DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA--A PASTORAL TRAGEDY

The news which one day reached Gabriel, that Bathsheba Everdene
had left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon him which might
have surprised any who never suspected that the more emphatic the
renunciation the less absolute its character.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting
out of love as there is for getting in.  Some people look upon
marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by
Bathsheba's disappearance, though effectual with people of certain
humours, is apt to idealize the removed object with others--notably
those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep
and long.  Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and
felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a
finer flame now that she was gone--that was all.

His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by the
failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of Bathsheba's
movements was done indirectly.  It appeared that she had gone to
a place called Weatherbury, more than twenty miles off, but in
what capacity--whether as a visitor, or permanently, he could not
discover.

Gabriel had two dogs.  George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped
nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked
in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty
grey; but the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched
and washed out of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a
reddish-brown, as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like
the indigo from the same kind of colour in Turner's pictures.  In
substance it had originally been hair, but long contact with sheep
seemed to be turning it by degrees into wool of a poor quality and
staple.

This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior morals
and dreadful temper, and the result was that George knew the exact
degrees of condemnation signified by cursing and swearing of all
descriptions better than the wickedest old man in the neighbourhood.
Long experience had so precisely taught the animal the difference
between such exclamations as "Come in!" and "D---- ye, come in!" that
he knew to a hair's breadth the rate of trotting back from the ewes'
tails that each call involved, if a staggerer with the sheep crook
was to be escaped.  Though old, he was clever and trustworthy still.

The young dog, George's son, might possibly have been the image
of his mother, for there was not much resemblance between him and
George.  He was learning the sheep-keeping business, so as to follow
on at the flock when the other should die, but had got no further
than the rudiments as yet--still finding an insuperable difficulty
in distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too
well.  So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had
no name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any
pleasant interjection), that if sent behind the flock to help them
on, he did it so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the
whole county with the greatest pleasure if not called off or reminded
when to stop by the example of old George.

Thus much for the dogs.  On the further side of Norcombe Hill was
a chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for generations, and
spread over adjacent farms.  Two hedges converged upon it in the form
of a V, but without quite meeting.  The narrow opening left, which
was immediately over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough
railing.

One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to his house, believing there
would be no further necessity for his attendance on the down, he
called as usual to the dogs, previously to shutting them up in the
outhouse till next morning.  Only one responded--old George; the
other could not be found, either in the house, lane, or garden.
Gabriel then remembered that he had left the two dogs on the hill
eating a dead lamb (a kind of meat he usually kept from them, except
when other food ran short), and concluding that the young one had
not finished his meal, he went indoors to the luxury of a bed, which
latterly he had only enjoyed on Sundays.

It was a still, moist night.  Just before dawn he was assisted in
waking by the abnormal reverberation of familiar music.  To the
shepherd, the note of the sheep-bell, like the ticking of the clock
to other people, is a chronic sound that only makes itself noticed by
ceasing or altering in some unusual manner from the well-known idle
twinkle which signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that
all is well in the fold.  In the solemn calm of the awakening morn
that note was heard by Gabriel, beating with unusual violence and
rapidity.  This exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways--by
the rapid feeding of the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock
breaks into new pasture, which gives it an intermittent rapidity,
or by the sheep starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular
palpitation.  The experienced ear of Oak knew the sound he now heard
to be caused by the running of the flock with great velocity.

He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a foggy
dawn, and ascended the hill.  The forward ewes were kept apart from
those among which the fall of lambs would be later, there being two
hundred of the latter class in Gabriel's flock.  These two hundred
seemed to have absolutely vanished from the hill.  There were the
fifty with their lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left
them, but the rest, forming the bulk of the flock, were nowhere.
Gabriel called at the top of his voice the shepherd's call:

"Ovey, ovey, ovey!"

Not a single bleat.  He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken
through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep.  Rather
surprised to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it
down instantly to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of
which a great deal grew in the plantation, he followed through the
hedge.  They were not in the plantation.  He called again: the
valleys and farthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the
lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep.  He passed through the
trees and along the ridge of the hill.  On the extreme summit, where
the ends of the two converging hedges of which we have spoken were
stopped short by meeting the brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the
younger dog standing against the sky--dark and motionless as Napoleon
at St. Helena.

A horrible conviction darted through Oak.  With a sensation of bodily
faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through,
and there he saw the footprints of his ewes.  The dog came up, licked
his hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward
for signal services rendered.  Oak looked over the precipice.  The
ewes lay dead and dying at its foot--a heap of two hundred mangled
carcasses, representing in their condition just now at least two
hundred more.

Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in
pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and
carried him on as by gravitation.  A shadow in his life had always
been that his flock ended in mutton--that a day came and found every
shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep.  His first
feeling now was one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle
ewes and their unborn lambs.

It was a second to remember another phase of the matter.  The
sheep were not insured.  All the savings of a frugal life had been
dispersed at a blow; his hopes of being an independent farmer were
laid low--possibly for ever.  Gabriel's energies, patience, and
industry had been so severely taxed during the years of his life
between eighteen and eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of
progress that no more seemed to be left in him.  He leant down upon a
rail, and covered his face with his hands.

Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak recovered from
his.  It was as remarkable as it was characteristic that the one
sentence he uttered was in thankfulness:--

"Thank God I am not married: what would SHE have done in the poverty
now coming upon me!"

Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do, listlessly
surveyed the scene.  By the outer margin of the Pit was an oval pond,
and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon
which had only a few days to last--the morning star dogging her on
the left hand.  The pool glittered like a dead man's eye, and as the
world awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of
the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a
phosphoric streak upon the water.  All this Oak saw and remembered.

As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still
under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep,
the more he ran after them the better, had at the end of his meal
off the dead lamb, which may have given him additional energy and
spirits, collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid
creatures through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main
force of worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a
portion of the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.

George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered
too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically
shot at twelve o'clock that same day--another instance of the
untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers
who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and
attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely
of compromise.

Gabriel's farm had been stocked by a dealer--on the strength of Oak's
promising look and character--who was receiving a percentage from the
farmer till such time as the advance should be cleared off. Oak found
that the value of stock, plant, and implements which were really his
own would be about sufficient to pay his debts, leaving himself a
free man with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more.

THE FAIR--THE JOURNEY--THE FIRE

Two months passed away.  We are brought on to a day in February, on
which was held the yearly statute or hiring fair in the county-town
of Casterbridge.

At one end of the street stood from two to three hundred blithe and
hearty labourers waiting upon Chance--all men of the stamp to whom
labour suggests nothing worse than a wrestle with gravitation, and
pleasure nothing better than a renunciation of the same. Among
these, carters and waggoners were distinguished by having a piece
of whip-cord twisted round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of
woven straw; shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands; and
thus the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance.

In the crowd was an athletic young fellow of somewhat superior
appearance to the rest--in fact, his superiority was marked enough to
lead several ruddy peasants standing by to speak to him inquiringly,
as to a farmer, and to use "Sir" as a finishing word.  His answer
always was,--

"I am looking for a place myself--a bailiff's.  Do ye know of anybody
who wants one?"

Gabriel was paler now.  His eyes were more meditative, and his
expression was more sad.  He had passed through an ordeal of
wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away.  He
had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very
slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he
had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though
it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when
it does not.  And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the
loss gain.

In the morning a regiment of cavalry had left the town, and a
sergeant and his party had been beating up for recruits through the
four streets.  As the end of the day drew on, and he found himself
not hired, Gabriel almost wished that he had joined them, and gone
off to serve his country.  Weary of standing in the market-place, and
not much minding the kind of work he turned his hand to, he decided
to offer himself in some other capacity than that of bailiff.

All the farmers seemed to be wanting shepherds.  Sheep-tending was
Gabriel's speciality.  Turning down an obscure street and entering
an obscurer lane, he went up to a smith's shop.

"How long would it take you to make a shepherd's crook?"

"Twenty minutes."

"How much?"

"Two shillings."

He sat on a bench and the crook was made, a stem being given him into
the bargain.

He then went to a ready-made clothes' shop, the owner of which had a
large rural connection.  As the crook had absorbed most of Gabriel's
money, he attempted, and carried out, an exchange of his overcoat for
a shepherd's regulation smock-frock.

This transaction having been completed, he again hurried off to the
centre of the town, and stood on the kerb of the pavement, as a
shepherd, crook in hand.

Now that Oak had turned himself into a shepherd, it seemed that
bailiffs were most in demand.  However, two or three farmers noticed
him and drew near.  Dialogues followed, more or less in the subjoined
form:--

"Where do you come from?"

"Norcombe."

"That's a long way.

"Fifteen miles."

"Who's farm were you upon last?"

"My own."

This reply invariably operated like a rumour of cholera. The
inquiring farmer would edge away and shake his head dubiously.
Gabriel, like his dog, was too good to be trustworthy, and he never
made advance beyond this point.

