato was finished
+and flung in.  "Ah, I know about it.  Little birds tell me things
+that people don't dream of my knowing."
+
+Fancy was desperate about Dick, and here was a chance--O, such a
+wicked chance--of getting help; and what was goodness beside love!
+
+"I wish you'd tell me how to put him in the humour for it?" she
+said.
+
+"That I could soon do," said the witch quietly.
+
+"Really?  O, do; anyhow--I don't care--so that it is done!  How
+could I do it, Mrs. Endorfield?"
+
+"Nothing so mighty wonderful in it."
+
+"Well, but how?"
+
+"By witchery, of course!" said Elizabeth.
+
+"No!" said Fancy.
+
+"'Tis, I assure ye.  Didn't you ever hear I was a witch?"
+
+"Well," hesitated Fancy, "I have heard you called so."
+
+"And you believed it?"
+
+"I can't say that I did exactly believe it, for 'tis very horrible
+and wicked; but, O, how I do wish it was possible for you to be
+one!"
+
+"So I am.  And I'll tell you how to bewitch your father to let you
+marry Dick Dewy."
+
+"Will it hurt him, poor thing?"
+
+"Hurt who?"
+
+"Father."
+
+"No; the charm is worked by common sense, and the spell can only be
+broke by your acting stupidly."
+
+Fancy looked rather perplexed, and Elizabeth went on:
+
+
+"This fear of Lizz--whatever 'tis -
+By great and small;
+She makes pretence to common sense,
+And that's all.
+
+
+"You must do it like this."  The witch laid down her knife and
+potato, and then poured into Fancy's ear a long and detailed list of
+directions, glancing up from the corner of her eye into Fancy's face
+with an expression of sinister humour.  Fancy's face brightened,
+clouded, rose and sank, as the narrative proceeded.  "There," said
+Elizabeth at length, stooping for the knife and another potato, "do
+that, and you'll have him by-long and by-late, my dear."
+
+"And do it I will!" said Fancy.
+
+She then turned her attention to the external world once more.  The
+rain continued as usual, but the wind had abated considerably during
+the discourse.  Judging that it was now possible to keep an umbrella
+erect, she pulled her hood again over her bonnet, bade the witch
+good-bye, and went her way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV:  THE SPELL
+
+
+
+Mrs. Endorfield's advice was duly followed.
+
+"I be proper sorry that your daughter isn't so well as she might
+be," said a Mellstock man to Geoffrey one morning.
+
+"But is there anything in it?" said Geoffrey uneasily, as he shifted
+his hat to the right.  "I can't understand the report.  She didn't
+complain to me a bit when I saw her."
+
+"No appetite at all, they say."
+
+Geoffrey crossed to Mellstock and called at the school that
+afternoon.  Fancy welcomed him as usual, and asked him to stay and
+take tea with her.
+
+"I be'n't much for tea, this time o' day," he said, but stayed.
+
+During the meal he watched her narrowly.  And to his great
+consternation discovered the following unprecedented change in the
+healthy girl--that she cut herself only a diaphanous slice of bread-
+and-butter, and, laying it on her plate, passed the meal-time in
+breaking it into pieces, but eating no more than about one-tenth of
+the slice.  Geoffrey hoped she would say something about Dick, and
+finish up by weeping, as she had done after the decision against him
+a few days subsequent to the interview in the garden.  But nothing
+was said, and in due time Geoffrey departed again for Yalbury Wood.
+
+"'Tis to be hoped poor Miss Fancy will be able to keep on her
+school," said Geoffrey's man Enoch to Geoffrey the following week,
+as they were shovelling up ant-hills in the wood.
+
+Geoffrey stuck in the shovel, swept seven or eight ants from his
+sleeve, and killed another that was prowling round his ear, then
+looked perpendicularly into the earth as usual, waiting for Enoch to
+say more.  "Well, why shouldn't she?" said the keeper at last.
+
+"The baker told me yesterday," continued Enoch, shaking out another
+emmet that had run merrily up his thigh, "that the bread he've left
+at that there school-house this last month would starve any mouse in
+the three creations; that 'twould so!  And afterwards I had a pint
+o' small down at Morrs's, and there I heard more."
+
+"What might that ha' been?"
+
+"That she used to have a pound o' the best rolled butter a week,
+regular as clockwork, from Dairyman Viney's for herself, as well as
+just so much salted for the helping girl, and the 'ooman she calls
+in; but now the same quantity d'last her three weeks, and then 'tis
+thoughted she throws it away sour."
+
+"Finish doing the emmets, and carry the bag home-along."  The keeper
+resumed his gun, tucked it under his arm, and went on without
+whistling to the dogs, who however followed, with a bearing meant to
+imply that they did not expect any such attentions when their master
+was reflecting.
+
+On Saturday morning a note came from Fancy.  He was not to trouble
+about sending her the couple of rabbits, as was intended, because
+she feared she should not want them.  Later in the day Geoffrey went
+to Casterbridge and called upon the butcher who served Fancy with
+fresh meat, which was put down to her father's account.
+
+"I've called to pay up our little bill, Neighbour Haylock, and you
+can gie me the chiel's account at the same time."
+
+Mr. Haylock turned round three quarters of a circle in the midst of
+a heap of joints, altered the expression of his face from meat to
+money, went into a little office consisting only of a door and a
+window, looked very vigorously into a book which possessed length
+but no breadth; and then, seizing a piece of paper and scribbling
+thereupon, handed the bill.
+
+Probably it was the first time in the history of commercial
+transactions that the quality of shortness in a butcher's bill was a
+cause of tribulation to the debtor.  "Why, this isn't all she've had
+in a whole month!" said Geoffrey.
+
+"Every mossel," said the butcher--"(now, Dan, take that leg and
+shoulder to Mrs. White's, and this eleven pound here to Mr.
+Martin's)--you've been treating her to smaller joints lately, to my
+thinking, Mr. Day?"
+
+"Only two or three little scram rabbits this last week, as I am
+alive--I wish I had!"
+
+"Well, my wife said to me--(Dan! not too much, not too much on that
+tray at a time; better go twice)--my wife said to me as she posted
+up the books:  she says, "Miss Day must have been summer during that
+hot muggy weather much for us; for depend upon't," she says, "she've
+been trying John Grimmett unknown to us:  see her account else."
+'Tis little, of course, at the best of times, being only for one,
+but now 'tis next kin to nothing."
+
+"I'll inquire," said Geoffrey despondingly.
+
+He returned by way of Mellstock, and called upon Fancy, in
+fulfilment of a promise.  It being Saturday, the children were
+enjoying a holiday, and on entering the residence Fancy was nowhere
+to be seen.  Nan, the charwoman, was sweeping the kitchen.
+
+"Where's my da'ter?" said the keeper.
+
+"Well, you see she was tired with the week's teaching, and this
+morning she said, "Nan, I sha'n't get up till the evening."  You
+see, Mr. Day, if people don't eat, they can't work; and as she've
+gie'd up eating, she must gie up working."
+
+"Have ye carried up any dinner to her?"
+
+"No; she don't want any.  There, we all know that such things don't
+come without good reason--not that I wish to say anything about a
+broken heart, or anything of the kind."
+
+Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then.  He went
+to the staircase and ascended to his daughter's door.
+
+"Fancy!"
+
+"Come in, father."
+
+To see a person in bed from any cause whatever, on a fine afternoon,
+is depressing enough; and here was his only child Fancy, not only in
+bed, but looking very pale.  Geoffrey was visibly disturbed.
+
+"Fancy, I didn't expect to see thee here, chiel," he said.  "What's
+the matter?"
+
+"I'm not well, father."
+
+"How's that?"
+
+"Because I think of things."
+
+"What things can you have to think o' so mortal much?"
+
+"You know, father."
+
+"You think I've been cruel to thee in saying that that penniless
+Dick o' thine sha'n't marry thee, I suppose?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Well, you know, Fancy, I do it for the best, and he isn't good
+enough for thee.  You know that well enough."  Here he again looked
+at her as she lay.  "Well, Fancy, I can't let my only chiel die; and
+if you can't live without en, you must ha' en, I suppose."
+
+"O, I don't want him like that; all against your will, and
+everything so disobedient!" sighed the invalid.