It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize
a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for
a chance of using it.  Gabriel wished he had not nailed up his
colours as a shepherd, but had laid himself out for anything in the
whole cycle of labour that was required in the fair.  It grew dusk.
Some merry men were whistling and singing by the corn-exchange.
Gabriel's hand, which had lain for some time idle in his smock-frock
pocket, touched his flute which he carried there.  Here was an
opportunity for putting his dearly bought wisdom into practice.

He drew out his flute and began to play "Jockey to the Fair" in the
style of a man who had never known moment's sorrow.  Oak could pipe
with Arcadian sweetness, and the sound of the well-known notes
cheered his own heart as well as those of the loungers.  He played on
with spirit, and in half an hour had earned in pence what was a small
fortune to a destitute man.

By making inquiries he learnt that there was another fair at
Shottsford the next day.

"How far is Shottsford?"

"Ten miles t'other side of Weatherbury."

Weatherbury!  It was where Bathsheba had gone two months before.
This information was like coming from night into noon.

"How far is it to Weatherbury?"

"Five or six miles."

Bathsheba had probably left Weatherbury long before this time, but
the place had enough interest attaching to it to lead Oak to choose
Shottsford fair as his next field of inquiry, because it lay in the
Weatherbury quarter.  Moreover, the Weatherbury folk were by no means
uninteresting intrinsically.  If report spoke truly they were as
hardy, merry, thriving, wicked a set as any in the whole county.  Oak
resolved to sleep at Weatherbury that night on his way to Shottsford,
and struck out at once into the high road which had been recommended
as the direct route to the village in question.

The road stretched through water-meadows traversed by little brooks,
whose quivering surfaces were braided along their centres, and
folded into creases at the sides; or, where the flow was more
rapid, the stream was pied with spots of white froth, which rode
on in undisturbed serenity.  On the higher levels the dead and
dry carcasses of leaves tapped the ground as they bowled along
helter-skelter upon the shoulders of the wind, and little birds in
the hedges were rustling their feathers and tucking themselves in
comfortably for the night, retaining their places if Oak kept moving,
but flying away if he stopped to look at them.  He passed by Yalbury
Wood where the game-birds were rising to their roosts, and heard the
crack-voiced cock-pheasants "cu-uck, cuck," and the wheezy whistle of
the hens.

By the time he had walked three or four miles every shape in the
landscape had assumed a uniform hue of blackness.  He descended
Yalbury Hill and could just discern ahead of him a waggon, drawn up
under a great over-hanging tree by the roadside.

On coming close, he found there were no horses attached to it, the
spot being apparently quite deserted.  The waggon, from its position,
seemed to have been left there for the night, for beyond about half
a truss of hay which was heaped in the bottom, it was quite empty.
Gabriel sat down on the shafts of the vehicle and considered his
position.  He calculated that he had walked a very fair proportion of
the journey; and having been on foot since daybreak, he felt tempted
to lie down upon the hay in the waggon instead of pushing on to the
village of Weatherbury, and having to pay for a lodging.

Eating his last slices of bread and ham, and drinking from the bottle
of cider he had taken the precaution to bring with him, he got into
the lonely waggon.  Here he spread half of the hay as a bed, and,
as well as he could in the darkness, pulled the other half over
him by way of bed-clothes, covering himself entirely, and feeling,
physically, as comfortable as ever he had been in his life.  Inward
melancholy it was impossible for a man like Oak, introspective far
beyond his neighbours, to banish quite, whilst conning the present
untoward page of his history.  So, thinking of his misfortunes,
amorous and pastoral, he fell asleep, shepherds enjoying, in common
with sailors, the privilege of being able to summon the god instead
of having to wait for him.

On somewhat suddenly awaking, after a sleep of whose length he had no
idea, Oak found that the waggon was in motion.  He was being carried
along the road at a rate rather considerable for a vehicle without
springs, and under circumstances of physical uneasiness, his
head being dandled up and down on the bed of the waggon like a
kettledrum-stick.  He then distinguished voices in conversation,
coming from the forpart of the waggon.  His concern at this dilemma
(which would have been alarm, had he been a thriving man; but
misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror) led him to peer
cautiously from the hay, and the first sight he beheld was the stars
above him.  Charles's Wain was getting towards a right angle with
the Pole star, and Gabriel concluded that it must be about nine
o'clock--in other words, that he had slept two hours.  This small
astronomical calculation was made without any positive effort, and
whilst he was stealthily turning to discover, if possible, into whose
hands he had fallen.

Two figures were dimly visible in front, sitting with their legs
outside the waggon, one of whom was driving.  Gabriel soon found that
this was the waggoner, and it appeared they had come from
Casterbridge fair, like himself.

A conversation was in progress, which continued thus:--

"Be as 'twill, she's a fine handsome body as far's looks be
concerned.  But that's only the skin of the woman, and these dandy
cattle be as proud as a lucifer in their insides."

"Ay--so 'a do seem, Billy Smallbury--so 'a do seem."  This utterance
was very shaky by nature, and more so by circumstance, the jolting of
the waggon not being without its effect upon the speaker's larynx.
It came from the man who held the reins.

"She's a very vain feymell--so 'tis said here and there."

"Ah, now.  If so be 'tis like that, I can't look her in the face.
Lord, no: not I--heh-heh-heh!  Such a shy man as I be!"

"Yes--she's very vain.  'Tis said that every night at going to bed
she looks in the glass to put on her night-cap properly."

"And not a married woman.  Oh, the world!"

"And 'a can play the peanner, so 'tis said.  Can play so clever that
'a can make a psalm tune sound as well as the merriest loose song a
man can wish for."

"D'ye tell o't!  A happy time for us, and I feel quite a new man!
And how do she pay?"

"That I don't know, Master Poorgrass."

On hearing these and other similar remarks, a wild thought flashed
into Gabriel's mind that they might be speaking of Bathsheba.  There
were, however, no grounds for retaining such a supposition, for the
waggon, though going in the direction of Weatherbury, might be going
beyond it, and the woman alluded to seemed to be the mistress of some
estate.  They were now apparently close upon Weatherbury and not to
alarm the speakers unnecessarily, Gabriel slipped out of the waggon
unseen.

He turned to an opening in the hedge, which he found to be a gate,
and mounting thereon, he sat meditating whether to seek a cheap
lodging in the village, or to ensure a cheaper one by lying under
some hay or corn-stack.  The crunching jangle of the waggon died upon
his ear.  He was about to walk on, when he noticed on his left hand
an unusual light--appearing about half a mile distant.  Oak watched
it, and the glow increased.  Something was on fire.

Gabriel again mounted the gate, and, leaping down on the other side
upon what he found to be ploughed soil, made across the field in the
exact direction of the fire.  The blaze, enlarging in a double ratio
by his approach and its own increase, showed him as he drew nearer
the outlines of ricks beside it, lighted up to great distinctness.  A
rick-yard was the source of the fire.  His weary face now began to
be painted over with a rich orange glow, and the whole front of his
smock-frock and gaiters was covered with a dancing shadow pattern of
thorn-twigs--the light reaching him through a leafless intervening
hedge--and the metallic curve of his sheep-crook shone silver-bright
in the same abounding rays.  He came up to the boundary fence, and
stood to regain breath.  It seemed as if the spot was unoccupied by
a living soul.

The fire was issuing from a long straw-stack, which was so far gone
as to preclude a possibility of saving it.  A rick burns differently
from a house.  As the wind blows the fire inwards, the portion in
flames completely disappears like melting sugar, and the outline is
lost to the eye.  However, a hay or a wheat-rick, well put together,
will resist combustion for a length of time, if it begins on the
outside.

This before Gabriel's eyes was a rick of straw, loosely put together,
and the flames darted into it with lightning swiftness.  It glowed on
the windward side, rising and falling in intensity, like the coal of
a cigar.  Then a superincumbent bundle rolled down, with a whisking
noise; flames elongated, and bent themselves about with a quiet
roar, but no crackle.  Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the
back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres,
illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow
uniformity.  Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a
creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms,
and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips,
glaring eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks
flew in clusters like birds from a nest.

Oak suddenly ceased from being a mere spectator by discovering the
case to be more serious than he had at first imagined.  A scroll
of smoke blew aside and revealed to him a wheat-rick in startling
juxtaposition with the decaying one, and behind this a series of
others, composing the main corn produce of the farm; so that instead
of the straw-stack standing, as he had imagined comparatively
isolated, there was a regular connection between it and the remaining
stacks of the group.

Gabriel leapt over the hedge, and saw that he was not alone.  The
first man he came to was running about in a great hurry, as if his
thoughts were several yards in advance of his body, which they could
never drag on fast enough.

"O, man--fire, fire!  A good master and a bad servant is fire,
fire!--I mane a bad servant and a good master.  Oh, Mark Clark--come!
And you, Billy Smallbury--and you, Maryann Money--and you, Jan
Coggan, and Matthew there!"  Other figures now appeared behind this
shouting man and among the smoke, and Gabriel found that, far from
being alone he was in a great company--whose shadows danced merrily
up and down, timed by the jigging of the flames, and not at all by
their owners' movements.  The assemblage--belonging to that class of
society which casts its thoughts into the form of feeling, and its
feelings into the form of commotion--set to work with a remarkable
confusion of purpose.

"Stop the draught under the wheat-rick!" cried Gabriel to those
nearest to him.  The corn stood on stone staddles, and between these,
tongues of yellow hue from the burning straw licked and darted
playfully.  If the fire once got UNDER this stack, all would be lost.

"Get a tarpaulin--quick!" said Gabriel.

A rick-cloth was brought, and they hung it like a curtain across the
channel.  The flames immediately ceased to go under the bottom of the
corn-stack, and stood up vertical.

"Stand here with a bucket of water and keep the cloth wet." said
Gabriel again.

The flames, now driven upwards, began to attack the angles of the
huge roof covering the wheat-stack.

"A ladder," cried Gabriel.

"The ladder was against the straw-rick and is burnt to a cinder,"
said a spectre-like form in the smoke.

Oak seized the cut ends of the sheaves, as if he were going to engage
in the operation of "reed-drawing," and digging in his feet, and
occasionally sticking in the stem of his sheep-crook, he clambered up
the beetling face.  He at once sat astride the very apex, and began
with his crook to beat off the fiery fragments which had lodged
thereon, shouting to the others to get him a bough and a ladder, and
some water.

Billy Smallbury--one of the men who had been on the waggon--by this
time had found a ladder, which Mark Clark ascended, holding on beside
Oak upon the thatch.  The smoke at this corner was stifling, and
Clark, a nimble fellow, having been handed a bucket of water, bathed
Oak's face and sprinkled him generally, whilst Gabriel, now with a
long beech-bough in one hand, in addition to his crook in the other,
kept sweeping the stack and dislodging all fiery particles.

On the ground the groups of villagers were still occupied in doing
all they could to keep down the conflagration, which was not much.
They were all tinged orange, and backed up by shadows of varying
pattern.  Round the corner of the largest stack, out of the direct
rays of the fire, stood a pony, bearing a young woman on its back.
By her side was another woman, on foot.  These two seemed to keep at
a distance from the fire, that the horse might not become restive.

"He's a shepherd," said the woman on foot.  "Yes--he is. See how his
crook shines as he beats the rick with it.  And his smock-frock is
burnt in two holes, I declare!  A fine young shepherd he is too,
ma'am."

"Whose shepherd is he?" said the equestrian in a clear voice.

"Don't know, ma'am."

"Don't any of the others know?"

"Nobody at all--I've asked 'em.  Quite a stranger, they say."

The young woman on the pony rode out from the shade and looked
anxiously around.

"Do you think the barn is safe?" she said.

"D'ye think the barn is safe, Jan Coggan?" said the second woman,
passing on the question to the nearest man in that direction.

"Safe-now--leastwise I think so.  If this rick had gone the barn
would have followed.  'Tis that bold shepherd up there that have done
the most good--he sitting on the top o' rick, whizzing his great
long-arms about like a windmill."

"He does work hard," said the young woman on horseback, looking up at
Gabriel through her thick woollen veil.  "I wish he was shepherd
here.  Don't any of you know his name."

"Never heard the man's name in my life, or seed his form afore."

The fire began to get worsted, and Gabriel's elevated position being
no longer required of him, he made as if to descend.

"Maryann," said the girl on horseback, "go to him as he comes down,
and say that the farmer wishes to thank him for the great service he
has done."

Maryann stalked off towards the rick and met Oak at the foot of the
ladder.  She delivered her message.

"Where is your master the farmer?" asked Gabriel, kindling with the
idea of getting employment that seemed to strike him now.

"'Tisn't a master; 'tis a mistress, shepherd."

"A woman farmer?"

"Ay, 'a b'lieve, and a rich one too!" said a bystander. "Lately
'a came here from a distance.  Took on her uncle's farm, who died
suddenly.  Used to measure his money in half-pint cups.  They say
now that she've business in every bank in Casterbridge, and thinks
no more of playing pitch-and-toss sovereign than you and I, do
pitch-halfpenny--not a bit in the world, shepherd."

"That's she, back there upon the pony," said Maryann; "wi' her face
a-covered up in that black cloth with holes in it."

Oak, his features smudged, grimy, and undiscoverable from the smoke
and heat, his smock-frock burnt into holes and dripping with water,
the ash stem of his sheep-crook charred six inches shorter, advanced
with the humility stern adversity had thrust upon him up to the
slight female form in the saddle.  He lifted his hat with respect,
and not without gallantry: stepping close to her hanging feet he said
in a hesitating voice,--

"Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma'am?"

She lifted the wool veil tied round her face, and looked all
astonishment.  Gabriel and his cold-hearted darling, Bathsheba
Everdene, were face to face.

Bathsheba did not speak, and he mechanically repeated in an abashed
and sad voice,--

"Do you want a shepherd, ma'am?"

RECOGNITION--A TIMID GIRL

Bathsheba withdrew into the shade.  She scarcely knew whether most to
be amused at the singularity of the meeting, or to be concerned at
its awkwardness.  There was room for a little pity, also for a very
little exultation: the former at his position, the latter at her own.
Embarrassed she was not, and she remembered Gabriel's declaration of
love to her at Norcombe only to think she had nearly forgotten it.

"Yes," she murmured, putting on an air of dignity, and turning again
to him with a little warmth of cheek; "I do want a shepherd.  But--"

"He's the very man, ma'am," said one of the villagers, quietly.

Conviction breeds conviction.  "Ay, that 'a is," said a second,
decisively.

"The man, truly!" said a third, with heartiness.

"He's all there!" said number four, fervidly.

"Then will you tell him to speak to the bailiff," said Bathsheba.

All was practical again now.  A summer eve and loneliness would have
been necessary to give the meeting its proper fulness of romance.

The bailiff was pointed out to Gabriel, who, checking the palpitation
within his breast at discovering that this Ashtoreth of strange
report was only a modification of Venus the well-known and admired,
retired with him to talk over the necessary preliminaries of hiring.

The fire before them wasted away.  "Men," said Bathsheba, "you shall
take a little refreshment after this extra work.  Will you come to
the house?"

"We could knock in a bit and a drop a good deal freer, Miss, if so be
ye'd send it to Warren's Malthouse," replied the spokesman.

Bathsheba then rode off into the darkness, and the men straggled on
to the village in twos and threes--Oak and the bailiff being left by
the rick alone.

"And now," said the bailiff, finally, "all is settled, I think, about
your coming, and I am going home-along.  Good-night to ye, shepherd."

"Can you get me a lodging?" inquired Gabriel.

"That I can't, indeed," he said, moving past Oak as a Christian edges
past an offertory-plate when he does not mean to contribute.  "If you
follow on the road till you come to Warren's Malthouse, where they
are all gone to have their snap of victuals, I daresay some of 'em
will tell you of a place.  Good-night to ye, shepherd."

The bailiff who showed this nervous dread of loving his neighbour as
himself, went up the hill, and Oak walked on to the village, still
astonished at the reencounter with Bathsheba, glad of his nearness to
her, and perplexed at the rapidity with which the unpractised girl of
Norcombe had developed into the supervising and cool woman here.  But
some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.

Obliged, to some extent, to forgo dreaming in order to find the way,
he reached the churchyard, and passed round it under the wall where
several ancient trees grew.  There was a wide margin of grass along
here, and Gabriel's footsteps were deadened by its softness, even at
this indurating period of the year.  When abreast of a trunk which
appeared to be the oldest of the old, he became aware that a figure
was standing behind it.  Gabriel did not pause in his walk, and in
another moment he accidentally kicked a loose stone. The noise was
enough to disturb the motionless stranger, who started and assumed
a careless position.

It was a slim girl, rather thinly clad.

"Good-night to you," said Gabriel, heartily.

"Good-night," said the girl to Gabriel.

The voice was unexpectedly attractive; it was the low and dulcet note
suggestive of romance; common in descriptions, rare in experience.

"I'll thank you to tell me if I'm in the way for Warren's Malthouse?"
Gabriel resumed, primarily to gain the information, indirectly to get
more of the music.

"Quite right.  It's at the bottom of the hill.  And do you know--"
The girl hesitated and then went on again.  "Do you know how late
they keep open the Buck's Head Inn?"  She seemed to be won by
Gabriel's heartiness, as Gabriel had been won by her modulations.

"I don't know where the Buck's Head is, or anything about it.  Do you
think of going there to-night?"

"Yes--"  The woman again paused.  There was no necessity for any
continuance of speech, and the fact that she did add more seemed to
proceed from an unconscious desire to show unconcern by making a
remark, which is noticeable in the ingenuous when they are acting by
stealth.  "You are not a Weatherbury man?" she said, timorously.

"I am not.  I am the new shepherd--just arrived."

"Only a shepherd--and you seem almost a farmer by your ways."

"Only a shepherd," Gabriel repeated, in a dull cadence of finality.
His thoughts were directed to the past, his eyes to the feet of the
girl; and for the first time he saw lying there a bundle of some
sort.  She may have perceived the direction of his face, for she said
coaxingly,--

"You won't say anything in the parish about having seen me here, will
you--at least, not for a day or two?"

"I won't if you wish me not to," said Oak.