+
+"No, no, 'tisn't against my will.  My wish is, now I d'see how 'tis
+hurten thee to live without en, that he shall marry thee as soon as
+we've considered a little.  That's my wish flat and plain, Fancy.
+There, never cry, my little maid!  You ought to ha' cried afore; no
+need o' crying now 'tis all over.  Well, howsoever, try to step over
+and see me and mother-law to-morrow, and ha' a bit of dinner wi'
+us."
+
+"And--Dick too?"
+
+"Ay, Dick too, 'far's I know."
+
+"And WHEN do you think you'll have considered, father, and he may
+marry me?" she coaxed.
+
+"Well, there, say next Midsummer; that's not a day too long to
+wait."
+
+On leaving the school Geoffrey went to the tranter's.  Old William
+opened the door.
+
+"Is your grandson Dick in 'ithin, William?"
+
+"No, not just now, Mr. Day.  Though he've been at home a good deal
+lately."
+
+"O, how's that?"
+
+"What wi' one thing, and what wi' t'other, he's all in a mope, as
+might be said.  Don't seem the feller he used to.  Ay, 'a will sit
+studding and thinking as if 'a were going to turn chapel-member, and
+then do nothing but traypse and wamble about.  Used to be such a
+chatty boy, too, Dick did; and now 'a don't speak at all.  But won't
+ye step inside?  Reuben will be home soon, 'a b'lieve."
+
+"No, thank you, I can't stay now.  Will ye just ask Dick if he'll do
+me the kindness to step over to Yalbury to-morrow with my da'ter
+Fancy, if she's well enough?  I don't like her to come by herself,
+now she's not so terrible topping in health."
+
+"So I've heard.  Ay, sure, I'll tell him without fail."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V:  AFTER GAINING HER POINT
+
+
+
+The visit to Geoffrey passed off as delightfully as a visit might
+have been expected to pass off when it was the first day of smooth
+experience in a hitherto obstructed love-course.  And then came a
+series of several happy days, of the same undisturbed serenity.
+Dick could court her when he chose; stay away when he chose,--which
+was never; walk with her by winding streams and waterfalls and
+autumn scenery till dews arid twilight sent them home.  And thus
+they drew near the day of the Harvest Thanksgiving, which was also
+the time chosen for opening the organ in Mellstock Church.
+
+It chanced that Dick on that very day was called away from
+Mellstock.  A young acquaintance had died of consumption at
+Charmley, a neighbouring village, on the previous Monday, and Dick,
+in fulfilment of a long-standing promise, was to assist in carrying
+him to the grave.  When on Tuesday, Dick went towards the school to
+acquaint Fancy with the fact, it is difficult to say whether his own
+disappointment at being denied the sight of her triumphant debut as
+organist, was greater than his vexation that his pet should on this
+great occasion be deprived of the pleasure of his presence.
+However, the intelligence was communicated.  She bore it as she best
+could, not without many expressions of regret, and convictions that
+her performance would be nothing to her now.
+
+Just before eleven o'clock on Sunday he set out upon his sad errand.
+The funeral was to be immediately after the morning service, and as
+there were four good miles to walk, driving being inconvenient, it
+became necessary to start comparatively early.  Half an hour later
+would certainly have answered his purpose quite as well, yet at the
+last moment nothing would content his ardent mind but that he must
+go a mile out of his way in the direction of the school, in the hope
+of getting a glimpse of his Love as she started for church.
+
+Striking, therefore, into the lane towards the school, instead of
+across the ewelease direct to Charmley, he arrived opposite her door
+as his goddess emerged.
+
+If ever a woman looked a divinity, Fancy Day appeared one that
+morning as she floated down those school steps, in the form of a
+nebulous collection of colours inclining to blue.  With an audacity
+unparalleled in the whole history of village-school-mistresses at
+this date--partly owing, no doubt, to papa's respectable
+accumulation of cash, which rendered her profession not altogether
+one of necessity--she had actually donned a hat and feather, and
+lowered her hitherto plainly looped-up hair, which now fell about
+her shoulders in a profusion of curls.  Poor Dick was astonished:
+he had never seen her look so distractingly beautiful before, save
+on Christmas-eve, when her hair was in the same luxuriant condition
+of freedom.  But his first burst of delighted surprise was followed
+by less comfortable feelings, as soon as his brain recovered its
+power to think.
+
+Fancy had blushed;--was it with confusion?  She had also
+involuntarily pressed back her curls.  She had not expected him.
+
+"Fancy, you didn't know me for a moment in my funeral clothes, did
+you?"
+
+"Good-morning, Dick--no, really, I didn't know you for an instant in
+such a sad suit."
+
+He looked again at the gay tresses and hat.  "You've never dressed
+so charming before, dearest."
+
+"I like to hear you praise me in that way, Dick," she said, smiling
+archly.  "It is meat and drink to a woman.  Do I look nice really?"
+
+"Fie! you know it.  Did you remember,--I mean didn't you remember
+about my going away to-day?"
+
+"Well, yes, I did, Dick; but, you know, I wanted to look well;--
+forgive me."
+
+"Yes, darling; yes, of course,--there's nothing to forgive.  No, I
+was only thinking that when we talked on Tuesday and Wednesday and
+Thursday and Friday about my absence to-day, and I was so sorry for
+it, you said, Fancy, so were you sorry, and almost cried, and said
+it would be no pleasure to you to be the attraction of the church
+to-day, since I could not be there."
+
+"My dear one, neither will it be so much pleasure to me . . . But I
+do take a little delight in my life, I suppose," she pouted.
+
+"Apart from mine?"
+
+She looked at him with perplexed eyes.  "I know you are vexed with
+me, Dick, and it is because the first Sunday I have curls and a hat
+and feather since I have been here happens to be the very day you
+are away and won't be with me.  Yes, say it is, for that is it!  And
+you think that all this week I ought to have remembered you wouldn't
+be here to-day, and not have cared to be better dressed than usual.
+Yes, you do, Dick, and it is rather unkind!"
+
+"No, no," said Dick earnestly and simply, "I didn't think so badly
+of you as that.  I only thought that--if YOU had been going away, I
+shouldn't have tried new attractions for the eyes of other people.
+But then of course you and I are different, naturally."
+
+"Well, perhaps we are."
+
+"Whatever will the vicar say, Fancy?"
+
+"I don't fear what he says in the least!" she answered proudly.
+"But he won't say anything of the sort you think.  No, no."
+
+"He can hardly have conscience to, indeed."
+
+"Now come, you say, Dick, that you quite forgive me, for I must go,"
+she said with sudden gaiety, and skipped backwards into the porch.
+"Come here, sir;--say you forgive me, and then you shall kiss me;--
+you never have yet when I have worn curls, you know.  Yes, just
+where you want to so much,--yes, you may!"
+
+Dick followed her into the inner corner, where he was probably not
+slow in availing himself of the privilege offered.
+
+"Now that's a treat for you, isn't it?" she continued.  "Good-bye,
+or I shall be late.  Come and see me to-morrow:  you'll be tired to
+night."
+
+Thus they parted, and Fancy proceeded to the church.  The organ
+stood on one side of the chancel, close to and under the immediate
+eye of the vicar when he was in the pulpit, and also in full view of
+the congregation.  Here she sat down, for the first time in such a
+conspicuous position, her seat having previously been in a remote
+spot in the aisle.
+
+"Good heavens--disgraceful!  Curls and a hat and feather!" said the
+daughters of the small gentry, who had either only curly hair
+without a hat and feather, or a hat and feather without curly hair.
+"A bonnet for church always," said sober matrons.
+
+That Mr. Maybold was conscious of her presence close beside him
+during the sermon; that he was not at all angry at her development
+of costume; that he admired her, she perceived.  But she did not see
+that he loved her during that sermon-time as he had never loved a
+woman before; that her proximity was a strange delight to him; and
+that he gloried in her musical success that morning in a spirit
+quite beyond a mere cleric's glory at the inauguration of a new
+order of things.
+
+The old choir, with humbled hearts, no longer took their seats in
+the gallery as heretofore (which was now given up to the school-
+children who were not singers, and a pupil-teacher), but were
+scattered about with their wives in different parts of the church.
+Having nothing to do with conducting the service for almost the
+first time in their lives, they all felt awkward, out of place,
+abashed, and inconvenienced by their hands.  The tranter had
+proposed that they should stay away to-day and go nutting, but
+grandfather William would not hear of such a thing for a moment.