"Thank you, indeed," the other replied.  "I am rather poor, and I
don't want people to know anything about me."  Then she was silent
and shivered.

"You ought to have a cloak on such a cold night," Gabriel observed.
"I would advise 'ee to get indoors."

"O no!  Would you mind going on and leaving me?  I thank you much for
what you have told me."

"I will go on," he said; adding hesitatingly,--"Since you are not
very well off, perhaps you would accept this trifle from me.  It is
only a shilling, but it is all I have to spare."

"Yes, I will take it," said the stranger gratefully.

She extended her hand; Gabriel his.  In feeling for each other's palm
in the gloom before the money could be passed, a minute incident
occurred which told much.  Gabriel's fingers alighted on the young
woman's wrist.  It was beating with a throb of tragic intensity.  He
had frequently felt the same quick, hard beat in the femoral artery
of his lambs when overdriven.  It suggested a consumption too great
of a vitality which, to judge from her figure and stature, was
already too little.

"What is the matter?"

"Nothing."

"But there is?"

"No, no, no!  Let your having seen me be a secret!"

"Very well; I will.  Good-night, again."

"Good-night."

The young girl remained motionless by the tree, and Gabriel descended
into the village of Weatherbury, or Lower Longpuddle as it was
sometimes called.  He fancied that he had felt himself in the
penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching that slight and fragile
creature.  But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions, and
Gabriel endeavoured to think little of this.

THE MALTHOUSE--THE CHAT--NEWS

Warren's Malthouse was enclosed by an old wall inwrapped with ivy,
and though not much of the exterior was visible at this hour, the
character and purposes of the building were clearly enough shown by
its outline upon the sky.  From the walls an overhanging thatched
roof sloped up to a point in the centre, upon which rose a small
wooden lantern, fitted with louvre-boards on all the four sides,
and from these openings a mist was dimly perceived to be escaping
into the night air.  There was no window in front; but a square
hole in the door was glazed with a single pane, through which red,
comfortable rays now stretched out upon the ivied wall in front.
Voices were to be heard inside.

Oak's hand skimmed the surface of the door with fingers extended to
an Elymas-the-Sorcerer pattern, till he found a leathern strap, which
he pulled.  This lifted a wooden latch, and the door swung open.

The room inside was lighted only by the ruddy glow from the kiln
mouth, which shone over the floor with the streaming horizontality
of the setting sun, and threw upwards the shadows of all facial
irregularities in those assembled around.  The stone-flag floor was
worn into a path from the doorway to the kiln, and into undulations
everywhere.  A curved settle of unplaned oak stretched along one
side, and in a remote corner was a small bed and bedstead, the owner
and frequent occupier of which was the maltster.

This aged man was now sitting opposite the fire, his frosty white
hair and beard overgrowing his gnarled figure like the grey moss and
lichen upon a leafless apple-tree.  He wore breeches and the laced-up
shoes called ankle-jacks; he kept his eyes fixed upon the fire.

Gabriel's nose was greeted by an atmosphere laden with the sweet
smell of new malt.  The conversation (which seemed to have been
concerning the origin of the fire) immediately ceased, and every one
ocularly criticised him to the degree expressed by contracting the
flesh of their foreheads and looking at him with narrowed eyelids, as
if he had been a light too strong for their sight.  Several exclaimed
meditatively, after this operation had been completed:--

"Oh, 'tis the new shepherd, 'a b'lieve."

"We thought we heard a hand pawing about the door for the bobbin, but
weren't sure 'twere not a dead leaf blowed across," said another.
"Come in, shepherd; sure ye be welcome, though we don't know yer
name."

"Gabriel Oak, that's my name, neighbours."

The ancient maltster sitting in the midst turned at this--his turning
being as the turning of a rusty crane.

"That's never Gable Oak's grandson over at Norcombe--never!" he said,
as a formula expressive of surprise, which nobody was supposed for a
moment to take literally.

"My father and my grandfather were old men of the name of Gabriel,"
said the shepherd, placidly.

"Thought I knowed the man's face as I seed him on the rick!--thought
I did!  And where be ye trading o't to now, shepherd?"

"I'm thinking of biding here," said Mr. Oak.

"Knowed yer grandfather for years and years!" continued the maltster,
the words coming forth of their own accord as if the momentum
previously imparted had been sufficient.

"Ah--and did you!"

"Knowed yer grandmother."

"And her too!"

"Likewise knowed yer father when he was a child.  Why, my boy
Jacob there and your father were sworn brothers--that they were
sure--weren't ye, Jacob?"

"Ay, sure," said his son, a young man about sixty-five, with a
semi-bald head and one tooth in the left centre of his upper jaw,
which made much of itself by standing prominent, like a milestone in
a bank.  "But 'twas Joe had most to do with him.  However, my son
William must have knowed the very man afore us--didn't ye, Billy,
afore ye left Norcombe?"

"No, 'twas Andrew," said Jacob's son Billy, a child of forty, or
thereabouts, who manifested the peculiarity of possessing a cheerful
soul in a gloomy body, and whose whiskers were assuming a chinchilla
shade here and there.

"I can mind Andrew," said Oak, "as being a man in the place when I
was quite a child."

"Ay--the other day I and my youngest daughter, Liddy, were over at
my grandson's christening," continued Billy.  "We were talking about
this very family, and 'twas only last Purification Day in this very
world, when the use-money is gied away to the second-best poor folk,
you know, shepherd, and I can mind the day because they all had to
traypse up to the vestry--yes, this very man's family."

"Come, shepherd, and drink.  'Tis gape and swaller with us--a drap of
sommit, but not of much account," said the maltster, removing from
the fire his eyes, which were vermilion-red and bleared by gazing
into it for so many years.  "Take up the God-forgive-me, Jacob.  See
if 'tis warm, Jacob."

Jacob stooped to the God-forgive-me, which was a two-handled tall mug
standing in the ashes, cracked and charred with heat: it was rather
furred with extraneous matter about the outside, especially in the
crevices of the handles, the innermost curves of which may not have
seen daylight for several years by reason of this encrustation
thereon--formed of ashes accidentally wetted with cider and baked
hard; but to the mind of any sensible drinker the cup was no
worse for that, being incontestably clean on the inside and about
the rim.  It may be observed that such a class of mug is called a
God-forgive-me in Weatherbury and its vicinity for uncertain reasons;
probably because its size makes any given toper feel ashamed of
himself when he sees its bottom in drinking it empty.

Jacob, on receiving the order to see if the liquor was warm enough,
placidly dipped his forefinger into it by way of thermometer, and
having pronounced it nearly of the proper degree, raised the cup and
very civilly attempted to dust some of the ashes from the bottom with
the skirt of his smock-frock, because Shepherd Oak was a stranger.

"A clane cup for the shepherd," said the maltster commandingly.

"No--not at all," said Gabriel, in a reproving tone of
considerateness.  "I never fuss about dirt in its pure state, and
when I know what sort it is."  Taking the mug he drank an inch or
more from the depth of its contents, and duly passed it to the
next man.  "I wouldn't think of giving such trouble to neighbours
in washing up when there's so much work to be done in the world
already." continued Oak in a moister tone, after recovering from the
stoppage of breath which is occasioned by pulls at large mugs.

"A right sensible man," said Jacob.

"True, true; it can't be gainsaid!" observed a brisk young man--Mark
Clark by name, a genial and pleasant gentleman, whom to meet anywhere
in your travels was to know, to know was to drink with, and to drink
with was, unfortunately, to pay for.

"And here's a mouthful of bread and bacon that mis'ess have sent,
shepherd.  The cider will go down better with a bit of victuals.
Don't ye chaw quite close, shepherd, for I let the bacon fall in
the road outside as I was bringing it along, and may be 'tis rather
gritty.  There, 'tis clane dirt; and we all know what that is, as you
say, and you bain't a particular man we see, shepherd."

"True, true--not at all," said the friendly Oak.

"Don't let your teeth quite meet, and you won't feel the sandiness at
all.  Ah! 'tis wonderful what can be done by contrivance!"

"My own mind exactly, neighbour."

"Ah, he's his grandfer's own grandson!--his grandfer were just such a
nice unparticular man!" said the maltster.

"Drink, Henry Fray--drink," magnanimously said Jan Coggan, a person
who held Saint-Simonian notions of share and share alike where liquor
was concerned, as the vessel showed signs of approaching him in its
gradual revolution among them.

Having at this moment reached the end of a wistful gaze into mid-air,
Henry did not refuse.  He was a man of more than middle age, with
eyebrows high up in his forehead, who laid it down that the law of
the world was bad, with a long-suffering look through his listeners
at the world alluded to, as it presented itself to his imagination.
He always signed his name "Henery"--strenuously insisting upon that
spelling, and if any passing schoolmaster ventured to remark that the
second "e" was superfluous and old-fashioned, he received the reply
that "H-e-n-e-r-y" was the name he was christened and the name he
would stick to--in the tone of one to whom orthographical differences
were matters which had a great deal to do with personal character.

Mr. Jan Coggan, who had passed the cup to Henery, was a crimson man
with a spacious countenance and private glimmer in his eye, whose
name had appeared on the marriage register of Weatherbury and
neighbouring parishes as best man and chief witness in countless
unions of the previous twenty years; he also very frequently filled
the post of head godfather in baptisms of the subtly-jovial kind.

"Come, Mark Clark--come.  Ther's plenty more in the barrel," said
Jan.

"Ay--that I will, 'tis my only doctor," replied Mr. Clark, who,
twenty years younger than Jan Coggan, revolved in the same orbit.  He
secreted mirth on all occasions for special discharge at popular
parties.

"Why, Joseph Poorgrass, ye han't had a drop!" said Mr. Coggan to a
self-conscious man in the background, thrusting the cup towards him.

"Such a modest man as he is!" said Jacob Smallbury.  "Why, ye've
hardly had strength of eye enough to look in our young mis'ess's
face, so I hear, Joseph?"

All looked at Joseph Poorgrass with pitying reproach.

"No--I've hardly looked at her at all," simpered Joseph, reducing his
body smaller whilst talking, apparently from a meek sense of undue
prominence.  "And when I seed her, 'twas nothing but blushes with
me!"

"Poor feller," said Mr. Clark.

"'Tis a curious nature for a man," said Jan Coggan.

"Yes," continued Joseph Poorgrass--his shyness, which was so painful
as a defect, filling him with a mild complacency now that it was
regarded as an interesting study.  "'Twere blush, blush, blush with
me every minute of the time, when she was speaking to me."

"I believe ye, Joseph Poorgrass, for we all know ye to be a very
bashful man."

"'Tis a' awkward gift for a man, poor soul," said the maltster.  "And
how long have ye have suffered from it, Joseph?" [a]

   [Transcriber's note a: Alternate text, appears in all three
   editions on hand: "'Tis a' awkward gift for a man, poor soul,"
   said the maltster.  "And ye have suffered from it a long time, we
   know."

   "Ay, ever since..."]

"Oh, ever since I was a boy.  Yes--mother was concerned to her heart
about it--yes.  But 'twas all nought."

"Did ye ever go into the world to try and stop it, Joseph Poorgrass?"

"Oh ay, tried all sorts o' company.  They took me to Greenhill
Fair, and into a great gay jerry-go-nimble show, where there were
women-folk riding round--standing upon horses, with hardly anything
on but their smocks; but it didn't cure me a morsel.  And then I
was put errand-man at the Women's Skittle Alley at the back of the
Tailor's Arms in Casterbridge.  'Twas a horrible sinful situation,
and a very curious place for a good man.  I had to stand and look
ba'dy people in the face from morning till night; but 'twas no use--I
was just as bad as ever after all.  Blushes hev been in the family
for generations.  There, 'tis a happy providence that I be no worse."

"True," said Jacob Smallbury, deepening his thoughts to a profounder
view of the subject.  "'Tis a thought to look at, that ye might have
been worse; but even as you be, 'tis a very bad affliction for 'ee,
Joseph.  For ye see, shepherd, though 'tis very well for a woman,
dang it all, 'tis awkward for a man like him, poor feller?"

"'Tis--'tis," said Gabriel, recovering from a meditation.  "Yes, very
awkward for the man."

"Ay, and he's very timid, too," observed Jan Coggan.  "Once he had
been working late at Yalbury Bottom, and had had a drap of drink, and
lost his way as he was coming home-along through Yalbury Wood, didn't
ye, Master Poorgrass?"

"No, no, no; not that story!" expostulated the modest man, forcing a
laugh to bury his concern.

"--And so 'a lost himself quite," continued Mr. Coggan, with an
impassive face, implying that a true narrative, like time and tide,
must run its course and would respect no man.  "And as he was coming
along in the middle of the night, much afeared, and not able to
find his way out of the trees nohow, 'a cried out, 'Man-a-lost!
man-a-lost!'  A owl in a tree happened to be crying 'Whoo-whoo-whoo!'
as owls do, you know, shepherd" (Gabriel nodded), "and Joseph, all in
a tremble, said, 'Joseph Poorgrass, of Weatherbury, sir!'"

"No, no, now--that's too much!" said the timid man, becoming a man
of brazen courage all of a sudden.  "I didn't say SIR.  I'll take my
oath I didn't say 'Joseph Poorgrass o' Weatherbury, sir.'  No, no;
what's right is right, and I never said sir to the bird, knowing very
well that no man of a gentleman's rank would be hollering there at
that time o' night.  'Joseph Poorgrass of Weatherbury,'--that's every
word I said, and I shouldn't ha' said that if 't hadn't been for
Keeper Day's metheglin....  There, 'twas a merciful thing it ended
where it did."

The question of which was right being tacitly waived by the company,
Jan went on meditatively:--

"And he's the fearfullest man, bain't ye, Joseph?  Ay, another time
ye were lost by Lambing-Down Gate, weren't ye, Joseph?"

"I was," replied Poorgrass, as if there were some conditions too
serious even for modesty to remember itself under, this being one.

"Yes; that were the middle of the night, too.  The gate would not
open, try how he would, and knowing there was the Devil's hand in it,
he kneeled down."

"Ay," said Joseph, acquiring confidence from the warmth of the fire,
the cider, and a perception of the narrative capabilities of the
experience alluded to.  "My heart died within me, that time; but I
kneeled down and said the Lord's Prayer, and then the Belief right
through, and then the Ten Commandments, in earnest prayer.  But
no, the gate wouldn't open; and then I went on with Dearly Beloved
Brethren, and, thinks I, this makes four, and 'tis all I know out
of book, and if this don't do it nothing will, and I'm a lost man.
Well, when I got to Saying After Me, I rose from my knees and found
the gate would open--yes, neighbours, the gate opened the same as
ever."

A meditation on the obvious inference was indulged in by all, and
during its continuance each directed his vision into the ashpit,
which glowed like a desert in the tropics under a vertical sun,
shaping their eyes long and liny, partly because of the light, partly
from the depth of the subject discussed.

Gabriel broke the silence.  "What sort of a place is this to live at,
and what sort of a mis'ess is she to work under?" Gabriel's bosom
thrilled gently as he thus slipped under the notice of the assembly
the inner-most subject of his heart.

"We d' know little of her--nothing.  She only showed herself a few
days ago.  Her uncle was took bad, and the doctor was called with his
world-wide skill; but he couldn't save the man.  As I take it, she's
going to keep on the farm.

"That's about the shape o't, 'a b'lieve," said Jan Coggan.  "Ay, 'tis
a very good family.  I'd as soon be under 'em as under one here and
there.  Her uncle was a very fair sort of man.  Did ye know en,
shepherd--a bachelor-man?"

"Not at all."

"I used to go to his house a-courting my first wife, Charlotte,
who was his dairymaid.  Well, a very good-hearted man were Farmer
Everdene, and I being a respectable young fellow was allowed to call
and see her and drink as much ale as I liked, but not to carry away
any--outside my skin I mane of course."

"Ay, ay, Jan Coggan; we know yer maning."

"And so you see 'twas beautiful ale, and I wished to value his
kindness as much as I could, and not to be so ill-mannered as to
drink only a thimbleful, which would have been insulting the man's
generosity--"

"True, Master Coggan, 'twould so," corroborated Mark Clark.

"--And so I used to eat a lot of salt fish afore going, and then by
the time I got there I were as dry as a lime-basket--so thorough dry
that that ale would slip down--ah, 'twould slip down sweet!  Happy
times!  Heavenly times!  Such lovely drunks as I used to have at that
house!  You can mind, Jacob?  You used to go wi' me sometimes."

"I can--I can," said Jacob.  "That one, too, that we had at Buck's
Head on a White Monday was a pretty tipple."

"'Twas.  But for a wet of the better class, that brought you no
nearer to the horned man than you were afore you begun, there was
none like those in Farmer Everdene's kitchen.  Not a single damn
allowed; no, not a bare poor one, even at the most cheerful moment
when all were blindest, though the good old word of sin thrown in
here and there at such times is a great relief to a merry soul."

"True," said the maltster.  "Nater requires her swearing at the
regular times, or she's not herself; and unholy exclamations is a
necessity of life."

"But Charlotte," continued Coggan--"not a word of the sort would
Charlotte allow, nor the smallest item of taking in vain....  Ay,
poor Charlotte, I wonder if she had the good fortune to get into
Heaven when 'a died!  But 'a was never much in luck's way, and
perhaps 'a went downwards after all, poor soul."

"And did any of you know Miss Everdene's father and mother?" inquired
the shepherd, who found some difficulty in keeping the conversation
in the desired channel.

"I knew them a little," said Jacob Smallbury; "but they were
townsfolk, and didn't live here.  They've been dead for years.
Father, what sort of people were mis'ess' father and mother?"

"Well," said the maltster, "he wasn't much to look at; but she was a
lovely woman.  He was fond enough of her as his sweetheart."

"Used to kiss her scores and long-hundreds o' times, so 'twas said,"
observed Coggan.

"He was very proud of her, too, when they were married, as I've been
told," said the maltster.

"Ay," said Coggan.  "He admired her so much that he used to light the
candle three times a night to look at her."