+"No," he replied reproachfully, and quoted a verse "Though this has
+come upon us, let not our hearts be turned back, or our steps go out
+of the way."
+
+So they stood and watched the curls of hair trailing down the back
+of the successful rival, and the waving of her feather, as she
+swayed her head.  After a few timid notes and uncertain touches her
+playing became markedly correct, and towards the end full and free.
+But, whether from prejudice or unbiassed judgment, the venerable
+body of musicians could not help thinking that the simpler notes
+they had been wont to bring forth were more in keeping with the
+simplicity of their old church than the crowded chords and
+interludes it was her pleasure to produce.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI:  INTO TEMPTATION
+
+
+
+The day was done, and Fancy was again in the school-house.  About
+five o'clock it began to rain, and in rather a dull frame of mind
+she wandered into the schoolroom, for want of something better to
+do.  She was thinking--of her lover Dick Dewy?  Not precisely.  Of
+how weary she was of living alone:  how unbearable it would be to
+return to Yalbury under the rule of her strange-tempered step-
+mother; that it was far better to be married to anybody than do
+that; that eight or nine long months had yet to be lived through ere
+the wedding could take place.
+
+At the side of the room were high windows of Ham-hill stone, upon
+either sill of which she could sit by first mounting a desk and
+using it as a footstool.  As the evening advanced here she perched
+herself, as was her custom on such wet and gloomy occasions, put on
+a light shawl and bonnet, opened the window, and looked out at the
+rain.
+
+The window overlooked a field called the Grove, and it was the
+position from which she used to survey the crown of Dick's passing
+hat in the early days of their acquaintance and meetings.  Not a
+living soul was now visible anywhere; the rain kept all people
+indoors who were not forced abroad by necessity, and necessity was
+less importunate on Sundays than during the week.
+
+Sitting here and thinking again--of her lover, or of the sensation
+she had created at church that day?--well, it is unknown--thinking
+and thinking she saw a dark masculine figure arising into
+distinctness at the further end of the Grove--a man without an
+umbrella.  Nearer and nearer he came, and she perceived that he was
+in deep mourning, and then that it was Dick.  Yes, in the fondness
+and foolishness of his young heart, after walking four miles, in a
+drizzling rain without overcoat or umbrella, and in face of a remark
+from his love that he was not to come because he would be tired, he
+had made it his business to wander this mile out of his way again,
+from sheer wish of spending ten minutes in her presence.
+
+"O Dick, how wet you are!" she said, as he drew up under the window.
+"Why, your coat shines as if it had been varnished, and your hat--my
+goodness, there's a streaming hat!"
+
+"O, I don't mind, darling!" said Dick cheerfully.  "Wet never hurts
+me, though I am rather sorry for my best clothes.  However, it
+couldn't be helped; we lent all the umbrellas to the women.  I don't
+know when I shall get mine back!"
+
+"And look, there's a nasty patch of something just on your
+shoulder."
+
+"Ah, that's japanning; it rubbed off the clamps of poor Jack's
+coffin when we lowered him from our shoulders upon the bier!  I
+don't care about that, for 'twas the last deed I could do for him;
+and 'tis hard if you can't afford a coat for an old friend."
+
+Fancy put her hand to her mouth for half a minute.  Underneath the
+palm of that little hand there existed for that half-minute a little
+yawn.
+
+"Dick, I don't like you to stand there in the wet.  And you mustn't
+sit down.  Go home and change your things.  Don't stay another
+minute."
+
+"One kiss after coming so far," he pleaded.
+
+"If I can reach, then."
+
+He looked rather disappointed at not being invited round to the
+door.  She twisted from her seated position and bent herself
+downwards, but not even by standing on the plinth was it possible
+for Dick to get his lips into contact with hers as she held them.
+By great exertion she might have reached a little lower; but then
+she would have exposed her head to the rain.
+
+"Never mind, Dick; kiss my hand," she said, flinging it down to him.
+"Now, good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+He walked slowly away, turning and turning again to look at her till
+he was out of sight.  During the retreat she said to herself, almost
+involuntarily, and still conscious of that morning's triumph--"I
+like Dick, and I love him; but how plain and sorry a man looks in
+the rain, with no umbrella, and wet through!"
+
+As he vanished, she made as if to descend from her seat; but
+glancing in the other direction she saw another form coming along
+the same track.  It was also that of a man.  He, too, was in black
+from top to toe; but he carried an umbrella.
+
+He drew nearer, and the direction of the rain caused him so to slant
+his umbrella that from her height above the ground his head was
+invisible, as she was also to him.  He passed in due time directly
+beneath her, and in looking down upon the exterior of his umbrella
+her feminine eyes perceived it to be of superior silk--less common
+at that date than since--and of elegant make.  He reached the
+entrance to the building, and Fancy suddenly lost sight of him.
+Instead of pursuing the roadway as Dick had done he had turned
+sharply round into her own porch.
+
+She jumped to the floor, hastily flung off her shawl and bonnet,
+smoothed and patted her hair till the curls hung in passable
+condition, and listened.  No knock.  Nearly a minute passed, and
+still there was no knock.  Then there arose a soft series of raps,
+no louder than the tapping of a distant woodpecker, and barely
+distinct enough to reach her ears.  She composed herself and flung
+open the door.
+
+In the porch stood Mr. Maybold.
+
+There was a warm flush upon his face, and a bright flash in his
+eyes, which made him look handsomer than she had ever seen him
+before.
+
+"Good-evening, Miss Day."
+
+"Good-evening, Mr. Maybold," she said, in a strange state of mind.
+She had noticed, beyond the ardent hue of his face, that his voice
+had a singular tremor in it, and that his hand shook like an aspen
+leaf when he laid his umbrella in the corner of the porch.  Without
+another word being spoken by either, he came into the schoolroom,
+shut the door, and moved close to her.  Once inside, the expression
+of his face was no more discernible, by reason of the increasing
+dusk of evening.
+
+"I want to speak to you," he then said; "seriously--on a perhaps
+unexpected subject, but one which is all the world to me--I don't
+know what it may be to you, Miss Day."
+
+No reply.
+
+"Fancy, I have come to ask you if you will be my wife?"
+
+As a person who has been idly amusing himself with rolling a
+snowball might start at finding he had set in motion an avalanche,
+so did Fancy start at these words from the vicar.  And in the dead
+silence which followed them, the breathings of the man and of the
+woman could be distinctly and separately heard; and there was this
+difference between them--his respirations gradually grew quieter and
+less rapid after the enunciation hers, from having been low and
+regular, increased in quickness and force, till she almost panted.
+
+"I cannot, I cannot, Mr. Maybold--I cannot!  Don't ask me!" she
+said.
+
+"Don't answer in a hurry!" he entreated.  "And do listen to me.
+This is no sudden feeling on my part.  I have loved you for more
+than six months!  Perhaps my late interest in teaching the children
+here has not been so single-minded as it seemed.  You will
+understand my motive--like me better, perhaps, for honestly telling
+you that I have struggled against my emotion continually, because I
+have thought that it was not well for me to love you!  But I
+resolved to struggle no longer; I have examined the feeling; and the
+love I bear you is as genuine as that I could bear any woman!  I see
+your great charm; I respect your natural talents, and the refinement
+they have brought into your nature--they are quite enough, and more
+than enough for me!  They are equal to anything ever required of the
+mistress of a quiet parsonage-house--the place in which I shall pass
+my days, wherever it may be situated.  O Fancy, I have watched you,
+criticized you even severely, brought my feelings to the light of
+judgment, and still have found them rational, and such as any man
+might have expected to be inspired with by a woman like you!  So
+there is nothing hurried, secret, or untoward in my desire to do
+this.  Fancy, will you marry me?"
+
+No answer was returned.
+
+"Don't refuse; don't," he implored.  "It would be foolish of you--I
+mean cruel!  Of course we would not live here, Fancy.  I have had
+for a long time the offer of an exchange of livings with a friend in
+Yorkshire, but I have hitherto refused on account of my mother.
+There we would go.  Your musical powers shall be still further
+developed; you shall have whatever pianoforte you like; you shall
+have anything, Fancy, anything to make you happy--pony-carriage,
+flowers, birds, pleasant society; yes, you have enough in you for
+any society, after a few months of travel with me!  Will you, Fancy,
+marry me?"
+
+Another pause ensued, varied only by the surging of the rain against
+the window--panes, and then Fancy spoke, in a faint and broken
+voice.
+
+"Yes, I will," she said.
+
+"God bless you, my own!"  He advanced quickly, and put his arm out
+to embrace her.  She drew back hastily.  "No no, not now!" she said
+in an agitated whisper.  "There are things;--but the temptation is,
+O, too strong, and I can't resist it I can't tell you now, but I
+must tell you!  Don't, please, don't come near me now!  I want to
+think, I can scarcely get myself used to the idea of what I have
+promised yet."  The next minute she turned to a desk, buried her
+face in her hands, and burst into a hysterical fit of weeping.  "O,
+leave me to myself!" she sobbed; "leave me!  O, leave me!"
+
+"Don't be distressed; don't, dearest!"  It was with visible
+difficulty that he restrained himself from approaching her.  "You
+shall tell me at your leisure what it is that grieves you so; I am
+happy--beyond all measure happy!--at having your simple promise."
+
+"And do go and leave me now!"
+
+"But I must not, in justice to you, leave for a minute, until you
+are yourself again."
+
+"There then," she said, controlling her emotion, and standing up; "I
+am not disturbed now."
+
+He reluctantly moved towards the door.  "Good-bye!" he murmured
+tenderly.  "I'll come to-morrow about this time."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII:  SECOND THOUGHTS
+
+
+
+The next morning the vicar rose early.  The first thing he did was
+to write a long and careful letter to his friend in Yorkshire.
+Then, eating a little breakfast, he crossed the meadows in the
+direction of Casterbridge, bearing his letter in his pocket, that he
+might post it at the town office, and obviate the loss of one day in
+its transmission that would have resulted had he left it for the
+foot-post through the village.
+
+It was a foggy morning, and the trees shed in noisy water-drops the
+moisture they had collected from the thick air, an acorn
+occasionally falling from its cup to the ground, in company with the
+drippings.  In the meads, sheets of spiders'-web, almost opaque with
+wet, hung in folds over the fences, and the falling leaves appeared
+in every variety of brown, green, and yellow hue.
+
+A low and merry whistling was heard on the highway he was
+approaching, then the light footsteps of a man going in the same
+direction as himself.  On reaching the junction of his path with the
+road, the vicar beheld Dick Dewy's open and cheerful face.  Dick
+lifted his hat, and the vicar came out into the highway that Dick
+was pursuing.
+
+"Good-morning, Dewy.  How well you are looking!" said Mr. Maybold.
+
+"Yes, sir, I am well--quite well!  I am going to Casterbridge now,
+to get Smart's collar; we left it there Saturday to be repaired."
+
+"I am going to Casterbridge, so we'll walk together," the vicar
+said.  Dick gave a hop with one foot to put himself in step with Mr.
+Maybold, who proceeded:  "I fancy I didn't see you at church
+yesterday, Dewy.  Or were you behind the pier?"
+
+"No; I went to Charmley.  Poor John Dunford chose me to be one of
+his bearers a long time before he died, and yesterday was the
+funeral.  Of course I couldn't refuse, though I should have liked
+particularly to have been at home as 'twas the day of the new
+music."
+
+"Yes, you should have been.  The musical portion of the service was
+successful--very successful indeed; and what is more to the purpose,
+no ill-feeling whatever was evinced by any of the members of the old
+choir.  They joined in the singing with the greatest good-will."
+
+"'Twas natural enough that I should want to be there, I suppose,"
+said Dick, smiling a private smile; "considering who the organ--
+player was."
+
+At this the vicar reddened a little, and said, "Yes, yes," though
+not at all comprehending Dick's true meaning, who, as he received no
+further reply, continued hesitatingly, and with another smile
+denoting his pride as a lover -
+
+  "I suppose you know what I mean, sir?  You've heard about me and--
+Miss Day?"
+
+The red in Maybold's countenance went away:  he turned and looked
+Dick in the face.
+
+"No," he said constrainedly, "I've heard nothing whatever about you
+and Miss Day."
+
+"Why, she's my sweetheart, and we are going to be married next
+Midsummer.  We are keeping it rather close just at present, because
+'tis a good many months to wait; but it is her father's wish that we
+don't marry before, and of course we must submit.  But the time 'ill
+soon slip along."
+
+"Yes, the time will soon slip along--Time glides away every day--
+yes."
+
+Maybold said these words, but he had no idea of what they were.  He
+was conscious of a cold and sickly thrill throughout him; and all he
+reasoned was this that the young creature whose graces had
+intoxicated him into making the most imprudent resolution of his
+life, was less an angel than a woman.
+
+"You see, sir," continued the ingenuous Dick, "'twill be better in
+one sense.  I shall by that time be the regular manager of a branch
+o' father's business, which has very much increased lately, and
+business, which we think of starting elsewhere.  It has very much
+increased lately, and we expect next year to keep a' extra couple of
+horses.  We've already our eye on one--brown as a berry, neck like a
+rainbow, fifteen hands, and not a gray hair in her--offered us at
+twenty-five want a crown.  And to kip pace with the times I have had
+some cards prented and I beg leave to hand you one, sir."
+
+"Certainly," said the vicar, mechanically taking the card that Dick
+offered him.
+
+"I turn in here by Grey's Bridge," said Dick.  "I suppose you go
+straight on and up town?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Good-morning, sir."
+
+"Good-morning, Dewy."
+
+Maybold stood still upon the bridge, holding the card as it had been
+put into his hand, and Dick's footsteps died away towards Durnover
+Mill.  The vicar's first voluntary action was to read the card
+
+
+DEWY AND SON,
+TRANTERS AND HAULIERS,
+MELLSTOCK.
+
+NB.--FURNITURE, COALS, POTATOES, LIVE AND DEAD STOCK, REMOVED TO ANY
+DISTANCE ON THE SHORTEST NOTICE.
+
+
+Mr. Maybold leant over the parapet of the bridge and looked into the
+river.  He saw--without heeding--how the water came rapidly from
+beneath the arches, glided down a little steep, then spread itself
+over a pool in which dace, trout, and minnows sported at ease among
+the long green locks of weed that lay heaving and sinking with their
+roots towards the current.  At the end of ten minutes spent leaning
+thus, he drew from his pocket the letter to his friend, tore it
+deliberately into such minute fragments that scarcely two syllables
+remained in juxtaposition, and sent the whole handful of shreds
+fluttering into the water.  Here he watched them eddy, dart, and
+turn, as they were carried downwards towards the ocean and gradually
+disappeared from his view.  Finally he moved off, and pursued his
+way at a rapid pace back again to Mellstock Vicarage.
+
+Nerving himself by a long and intense effort, he sat down in his
+study and wrote as follows:
+
+
+"DEAR MISS DAY,--The meaning of your words, 'the temptation is too
+strong,' of your sadness and your tears, has been brought home to me
+by an accident.  I know to-day what I did not know yesterday--that
+you are not a free woman.
+
+"Why did you not tell me--why didn't you?  Did you suppose I knew?
+No.  Had I known, my conduct in coming to you as I did would have
+been reprehensible.
+
+"But I don't chide you!  Perhaps no blame attaches to you--I can't
+tell.  Fancy, though my opinion of you is assailed and disturbed in
+a way which cannot be expressed, I love you still, and my word to
+you holds good yet.  But will you, in justice to an honest man who
+relies upon your word to him, consider whether, under the
+circumstances, you can honourably forsake him?--Yours ever
+sincerely,
+
+"ARTHUR MAYBOLD."
+
+
+He rang the bell.  "Tell Charles to take these copybooks and this
+note to the school at once."
+
+The maid took the parcel and the letter, and in a few minutes a boy
+was seen to leave the vicarage gate, with the one under his arm, and
+the other in his hand.  The vicar sat with his hand to his brow,
+watching the lad as he descended Church Lane and entered the
+waterside path which intervened between that spot and the school.
+
+Here he was met by another boy, and after a free salutation and
+pugilistic frisk had passed between the two, the second boy came on
+his way to the vicarage, and the other vanished out of sight.
+
+The boy came to the door, and a note for Mr. Maybold was brought in.