"Boundless love; I shouldn't have supposed it in the universe!"
murmured Joseph Poorgrass, who habitually spoke on a large scale in
his moral reflections.

"Well, to be sure," said Gabriel.

"Oh, 'tis true enough.  I knowed the man and woman both well.  Levi
Everdene--that was the man's name, sure.  'Man,' saith I in my
hurry, but he were of a higher circle of life than that--'a was a
gentleman-tailor really, worth scores of pounds.  And he became a
very celebrated bankrupt two or three times."

"Oh, I thought he was quite a common man!" said Joseph.

"Oh no, no!  That man failed for heaps of money; hundreds in gold and
silver."

The maltster being rather short of breath, Mr. Coggan, after absently
scrutinising a coal which had fallen among the ashes, took up the
narrative, with a private twirl of his eye:--

"Well, now, you'd hardly believe it, but that man--our Miss
Everdene's father--was one of the ficklest husbands alive, after a
while.  Understand? 'a didn't want to be fickle, but he couldn't help
it.  The pore feller were faithful and true enough to her in his
wish, but his heart would rove, do what he would.  He spoke to me in
real tribulation about it once.  'Coggan,' he said, 'I could never
wish for a handsomer woman than I've got, but feeling she's ticketed
as my lawful wife, I can't help my wicked heart wandering, do what I
will.'  But at last I believe he cured it by making her take off her
wedding-ring and calling her by her maiden name as they sat together
after the shop was shut, and so 'a would get to fancy she was only
his sweetheart, and not married to him at all.  And as soon as he
could thoroughly fancy he was doing wrong and committing the seventh,
'a got to like her as well as ever, and they lived on a perfect
picture of mutel love."

"Well, 'twas a most ungodly remedy," murmured Joseph Poorgrass; "but
we ought to feel deep cheerfulness that a happy Providence kept it
from being any worse.  You see, he might have gone the bad road and
given his eyes to unlawfulness entirely--yes, gross unlawfulness, so
to say it."

"You see," said Billy Smallbury, "The man's will was to do right,
sure enough, but his heart didn't chime in."

"He got so much better, that he was quite godly in his later years,
wasn't he, Jan?" said Joseph Poorgrass.  "He got himself confirmed
over again in a more serious way, and took to saying 'Amen' almost as
loud as the clerk, and he liked to copy comforting verses from the
tombstones.  He used, too, to hold the money-plate at Let Your Light
so Shine, and stand godfather to poor little come-by-chance children;
and he kept a missionary box upon his table to nab folks unawares
when they called; yes, and he would box the charity-boys' ears, if
they laughed in church, till they could hardly stand upright, and do
other deeds of piety natural to the saintly inclined."

"Ay, at that time he thought of nothing but high things," added Billy
Smallbury.  "One day Parson Thirdly met him and said, 'Good-Morning,
Mister Everdene; 'tis a fine day!'  'Amen' said Everdene, quite
absent-like, thinking only of religion when he seed a parson.  Yes,
he was a very Christian man."

"Their daughter was not at all a pretty chiel at that time," said
Henery Fray.  "Never should have thought she'd have growed up such a
handsome body as she is."

"'Tis to be hoped her temper is as good as her face."

"Well, yes; but the baily will have most to do with the business and
ourselves.  Ah!" Henery gazed into the ashpit, and smiled volumes of
ironical knowledge.

"A queer Christian, like the Devil's head in a cowl, [1] as the
saying is," volunteered Mark Clark.

   [Footnote 1: This phrase is a conjectural emendation of the
   unintelligible expression, "as the Devil said to the Owl,"
   used by the natives.]

"He is," said Henery, implying that irony must cease at a certain
point.  "Between we two, man and man, I believe that man would as
soon tell a lie Sundays as working-days--that I do so."

"Good faith, you do talk!" said Gabriel.

"True enough," said the man of bitter moods, looking round upon
the company with the antithetic laughter that comes from a keener
appreciation of the miseries of life than ordinary men are capable
of.  "Ah, there's people of one sort, and people of another, but
that man--bless your souls!"

Gabriel thought fit to change the subject.  "You must be a very aged
man, malter, to have sons growed mild and ancient," he remarked.

"Father's so old that 'a can't mind his age, can ye, father?"
interposed Jacob.  "And he's growed terrible crooked too, lately,"
Jacob continued, surveying his father's figure, which was rather
more bowed than his own.  "Really one may say that father there is
three-double."

"Crooked folk will last a long while," said the maltster, grimly, and
not in the best humour.

"Shepherd would like to hear the pedigree of yer life, father--
wouldn't ye, shepherd?"

"Ay that I should," said Gabriel with the heartiness of a man who had
longed to hear it for several months.  "What may your age be,
malter?"

The maltster cleared his throat in an exaggerated form for emphasis,
and elongating his gaze to the remotest point of the ashpit, said, in
the slow speech justifiable when the importance of a subject is so
generally felt that any mannerism must be tolerated in getting at it,
"Well, I don't mind the year I were born in, but perhaps I can reckon
up the places I've lived at, and so get it that way.  I bode at
Upper Longpuddle across there" (nodding to the north) "till I were
eleven. I bode seven at Kingsbere" (nodding to the east) "where
I took to malting.  I went therefrom to Norcombe, and malted
there two-and-twenty years, and-two-and-twenty years I was there
turnip-hoeing and harvesting.  Ah, I knowed that old place, Norcombe,
years afore you were thought of, Master Oak" (Oak smiled sincere
belief in the fact).  "Then I malted at Durnover four year, and
four year turnip-hoeing; and I was fourteen times eleven months at
Millpond St. Jude's" (nodding north-west-by-north).  "Old Twills
wouldn't hire me for more than eleven months at a time, to keep me
from being chargeable to the parish if so be I was disabled.  Then I
was three year at Mellstock, and I've been here one-and-thirty year
come Candlemas.  How much is that?"

"Hundred and seventeen," chuckled another old gentleman, given to
mental arithmetic and little conversation, who had hitherto sat
unobserved in a corner.

"Well, then, that's my age," said the maltster, emphatically.

"O no, father!" said Jacob.  "Your turnip-hoeing were in the summer
and your malting in the winter of the same years, and ye don't ought
to count-both halves, father."

"Chok' it all!  I lived through the summers, didn't I?  That's my
question.  I suppose ye'll say next I be no age at all to speak of?"

"Sure we shan't," said Gabriel, soothingly.

"Ye be a very old aged person, malter," attested Jan Coggan, also
soothingly. "We all know that, and ye must have a wonderful talented
constitution to be able to live so long, mustn't he, neighbours?"

"True, true; ye must, malter, wonderful," said the meeting
unanimously.

The maltster, being now pacified, was even generous enough to
voluntarily disparage in a slight degree the virtue of having lived a
great many years, by mentioning that the cup they were drinking out
of was three years older than he.

While the cup was being examined, the end of Gabriel Oak's flute
became visible over his smock-frock pocket, and Henery Fray
exclaimed, "Surely, shepherd, I seed you blowing into a great flute
by now at Casterbridge?"

"You did," said Gabriel, blushing faintly.  "I've been in great
trouble, neighbours, and was driven to it.  I used not to be so poor
as I be now."

"Never mind, heart!" said Mark Clark.  "You should take it
careless-like, shepherd, and your time will come.  But we could thank
ye for a tune, if ye bain't too tired?"

"Neither drum nor trumpet have I heard since Christmas," said Jan
Coggan.  "Come, raise a tune, Master Oak!"

"Ay, that I will," said Gabriel, pulling out his flute and putting it
together.  "A poor tool, neighbours; but such as I can do ye shall
have and welcome."

Oak then struck up "Jockey to the Fair," and played that sparkling
melody three times through, accenting the notes in the third round in
a most artistic and lively manner by bending his body in small jerks
and tapping with his foot to beat time.

"He can blow the flute very well--that 'a can," said a young married
man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as "Susan
Tall's husband."  He continued, "I'd as lief as not be able to blow
into a flute as well as that."

"He's a clever man, and 'tis a true comfort for us to have such a
shepherd," murmured Joseph Poorgrass, in a soft cadence.  "We ought
to feel full o' thanksgiving that he's not a player of ba'dy songs
instead of these merry tunes; for 'twould have been just as easy for
God to have made the shepherd a loose low man--a man of iniquity, so
to speak it--as what he is.  Yes, for our wives' and daughters' sakes
we should feel real thanksgiving."

"True, true,--real thanksgiving!" dashed in Mark Clark conclusively,
not feeling it to be of any consequence to his opinion that he had
only heard about a word and three-quarters of what Joseph had said.

"Yes," added Joseph, beginning to feel like a man in the Bible; "for
evil do thrive so in these times that ye may be as much deceived in
the cleanest shaved and whitest shirted man as in the raggedest tramp
upon the turnpike, if I may term it so."

"Ay, I can mind yer face now, shepherd," said Henery Fray,
criticising Gabriel with misty eyes as he entered upon his second
tune.  "Yes--now I see 'ee blowing into the flute I know 'ee to be
the same man I see play at Casterbridge, for yer mouth were scrimped
up and yer eyes a-staring out like a strangled man's--just as they be
now."