+
+He knew the writing.  Opening the envelope with an unsteady hand, he
+read the subjoined words:
+
+
+"DEAR MR. MAYBOLD,--I have been thinking seriously and sadly through
+the whole of the night of the question you put to me last evening
+and of my answer.  That answer, as an honest woman, I had no right
+to give.
+
+"It is my nature--perhaps all women's--to love refinement of mind
+and manners; but even more than this, to be ever fascinated with the
+idea of surroundings more elegant and pleasing than those which have
+been customary.  And you praised me, and praise is life to me.  It
+was alone my sensations at these things which prompted my reply.
+Ambition and vanity they would be called; perhaps they are so.
+
+"After this explanation I hope you will generously allow me to
+withdraw the answer I too hastily gave.
+
+"And one more request.  To keep the meeting of last night, and all
+that passed between us there, for ever a secret.  Were it to become
+known, it would utterly blight the happiness of a trusting and
+generous man, whom I love still, and shall love always.--Yours
+sincerely,
+
+"FANCY DAY.
+
+
+The last written communication that ever passed from the vicar to
+Fancy, was a note containing these words only:
+
+"Tell him everything; it is best.  He will forgive you."
+
+
+
+
+PART THE FIFTH:  CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I:  'THE KNOT THERE'S NO UNTYING'
+
+
+
+The last day of the story is dated just subsequent to that point in
+the development of the seasons when country people go to bed among
+nearly naked trees, are lulled to sleep by a fall of rain, and awake
+next morning among green ones; when the landscape appears
+embarrassed with the sudden weight and brilliancy of its leaves;
+when the night-jar comes and strikes up for the summer his tune of
+one note; when the apple-trees have bloomed, and the roads and
+orchard-grass become spotted with fallen petals; when the faces of
+the delicate flowers are darkened, and their heads weighed down, by
+the throng of honey-bees, which increase their humming till humming
+is too mild a term for the all-pervading sound; and when cuckoos,
+blackbirds, and sparrows, that have hitherto been merry and
+respectful neighbours, become noisy and persistent intimates.
+
+The exterior of Geoffrey Day's house in Yalbury Wood appeared
+exactly as was usual at that season, but a frantic barking of the
+dogs at the back told of unwonted movements somewhere within.
+Inside the door the eyes beheld a gathering, which was a rarity
+indeed for the dwelling of the solitary wood-steward and keeper.
+
+About the room were sitting and standing, in various gnarled
+attitudes, our old acquaintance, grandfathers James and William, the
+tranter, Mr. Penny, two or three children, including Jimmy and
+Charley, besides three or four country ladies and gentlemen from a
+greater distance who do not require any distinction by name.
+Geoffrey was seen and heard stamping about the outhouse and among
+the bushes of the garden, attending to details of daily routine
+before the proper time arrived for their performance, in order that
+they might be off his hands for the day.  He appeared with his
+shirt-sleeves rolled up; his best new nether garments, in which he
+had arrayed himself that morning, being temporarily disguised under
+a weekday apron whilst these proceedings were in operation.  He
+occasionally glanced at the hives in passing, to see if his wife's
+bees were swarming, ultimately rolling down his shirt-sleeves and
+going indoors, talking to tranter Dewy whilst buttoning the
+wristbands, to save time; next going upstairs for his best
+waistcoat, and coming down again to make another remark whilst
+buttoning that, during the time looking fixedly in the tranter's
+face as if he were a looking-glass.
+
+The furniture had undergone attenuation to an alarming extent, every
+duplicate piece having been removed, including the clock by Thomas
+Wood; Ezekiel Saunders being at last left sole referee in matters of
+time.
+
+Fancy was stationary upstairs, receiving her layers of clothes and
+adornments, and answering by short fragments of laughter which had
+more fidgetiness than mirth in them, remarks that were made from
+time to time by Mrs. Dewy and Mrs. Penny, who were assisting her at
+the toilet, Mrs. Day having pleaded a queerness in her head as a
+reason for shutting herself up in an inner bedroom for the whole
+morning.  Mrs. Penny appeared with nine corkscrew curls on each side
+of her temples, and a back comb stuck upon her crown like a castle
+on a steep.
+
+The conversation just now going on was concerning the banns, the
+last publication of which had been on the Sunday previous.
+
+"And how did they sound?" Fancy subtly inquired.
+
+"Very beautiful indeed," said Mrs. Penny.  "I never heard any sound
+better."
+
+"But HOW?"
+
+"O, SO natural and elegant, didn't they, Reuben!" she cried, through
+the chinks of the unceiled floor, to the tranter downstairs.
+
+"What's that?" said the tranter, looking up inquiringly at the floor
+above him for an answer.
+
+"Didn't Dick and Fancy sound well when they were called home in
+church last Sunday?" came downwards again in Mrs. Penny's voice.
+
+"Ay, that they did, my sonnies!--especially the first time.  There
+was a terrible whispering piece of work in the congregation, wasn't
+there, neighbour Penny?" said the tranter, taking up the thread of
+conversation on his own account and, in order to be heard in the
+room above, speaking very loud to Mr. Penny, who sat at the distance
+of three feet from him, or rather less.
+
+"I never can mind seeing such a whispering as there was," said Mr.
+Penny, also loudly, to the room above.  "And such sorrowful envy on
+the maidens' faces; really, I never did see such envy as there was!"
+
+Fancy's lineaments varied in innumerable little flushes, and her
+heart palpitated innumerable little tremors of pleasure.  "But
+perhaps," she said, with assumed indifference, "it was only because
+no religion was going on just then?"
+
+"O, no; nothing to do with that.  'Twas because of your high
+standing in the parish.  It was just as if they had one and all
+caught Dick kissing and coling ye to death, wasn't it, Mrs. Dewy?"
+
+"Ay; that 'twas."
+
+"How people will talk about one's doings!" Fancy exclaimed.
+
+"Well, if you make songs about yourself, my dear, you can't blame
+other people for singing 'em."
+
+"Mercy me! how shall I go through it?" said the young lady again,
+but merely to those in the bedroom, with a breathing of a kind
+between a sigh and a pant, round shining eyes, and warm face.
+
+"O, you'll get through it well enough, child," said Mrs. Dewy
+placidly.  "The edge of the performance is took off at the calling
+home; and when once you get up to the chancel end o' the church, you
+feel as saucy as you please.  I'm sure I felt as brave as a sodger
+all through the deed--though of course I dropped my face and looked
+modest, as was becoming to a maid.  Mind you do that, Fancy."
+
+"And I walked into the church as quiet as a lamb, I'm sure,"
+subjoined Mrs. Penny.  "There, you see Penny is such a little small
+man, But certainly, I was flurried in the inside o' me.  Well,
+thinks I, 'tis to be, and here goes!  And do you do the same:  say,
+''Tis to be, and here goes!'"
+
+"Is there such wonderful virtue in ''Tis to be, and here goes!'"
+inquired Fancy.
+
+"Wonderful!  'Twill carry a body through it all from wedding to
+churching, if you only let it out with spirit enough."
+
+"Very well, then," said Fancy, blushing.  "'Tis to be, and here
+goes!"
+
+"That's a girl for a husband!" said Mrs. Dewy.
+
+"I do hope he'll come in time!" continued the bride-elect, inventing
+a new cause of affright, now that the other was demolished.
+
+"'Twould be a thousand pities if he didn't come, now you he so
+brave," said Mrs. Penny.
+
+Grandfather James, having overheard some of these remarks, said
+downstairs with mischievous loudness--"I've known some would-be
+weddings when the men didn't come."
+
+"They've happened not to come, before now, certainly," said Mr.
+Penny, cleaning one of the glasses of his spectacles.
+
+"O, do hear what they are saying downstairs," whispered Fancy.
+"Hush, hush!"
+
+She listened.
+
+"They have, haven't they, Geoffrey?" continued grandfather James, as
+Geoffrey entered.
+
+"Have what?" said Geoffrey.
+
+"The men have been known not to come."
+
+"That they have," said the keeper.
+
+"Ay; I've knowed times when the wedding had to be put off through
+his not appearing, being tired of the woman.  And another case I
+knowed was when the man was catched in a man-trap crossing Oaker's
+Wood, and the three months had run out before he got well, and the
+banns had to be published over again."
+
+"How horrible!" said Fancy.
+
+"They only say it on purpose to tease 'ee, my dear," said Mrs. Dewy.
+
+"'Tis quite sad to think what wretched shifts poor maids have been
+put to," came again from downstairs.  "Ye should hear Clerk Wilkins,
+my brother-law, tell his experiences in marrying couples these last
+thirty year:  sometimes one thing, sometimes another--'tis quite
+heart-rending--enough to make your hair stand on end."
+
+"Those things don't happen very often, I know," said Fancy, with
+smouldering uneasiness.
+
+"Well, really 'tis time Dick was here," said the tranter.
+
+"Don't keep on at me so, grandfather James and Mr. Dewy, and all you
+down there!" Fancy broke out, unable to endure any longer.  "I am
+sure I shall die, or do something, if you do!"
+
+"Never you hearken to these old chaps, Miss Day!" cried Nat
+Callcome, the best man, who had just entered, and threw his voice
+upward through the chinks of the floor as the others had done.
+"'Tis all right; Dick's coming on like a wild feller; he'll be here
+in a minute.  The hive o' bees his mother gie'd en for his new
+garden swarmed jist as he was starting, and he said, "I can't afford
+to lose a stock o' bees; no, that I can't, though I fain would; and
+Fancy wouldn't wish it on any account."  So he jist stopped to ting
+to 'em and shake 'em."
+
+"A genuine wise man," said Geoffrey.
+
+"To be sure, what a day's work we had yesterday!" Mr. Callcome
+continued, lowering his voice as if it were not necessary any longer
+to include those in the room above among his audience, and selecting
+a remote corner of his best clean handkerchief for wiping his face.
+"To be sure!"
+
+"Things so heavy, I suppose," said Geoffrey, as if reading through
+the chimney-window from the far end of the vista.
+
+"Ay," said Nat, looking round the room at points from which
+furniture had been removed.  "And so awkward to carry, too.  'Twas
+ath'art and across Dick's garden; in and out Dick's door; up and
+down Dick's stairs; round and round Dick's chammers till legs were
+worn to stumps:  and Dick is so particular, too.  And the stores of
+victuals and drink that lad has laid in:  why, 'tis enough for
+Noah's ark!  I'm sure I never wish to see a choicer half-dozen of
+hams than he's got there in his chimley; and the cider I tasted was
+a very pretty drop, indeed;--none could desire a prettier cider."
+
+"They be for the love and the stalled ox both, Ah, the greedy
+martels!" said grandfather James.
+
+"Well, may-be they be.  Surely," says I, "that couple between 'em
+have heaped up so much furniture and victuals, that anybody would
+think they were going to take hold the big end of married life
+first, and begin wi' a grown-up family.  Ah, what a bath of heat we
+two chaps were in, to be sure, a-getting that furniture in order!"
+
+"I do so wish the room below was ceiled," said Fancy, as the
+dressing went on; "we can hear all they say and do down there."
+
+"Hark!  Who's that?" exclaimed a small pupil-teacher, who also
+assisted this morning, to her great delight.  She ran half-way down
+the stairs, and peeped round the banister.  "O, you should, you
+should, you should!" she exclaimed, scrambling up to the room again.
+
+"What?" said Fancy.
+
+"See the bridesmaids!  They've just a come! 'Tis wonderful, really!
+'tis wonderful how muslin can be brought to it.  There, they don't
+look a bit like themselves, but like some very rich sisters o'
+theirs that nobody knew they had!"
+
+"Make 'em come up to me, make 'em come up!" cried Fancy
+ecstatically; and the four damsels appointed, namely, Miss Susan
+Dewy, Miss Bessie Dewy, Miss Vashti Sniff, and Miss Mercy Onmey,
+surged upstairs, and floated along the passage.
+
+"I wish Dick would come!" was again the burden of Fancy.
+
+The same instant a small twig and flower from the creeper outside
+the door flew in at the open window, and a masculine voice said,
+"Ready, Fancy dearest?"
+
+"There he is, he is!" cried Fancy, tittering spasmodically, and
+breathing as it were for the first time that morning.
+
+The bridesmaids crowded to the window and turned their heads in the
+direction pointed out, at which motion eight earrings all swung as
+one: --not looking at Dick because they particularly wanted to see
+him, but with an important sense of their duty as obedient ministers
+of the will of that apotheosised being--the Bride.
+
+"He looks very taking!" said Miss Vashti Sniff, a young lady who
+blushed cream-colour and wore yellow bonnet ribbons.
+
+Dick was advancing to the door in a painfully new coat of shining
+cloth, primrose-coloured waistcoat, hat of the same painful style of
+newness, and with an extra quantity of whiskers shaved off his face,
+and hair cut to an unwonted shortness in honour of the occasion.
+
+"Now, I'll run down," said Fancy, looking at herself over her
+shoulder in the glass, and flitting off.
+
+"O Dick!" she exclaimed, "I am so glad you are come!  I knew you
+would, of course, but I thought, Oh if you shouldn't!"
+
+"Not come, Fancy!  Het or wet, blow or snow, here come I to-day!
+Why, what's possessing your little soul?  You never used to mind
+such things a bit."
+
+"Ah, Mr. Dick, I hadn't hoisted my colours and committed myself
+then!" said Fancy.
+
+"'Tis a pity I can't marry the whole five of ye!" said Dick,
+surveying them all round.
+
+"Heh-heh-heh!" laughed the four bridesmaids, and Fancy privately
+touched Dick and smoothed him down behind his shoulder, as if to
+assure herself that he was there in flesh and blood as her own
+property.
+
+"Well, whoever would have thought such a thing?" said Dick, taking
+off his hat, sinking into a chair, and turning to the elder members
+of the company.
+
+The latter arranged their eyes and lips to signify that in their
+opinion nobody could have thought such a thing, whatever it was.
+
+"That my bees should ha' swarmed just then, of all times and
+seasons!" continued Dick, throwing a comprehensive glance like a net
+over the whole auditory.  "And 'tis a fine swarm, too:  I haven't
+seen such a fine swarm for these ten years."
+
+"A' excellent sign," said Mrs. Penny, from the depths of experience.
+"A' excellent sign."
+
+"I am glad everything seems so right," said Fancy with a breath of
+relief.
+
+"And so am I," said the four bridesmaids with much sympathy.
+
+"Well, bees can't be put off," observed the inharmonious grandfather
+James.  "Marrying a woman is a thing you can do at any moment; but a
+swarm o' bees won't come for the asking."
+
+Dick fanned himself with his hat.  "I can't think," he said
+thoughtfully, "whatever 'twas I did to offend Mr. Maybold, a man I
+like so much too.  He rather took to me when he came first, and used
+to say he should like to see me married, and that he'd marry me,
+whether the young woman I chose lived in his parish or no.  I just
+hinted to him of it when I put in the banns, but he didn't seem to
+take kindly to the notion now, and so I said no more.  I wonder how
+it was."
+
+"I wonder!" said Fancy, looking into vacancy with those beautiful
+eyes of hers--too refined and beautiful for a tranter's wife; but,
+perhaps, not too good.
+
+"Altered his mind, as folks will, I suppose," said the tranter.
+"Well, my sonnies, there'll he a good strong party looking at us to-
+day as we go along."
+
+"And the body of the church," said Geoffrey, "will be lined with
+females, and a row of young fellers' heads, as far down as the eyes,
+will be noticed just above the sills of the chancel-winders."
+
+"Ay, you've been through it twice," said Reuben, "and well mid
+know."
+
+"I can put up with it for once," said Dick, "or twice either, or a
+dozen times."
+
+"O Dick!" said Fancy reproachfully.
+
+"Why, dear, that's nothing,--only just a bit of a flourish.  You be
+as nervous as a cat to-day."
+
+"And then, of course, when 'tis all over," continued the tranter,
+"we shall march two and two round the parish."
+
+"Yes, sure," said Mr. Penny:  "two and two:  every man hitched up to
+his woman, 'a b'lieve."
+
+"I never can make a show of myself in that way!" said Fancy, looking
+at Dick to ascertain if he could.
+
+"I'm agreed to anything you and the company like, my dear!" said Mr.
+Richard Dewy heartily.
+
+"Why, we did when we were married, didn't we, Ann?" said the
+tranter; "and so do everybody, my sonnies."
+
+"And so did we," said Fancy's father.
+
+"And so did Penny and I," said Mrs. Penny:  "I wore my best Bath
+clogs, I remember, and Penny was cross because it made me look so
+tall."