"'Tis a pity that playing the flute should make a man look such a
scarecrow," observed Mr. Mark Clark, with additional criticism of
Gabriel's countenance, the latter person jerking out, with the
ghastly grimace required by the instrument, the chorus of "Dame
Durden:"--

   'Twas Moll' and Bet', and Doll' and Kate',
   And Dor'-othy Drag'-gle Tail'.

"I hope you don't mind that young man's bad manners in naming your
features?" whispered Joseph to Gabriel.

"Not at all," said Mr. Oak.

"For by nature ye be a very handsome man, shepherd," continued Joseph
Poorgrass, with winning sauvity.

"Ay, that ye be, shepard," said the company.

"Thank you very much," said Oak, in the modest tone good manners
demanded, thinking, however, that he would never let Bathsheba see
him playing the flute; in this resolve showing a discretion equal to
that related to its sagacious inventress, the divine Minerva herself.

"Ah, when I and my wife were married at Norcombe Church," said the
old maltster, not pleased at finding himself left out of the subject,
"we were called the handsomest couple in the neighbourhood--everybody
said so."

"Danged if ye bain't altered now, malter," said a voice with the
vigour natural to the enunciation of a remarkably evident truism.
It came from the old man in the background, whose offensiveness and
spiteful ways were barely atoned for by the occasional chuckle he
contributed to general laughs.

"O no, no," said Gabriel.

"Don't ye play no more shepherd" said Susan Tall's husband, the young
married man who had spoken once before.  "I must be moving and when
there's tunes going on I seem as if hung in wires.  If I thought
after I'd left that music was still playing, and I not there, I
should be quite melancholy-like."

"What's yer hurry then, Laban?" inquired Coggan.  "You used to bide
as late as the latest."

"Well, ye see, neighbours, I was lately married to a woman, and she's
my vocation now, and so ye see--"  The young man halted lamely.

"New Lords new laws, as the saying is, I suppose," remarked Coggan.

"Ay, 'a b'lieve--ha, ha!" said Susan Tall's husband, in a tone
intended to imply his habitual reception of jokes without minding
them at all.  The young man then wished them good-night and withdrew.

Henery Fray was the first to follow.  Then Gabriel arose and went off
with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging.  A few minutes later,
when the remaining ones were on their legs and about to depart, Fray
came back again in a hurry.  Flourishing his finger ominously he
threw a gaze teeming with tidings just where his eye alighted by
accident, which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass's face.

"O--what's the matter, what's the matter, Henery?" said Joseph,
starting back.

"What's a-brewing, Henrey?" asked Jacob and Mark Clark.

"Baily Pennyways--Baily Pennyways--I said so; yes, I said so!"

"What, found out stealing anything?"

"Stealing it is.  The news is, that after Miss Everdene got home she
went out again to see all was safe, as she usually do, and coming in
found Baily Pennyways creeping down the granary steps with half a a
bushel of barley.  She fleed at him like a cat--never such a tomboy
as she is--of course I speak with closed doors?"

"You do--you do, Henery."

"She fleed at him, and, to cut a long story short, he owned to having
carried off five sack altogether, upon her promising not to persecute
him.  Well, he's turned out neck and crop, and my question is, who's
going to be baily now?"

The question was such a profound one that Henery was obliged to drink
there and then from the large cup till the bottom was distinctly
visible inside.  Before he had replaced it on the table, in came the
young man, Susan Tall's husband, in a still greater hurry.

"Have ye heard the news that's all over parish?"

"About Baily Pennyways?"

"But besides that?"

"No--not a morsel of it!" they replied, looking into the very midst
of Laban Tall as if to meet his words half-way down his throat.

"What a night of horrors!" murmured Joseph Poorgrass, waving his
hands spasmodically.  "I've had the news-bell ringing in my left ear
quite bad enough for a murder, and I've seen a magpie all alone!"

"Fanny Robin--Miss Everdene's youngest servant--can't be found.
They've been wanting to lock up the door these two hours, but she
isn't come in.  And they don't know what to do about going to bed for
fear of locking her out.  They wouldn't be so concerned if she hadn't
been noticed in such low spirits these last few days, and Maryann d'
think the beginning of a crowner's inquest has happened to the poor
girl."

"Oh--'tis burned--'tis burned!" came from Joseph Poorgrass's dry
lips.

"No--'tis drowned!" said Tall.

"Or 'tis her father's razor!" suggested Billy Smallbury, with a vivid
sense of detail.

"Well--Miss Everdene wants to speak to one or two of us before we go
to bed.  What with this trouble about the baily, and now about the
girl, mis'ess is almost wild."

They all hastened up the lane to the farmhouse, excepting the old
maltster, whom neither news, fire, rain, nor thunder could draw from
his hole.  There, as the others' footsteps died away he sat down
again and continued gazing as usual into the furnace with his red,
bleared eyes.

From the bedroom window above their heads Bathsheba's head and
shoulders, robed in mystic white, were dimly seen extended into the
air.

"Are any of my men among you?" she said anxiously.

"Yes, ma'am, several," said Susan Tall's husband.

"To-morrow morning I wish two or three of you to make inquiries in
the villages round if they have seen such a person as Fanny Robin.
Do it quietly; there is no reason for alarm as yet.  She must have
left whilst we were all at the fire."

"I beg yer pardon, but had she any young man courting her in the
parish, ma'am?" asked Jacob Smallbury.

"I don't know," said Bathsheba.

"I've never heard of any such thing, ma'am," said two or three.

"It is hardly likely, either," continued Bathsheba.  "For any lover
of hers might have come to the house if he had been a respectable
lad.  The most mysterious matter connected with her absence--indeed,
the only thing which gives me serious alarm--is that she was seen
to go out of the house by Maryann with only her indoor working gown
on--not even a bonnet."

"And you mean, ma'am, excusing my words, that a young woman would
hardly go to see her young man without dressing up," said Jacob,
turning his mental vision upon past experiences.  "That's true--she
would not, ma'am."

"She had, I think, a bundle, though I couldn't see very well," said a
female voice from another window, which seemed that of Maryann.  "But
she had no young man about here.  Hers lives in Casterbridge, and I
believe he's a soldier."

"Do you know his name?" Bathsheba said.

"No, mistress; she was very close about it."

"Perhaps I might be able to find out if I went to Casterbridge
barracks," said William Smallbury.

"Very well; if she doesn't return to-morrow, mind you go there and try
to discover which man it is, and see him.  I feel more responsible
than I should if she had had any friends or relations alive.  I do
hope she has come to no harm through a man of that kind....  And then
there's this disgraceful affair of the bailiff--but I can't speak of
him now."

Bathsheba had so many reasons for uneasiness that it seemed she did
not think it worth while to dwell upon any particular one.  "Do as I
told you, then," she said in conclusion, closing the casement.

"Ay, ay, mistress; we will," they replied, and moved away.

That night at Coggan's, Gabriel Oak, beneath the screen of closed
eyelids, was busy with fancies, and full of movement, like a river
flowing rapidly under its ice.  Night had always been the time at
which he saw Bathsheba most vividly, and through the slow hours
of shadow he tenderly regarded her image now.  It is rarely that
the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of
sleeplessness, but they possibly did with Oak to-night, for the
delight of merely seeing her effaced for the time his perception
of the great difference between seeing and possessing.

He also thought of plans for fetching his few utensils and books from
Norcombe.  _The Young Man's Best Companion_, _The Farrier's Sure
Guide_, _The Veterinary Surgeon_, _Paradise Lost_, _The Pilgrim's
Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_, Ash's _Dictionary_, and Walkingame's
_Arithmetic_, constituted his library; and though a limited series,
it was one from which he had acquired more sound information by
diligent perusal than many a man of opportunities has done from a
furlong of laden shelves.

THE HOMESTEAD--A VISITOR--HALF-CONFIDENCES

By daylight, the bower of Oak's new-found mistress, Bathsheba
Everdene, presented itself as a hoary building, of the early stage of
Classic Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion
which told at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had
once been the memorial hall upon a small estate around it, now
altogether effaced as a distinct property, and merged in the vast
tract of a non-resident landlord, which comprised several such modest
demesnes.

Fluted pilasters, worked from the solid stone, decorated its front,
and above the roof the chimneys were panelled or columnar, some coped
gables with finials and like features still retaining traces of their
Gothic extraction.  Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed
cushions upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or
sengreen sprouted from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings.  A
gravel walk leading from the door to the road in front was encrusted
at the sides with more moss--here it was a silver-green variety, the
nut-brown of the gravel being visible to the width of only a foot
or two in the centre.  This circumstance, and the generally sleepy
air of the whole prospect here, together with the animated and
contrasting state of the reverse facade, suggested to the imagination
that on the adaptation of the building for farming purposes the
vital principle of the house had turned round inside its body to
face the other way.  Reversals of this kind, strange deformities,
tremendous paralyses, are often seen to be inflicted by trade upon
edifices--either individual or in the aggregate as streets and
towns--which were originally planned for pleasure alone.