+
+"And so did father and mother," said Miss Mercy Onmey.
+
+"And I mean to, come next Christmas!" said Nat the groomsman
+vigorously, and looking towards the person of Miss Vashti Sniff.
+
+"Respectable people don't nowadays," said Fancy.  "Still, since poor
+mother did, I will."
+
+"Ay," resumed the tranter, "'twas on a White Tuesday when I
+committed it.  Mellstock Club walked the same day, and we new-
+married folk went a-gaying round the parish behind 'em.  Everybody
+used to wear something white at Whitsuntide in them days.  My
+sonnies, I've got the very white trousers that I wore, at home in
+box now, Ha'n't I, Ann?"
+
+"You had till I cut 'em up for Jimmy," said Mrs. Dewy.
+
+"And we ought, by rights, after doing this parish, to go round
+Higher and Lower Mellstock, and call at Viney's, and so work our way
+hither again across He'th," said Mr. Penny, recovering scent of the
+matter in hand.  "Dairyman Viney is a very respectable man, and so
+is Farmer Kex, and we ought to show ourselves to them."
+
+"True," said the tranter, "we ought to go round Mellstock to do the
+thing well.  We shall form a very striking object walking along in
+rotation, good-now, neighbours?"
+
+"That we shall:  a proper pretty sight for the nation," said Mrs.
+Penny.
+
+"Hullo!" said the tranter, suddenly catching sight of a singular
+human figure standing in the doorway, and wearing a long smock-frock
+of pillow-case cut and of snowy whiteness.  "Why, Leaf! whatever
+dost thou do here?"
+
+"I've come to know if so be I can come to the wedding--hee-hee!"
+said Leaf in a voice of timidity.
+
+"Now, Leaf," said the tranter reproachfully, "you know we don't want
+'ee here to-day:  we've got no room for ye, Leaf."
+
+"Thomas Leaf, Thomas Leaf, fie upon ye for prying!" said old
+William.
+
+"I know I've got no head, but I thought, if I washed and put on a
+clane shirt and smock-frock, I might just call," said Leaf; turning
+away disappointed and trembling.
+
+"Poor feller!" said the tranter, turning to Geoffrey.  "Suppose we
+must let en come?  His looks are rather against en, and he is
+terrible silly; but 'a have never been in jail, and 'a won't do no
+harm."
+
+Leaf looked with gratitude at the tranter for these praises, and
+then anxiously at Geoffrey, to see what effect they would have in
+helping his cause.
+
+"Ay, let en come," said Geoffrey decisively.  "Leaf, th'rt welcome,
+'st know;" and Leaf accordingly remained.
+
+They were now all ready for leaving the house, and began to form a
+procession in the following order:  Fancy and her father, Dick and
+Susan Dewy, Nat Callcome and Vashti Sniff, Ted Waywood and Mercy
+Onmey, and Jimmy and Bessie Dewy.  These formed the executive, and
+all appeared in strict wedding attire.  Then came the tranter and
+Mrs. Dewy, and last of all Mr. and Mrs. Penny;--the tranter
+conspicuous by his enormous gloves, size eleven and three-quarters,
+which appeared at a distance like boxing gloves bleached, and sat
+rather awkwardly upon his brown hands; this hall-mark of
+respectability having been set upon himself to-day (by Fancy's
+special request) for the first time in his life.
+
+"The proper way is for the bridesmaids to walk together," suggested
+Fancy.
+
+"What?  'Twas always young man and young woman, arm in crook, in my
+time!" said Geoffrey, astounded.
+
+"And in mine!" said the tranter.
+
+"And in ours!" said Mr. and Mrs. Penny.
+
+"Never heard o' such a thing as woman and woman!" said old William;
+who, with grandfather James and Mrs. Day, was to stay at home.
+
+"Whichever way you and the company like, my dear!" said Dick, who,
+being on the point of securing his right to Fancy, seemed willing to
+renounce all other rights in the world with the greatest pleasure
+The decision was left to Fancy.
+
+"Well, I think I'd rather have it the way mother had it," she said,
+and the couples moved along under the trees, every man to his maid.
+
+"Ah!" said grandfather James to grandfather William as they retired,
+"I wonder which she thinks most about, Dick or her wedding raiment!"
+
+"Well, 'tis their nature," said grandfather William.  "Remember the
+words of the prophet Jeremiah:  'Can a maid forget her ornaments, or
+a bride her attire?'"
+
+Now among dark perpendicular firs, like the shafted columns of a
+cathedral; now through a hazel copse, matted with primroses and wild
+hyacinths; now under broad beeches in bright young leaves they
+threaded their way into the high road over Yalbury Hill, which
+dipped at that point directly into the village of Geoffrey Day's
+parish; and in the space of a quarter of an hour Fancy found herself
+to be Mrs. Richard Dewy, though, much to her surprise, feeling no
+other than Fancy Day still.
+
+On the circuitous return walk through the lanes and fields, amid
+much chattering and laughter, especially when they came to stiles,
+Dick discerned a brown spot far up a turnip field.
+
+"Why, 'tis Enoch!" he said to Fancy.  "I thought I missed him at the
+house this morning.  How is it he's left you?"
+
+"He drank too much cider, and it got into his head, and they put him
+in Weatherbury stocks for it.  Father was obliged to get somebody
+else for a day or two, and Enoch hasn't had anything to do with the
+woods since."
+
+"We might ask him to call down to-night.  Stocks are nothing for
+once, considering 'tis our wedding day."  The bridal party was
+ordered to halt.
+
+"Eno-o-o-o-ch!" cried Dick at the top of his voice.
+
+"Y-a-a-a-a-a-as!" said Enoch from the distance.
+
+"D'ye know who I be-e-e-e-e-e?"
+
+"No-o-o-o-o-o-o!"
+
+"Dick Dew-w-w-w-wy!"
+
+"O-h-h-h-h-h!"
+
+"Just a-ma-a-a-a-a-arried!"
+
+"O-h-h-h-h-h!"
+
+"This is my wife, Fa-a-a-a-a-ancy!" (holding her up to Enoch's view
+as if she had been a nosegay.)
+
+"O-h-h-h-h-h!"
+
+"Will ye come across to the party to-ni-i-i-i-i-i-ight!"
+
+"Ca-a-a-a-a-an't!"
+
+"Why n-o-o-o-o-ot?"
+
+"Don't work for the family no-o-o-o-ow!"
+
+"Not nice of Master Enoch," said Dick, as they resumed their walk.
+
+"You mustn't blame en," said Geoffrey; "the man's not hisself now;
+he's in his morning frame of mind.  When he's had a gallon o' cider
+or ale, or a pint or two of mead, the man's well enough, and his
+manners be as good as anybody's in the kingdom."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II:  UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
+
+
+
+The point in Yalbury Wood which abutted on the end of Geoffrey Day's
+premises was closed with an ancient tree, horizontally of enormous
+extent, though having no great pretensions to height.  Many hundreds
+of birds had been born amidst the boughs of this single tree; tribes
+of rabbits and hares had nibbled at its bark from year to year;
+quaint tufts of fungi had sprung from the cavities of its forks; and
+countless families of moles and earthworms had crept about its
+roots.  Beneath and beyond its shade spread a carefully-tended
+grass-plot, its purpose being to supply a healthy exercise-ground
+for young chickens and pheasants; the hens, their mothers, being
+enclosed in coops placed upon the same green flooring.
+
+All these encumbrances were now removed, and as the afternoon
+advanced, the guests gathered on the spot, where music, dancing, and
+the singing of songs went forward with great spirit throughout the
+evening.  The propriety of every one was intense by reason of the
+influence of Fancy, who, as an additional precaution in this
+direction, had strictly charged her father and the tranter to
+carefully avoid saying 'thee' and 'thou' in their conversation, on
+the plea that those ancient words sounded so very humiliating to
+persons of newer taste; also that they were never to be seen drawing
+the back of the hand across the mouth after drinking--a local
+English custom of extraordinary antiquity, but stated by Fancy to be
+decidedly dying out among the better classes of society.
+
+In addition to the local musicians present, a man who had a thorough
+knowledge of the tambourine was invited from the village of Tantrum
+Clangley,--a place long celebrated for the skill of its inhabitants
+as performers on instruments of percussion.  These important members
+of the assembly were relegated to a height of two or three feet from
+the ground, upon a temporary erection of planks supported by
+barrels.  Whilst the dancing progressed the older persons sat in a
+group under the trunk of the tree,--the space being allotted to them
+somewhat grudgingly by the young ones, who were greedy of
+pirouetting room,--and fortified by a table against the heels of the
+dancers.  Here the gaffers and gammers, whose dancing days were
+over, told stories of great impressiveness, and at intervals
+surveyed the advancing and retiring couples from the same retreat,
+as people on shore might be supposed to survey a naval engagement in
+the bay beyond; returning again to their tales when the pause was
+over.  Those of the whirling throng, who, during the rests between
+each figure, turned their eyes in the direction of these seated
+ones, were only able to discover, on account of the music and
+bustle, that a very striking circumstance was in course of
+narration--denoted by an emphatic sweep of the hand, snapping of the
+fingers, close of the lips, and fixed look into the centre of the
+listener's eye for the space of a quarter of a minute, which raised
+in that listener such a reciprocating working of face as to
+sometimes make the distant dancers half wish to know what such an
+interesting tale could refer to.
+
+Fancy caused her looks to wear as much matronly expression as was
+obtainable out of six hours' experience as a wife, in order that the
+contrast between her own state of life and that of the unmarried
+young women present might be duly impressed upon the company:
+occasionally stealing glances of admiration at her left hand, but
+this quite privately; for her ostensible bearing concerning the
+matter was intended to show that, though she undoubtedly occupied
+the most wondrous position in the eyes of the world that had ever
+been attained, she was almost unconscious of the circumstance, and
+that the somewhat prominent position in which that wonderfully-
+emblazoned left hand was continually found to be placed, when
+handing cups and saucers, knives, forks, and glasses, was quite the
+result of accident.  As to wishing to excite envy in the bosoms of
+her maiden companions, by the exhibition of the shining ring, every
+one was to know it was quite foreign to the dignity of such an
+experienced married woman.  Dick's imagination in the meantime was
+far less capable of drawing so much wontedness from his new
+condition.  He had been for two or three hours trying to feel
+himself merely a newly-married man, but had been able to get no
+further in the attempt than to realize that he was Dick Dewy, the
+tranter's son, at a party given by Lord Wessex's head man-in-charge,
+on the outlying Yalbury estate, dancing and chatting with Fancy Day.
+
+Five country dances, including 'Haste to the Wedding,' two reels,
+and three fragments of horn-pipes, brought them to the time for
+supper, which, on account of the dampness of the grass from the
+immaturity of the summer season, was spread indoors.  At the
+conclusion of the meal Dick went out to put the horse in; and Fancy,
+with the elder half of the four bridesmaids, retired upstairs to
+dress for the journey to Dick's new cottage near Mellstock.
+
+"How long will you be putting on your bonnet, Fancy?" Dick inquired
+at the foot of the staircase.  Being now a man of business and
+married, he was strong on the importance of time, and doubled the
+emphasis of his words in conversing, and added vigour to his nods.
+
+"Only a minute."
+
+"How long is that?"
+
+"Well, dear, five."
+
+"Ah, sonnies!" said the tranter, as Dick retired, "'tis a talent of
+the female race that low numbers should stand for high, more
+especially in matters of waiting, matters of age, and matters of
+money."
+
+"True, true, upon my body," said Geoffrey.
+
+"Ye spak with feeling, Geoffrey, seemingly."
+
+"Anybody that d'know my experience might guess that."
+
+"What's she doing now, Geoffrey?"
+
+"Claning out all the upstairs drawers and cupboards, and dusting the
+second-best chainey--a thing that's only done once a year.  'If
+there's work to be done I must do it,' says she, 'wedding or no.'"
+
+"'Tis my belief she's a very good woman at bottom."
+
+"She's terrible deep, then."
+
+Mrs. Penny turned round.  "Well, 'tis humps and hollers with the
+best of us; but still and for all that, Dick and Fancy stand as fair
+a chance of having a bit of sunsheen as any married pair in the
+land."
+
+"Ay, there's no gainsaying it."
+
+Mrs. Dewy came up, talking to one person and looking at another.
+"Happy, yes," she said.  "'Tis always so when a couple is so exactly
+in tune with one another as Dick and she."
+
+"When they be'n't too poor to have time to sing," said grandfather
+James.
+
+"I tell ye, neighbours, when the pinch comes," said the tranter:
+"when the oldest daughter's boots be only a size less than her
+mother's, and the rest o' the flock close behind her.  A sharp time
+for a man that, my sonnies; a very sharp time!  Chanticleer's comb
+is a-cut then, 'a believe."
+
+"That's about the form o't," said Mr. Penny.  "That'll put the stuns
+upon a man, when you must measure mother and daughter's lasts to
+tell 'em apart."
+
+"You've no cause to complain, Reuben, of such a close-coming flock,"
+said Mrs. Dewy; "for ours was a straggling lot enough, God knows!"
+
+"I d'know it, I d'know it," said the tranter.  "You be a well-enough
+woman, Ann."
+
+Mrs. Dewy put her mouth in the form of a smile, and put it back
+again without smiling.
+
+"And if they come together, they go together," said Mrs. Penny,
+whose family had been the reverse of the tranter's; "and a little
+money will make either fate tolerable.  And money can be made by our
+young couple, I know."
+
+"Yes, that it can!" said the impulsive voice of Leaf, who had
+hitherto humbly admired the proceedings from a corner.  "It can be
+done--all that's wanted is a few pounds to begin with.  That's all!
+I know a story about it!"
+
+"Let's hear thy story, Leaf;" said the tranter.  "I never knew you
+were clever enough to tell a story.  Silence, all of ye!  Mr. Leaf
+will tell a story."
+
+"Tell your story, Thomas Leaf," said grandfather William in the tone
+of a schoolmaster.
+
+"Once," said the delighted Leaf; in an uncertain voice, "there was a
+man who lived in a house!  Well, this man went thinking and thinking
+night and day.  At last, he said to himself; as I might, 'If I had
+only ten pound, I'd make a fortune.'  At last by hook or by crook,
+behold he got the ten pounds!"
+
+"Only think of that!" said Nat Callcome satirically.
+
+"Silence!" said the tranter.
+
+"Well, now comes the interesting part of the story!  In a little
+time he made that ten pounds twenty.  Then a little time after that
+he doubled it, and made it forty.  Well, he went on, and a good
+while after that he made it eighty, and on to a hundred.  Well, by-
+and-by he made it two hundred!  Well, you'd never believe it, but--
+he went on and made it four hundred!  He went on, and what did he
+do?  Why, he made it eight hundred!  Yes, he did," continued Leaf;
+in the highest pitch of excitement, bringing down his fist upon his
+knee with such force that he quivered with the pain; "yes, and he
+went on and made it A THOUSAND!"
+
+"Hear, hear!" said the tranter.  "Better than the history of
+England, my sonnies!"
+
+"Thank you for your story, Thomas Leaf," said grandfather William;
+and then Leaf gradually sank into nothingness again.
+
+Amid a medley of laughter, old shoes, and elder-wine, Dick and his
+bride took their departure, side by side in the excellent new
+spring-cart which the young tranter now possessed.  The moon was
+just over the full, rendering any light from lamps or their own
+beauties quite unnecessary to the pair.  They drove slowly along
+Yalbury Bottom, where the road passed between two copses.  Dick was
+talking to his companion.
+
+"Fancy," he said, "why we are so happy is because there is such full
+confidence between us.  Ever since that time you confessed to that
+little flirtation with Shiner by the river (which was really no
+flirtation at all), I have thought how artless and good you must be
+to tell me o' such a trifling thing, and to be so frightened about
+it as you were.  It has won me to tell you my every deed and word
+since then.  We'll have no secrets from each other, darling, will we
+ever?--no secret at all."
+
+"None from to-day," said Fancy.  "Hark! what's that?"
+
+From a neighbouring thicket was suddenly heard to issue in a loud,
+musical, and liquid voice -
+
+"Tippiwit! swe-e-et! ki-ki-ki!  Come hither, come hither, come
+hither!"
+
+"O, 'tis the nightingale," murmured she, and thought of a secret she
+would never tell.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1} This, a local expression, must be a corruption of something less
+questionable.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext Under the Greenwood Tree, by Hardy
+