Lively voices were heard this morning in the upper rooms, the
main staircase to which was of hard oak, the balusters, heavy as
bed-posts, being turned and moulded in the quaint fashion of their
century, the handrail as stout as a parapet-top, and the stairs
themselves continually twisting round like a person trying to look
over his shoulder.  Going up, the floors above were found to have a
very irregular surface, rising to ridges, sinking into valleys; and
being just then uncarpeted, the face of the boards was seen to be
eaten into innumerable vermiculations.  Every window replied by a
clang to the opening and shutting of every door, a tremble followed
every bustling movement, and a creak accompanied a walker about the
house, like a spirit, wherever he went.

In the room from which the conversation proceeded Bathsheba and her
servant-companion, Liddy Smallbury, were to be discovered sitting
upon the floor, and sorting a complication of papers, books, bottles,
and rubbish spread out thereon--remnants from the household stores
of the late occupier.  Liddy, the maltster's great-granddaughter,
was about Bathsheba's equal in age, and her face was a prominent
advertisement of the light-hearted English country girl.  The beauty
her features might have lacked in form was amply made up for by
perfection of hue, which at this winter-time was the softened
ruddiness on a surface of high rotundity that we meet with in a
Terburg or a Gerard Douw; and, like the presentations of those great
colourists, it was a face which kept well back from the boundary
between comeliness and the ideal.  Though elastic in nature she was
less daring than Bathsheba, and occasionally showed some earnestness,
which consisted half of genuine feeling, and half of mannerliness
superadded by way of duty.

Through a partly-opened door the noise of a scrubbing-brush led up to
the charwoman, Maryann Money, a person who for a face had a circular
disc, furrowed less by age than by long gazes of perplexity at
distant objects.  To think of her was to get good-humoured; to speak
of her was to raise the image of a dried Normandy pippin.

"Stop your scrubbing a moment," said Bathsheba through the door to
her.  "I hear something."

Maryann suspended the brush.

The tramp of a horse was apparent, approaching the front of the
building.  The paces slackened, turned in at the wicket, and, what
was most unusual, came up the mossy path close to the door.  The door
was tapped with the end of a crop or stick.

"What impertinence!" said Liddy, in a low voice.  "To ride up the
footpath like that!  Why didn't he stop at the gate? Lord!  'Tis a
gentleman!  I see the top of his hat."

"Be quiet!" said Bathsheba.

The further expression of Liddy's concern was continued by aspect
instead of narrative.

"Why doesn't Mrs. Coggan go to the door?" Bathsheba continued.

Rat-tat-tat-tat resounded more decisively from Bathsheba's oak.

"Maryann, you go!" said she, fluttering under the onset of a crowd of
romantic possibilities.

"Oh ma'am--see, here's a mess!"

The argument was unanswerable after a glance at Maryann.

"Liddy--you must," said Bathsheba.

Liddy held up her hands and arms, coated with dust from the rubbish
they were sorting, and looked imploringly at her mistress.

"There--Mrs. Coggan is going!" said Bathsheba, exhaling her relief
in the form of a long breath which had lain in her bosom a minute or
more.

The door opened, and a deep voice said--

"Is Miss Everdene at home?"

"I'll see, sir," said Mrs. Coggan, and in a minute appeared in the
room.

"Dear, what a thirtover place this world is!" continued Mrs. Coggan
(a wholesome-looking lady who had a voice for each class of remark
according to the emotion involved; who could toss a pancake or twirl
a mop with the accuracy of pure mathematics, and who at this moment
showed hands shaggy with fragments of dough and arms encrusted with
flour).  "I am never up to my elbows, Miss, in making a pudding but
one of two things do happen--either my nose must needs begin
tickling, and I can't live without scratching it, or somebody knocks
at the door.  Here's Mr. Boldwood wanting to see you, Miss Everdene."

A woman's dress being a part of her countenance, and any disorder in
the one being of the same nature with a malformation or wound in the
other, Bathsheba said at once--

"I can't see him in this state.  Whatever shall I do?"

Not-at-homes were hardly naturalized in Weatherbury farmhouses, so
Liddy suggested--"Say you're a fright with dust, and can't come
down."

"Yes--that sounds very well," said Mrs. Coggan, critically.

"Say I can't see him--that will do."

Mrs. Coggan went downstairs, and returned the answer as requested,
adding, however, on her own responsibility, "Miss is dusting bottles,
sir, and is quite a object--that's why 'tis."

"Oh, very well," said the deep voice indifferently.  "All I wanted to
ask was, if anything had been heard of Fanny Robin?"

"Nothing, sir--but we may know to-night.  William Smallbury is gone
to Casterbridge, where her young man lives, as is supposed, and the
other men be inquiring about everywhere."

The horse's tramp then recommenced and retreated, and the door
closed.

"Who is Mr. Boldwood?" said Bathsheba.

"A gentleman-farmer at Little Weatherbury."

"Married?"

"No, miss."

"How old is he?"

"Forty, I should say--very handsome--rather stern-looking--and rich."

"What a bother this dusting is!  I am always in some unfortunate
plight or other," Bathsheba said, complainingly.  "Why should he
inquire about Fanny?"

"Oh, because, as she had no friends in her childhood, he took her and
put her to school, and got her her place here under your uncle.  He's
a very kind man that way, but Lord--there!"

"What?"

"Never was such a hopeless man for a woman!  He's been courted by
sixes and sevens--all the girls, gentle and simple, for miles round,
have tried him.  Jane Perkins worked at him for two months like a
slave, and the two Miss Taylors spent a year upon him, and he cost
Farmer Ives's daughter nights of tears and twenty pounds' worth of
new clothes; but Lord--the money might as well have been thrown out
of the window."

A little boy came up at this moment and looked in upon them.  This
child was one of the Coggans, who, with the Smallburys, were as
common among the families of this district as the Avons and Derwents
among our rivers.  He always had a loosened tooth or a cut finger to
show to particular friends, which he did with an air of being thereby
elevated above the common herd of afflictionless humanity--to which
exhibition people were expected to say "Poor child!" with a dash of
congratulation as well as pity.

"I've got a pen-nee!" said Master Coggan in a scanning measure.

"Well--who gave it you, Teddy?" said Liddy.

"Mis-terr Bold-wood!  He gave it to me for opening the gate."

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'Where are you going, my little man?' and I said, 'To Miss
Everdene's please,' and he said, 'She is a staid woman, isn't she, my
little man?' and I said, 'Yes.'"

"You naughty child!  What did you say that for?"

"'Cause he gave me the penny!"

"What a pucker everything is in!" said Bathsheba, discontentedly
when the child had gone.  "Get away, Maryann, or go on with your
scrubbing, or do something!  You ought to be married by this time,
and not here troubling me!"

"Ay, mistress--so I did.  But what between the poor men I won't have,
and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a pelican in the
wilderness!"

"Did anybody ever want to marry you miss?" Liddy ventured to ask when
they were again alone.  "Lots of 'em, I daresay?"

Bathsheba paused, as if about to refuse a reply, but the temptation
to say yes, since it was really in her power was irresistible by
aspiring virginity, in spite of her spleen at having been published
as old.

"A man wanted to once," she said, in a highly experienced tone, and
the image of Gabriel Oak, as the farmer, rose before her.

"How nice it must seem!" said Liddy, with the fixed features of
mental realization.  "And you wouldn't have him?"

"He wasn't quite good enough for me."

"How sweet to be able to disdain, when most of us are glad to say,
'Thank you!'  I seem I hear it.  'No, sir--I'm your better.' or 'Kiss
my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.'  And did you
love him, miss?"

"Oh, no.  But I rather liked him."

"Do you now?"

"Of course not--what footsteps are those I hear?"

Liddy looked from a back window into the courtyard behind, which was
now getting low-toned and dim with the earliest films of night.  A
crooked file of men was approaching the back door.  The whole string
of trailing individuals advanced in the completest balance of
intention, like the remarkable creatures known as Chain Salpae, which,
distinctly organized in other respects, have one will common to a
whole family.  Some were, as usual, in snow-white smock-frocks of
Russia duck, and some in whitey-brown ones of drabbet--marked on the
wrists, breasts, backs, and sleeves with honeycomb-work.  Two or
three women in pattens brought up the rear.

"The Philistines be upon us," said Liddy, making her nose white
against the glass.

"Oh, very well.  Maryann, go down and keep them in the kitchen till I
am dressed, and then show them in to me in the hall."

MISTRESS AND MEN

Half-an-hour later Bathsheba, in finished dress, and followed by
Liddy, entered the upper end of the old hall to find that her men had
all deposited themselves on a long form and a settle at the lower
extremity.  She sat down at a table and opened the time-book, pen in
her hand, with a canvas money-bag beside her.  From this she poured
a small heap of coin.  Liddy chose a position at her elbow and began
to sew, sometimes pausing and looking round, or, with the air of
a privileged person, taking up one of the half-sovereigns lying
before her and surveying it merely as a work of art, while strictly
preventing her countenance from expressing any wish to possess it as
money.

"Now before I begin, men," said Bathsheba, "I have two matters to
speak of.  The first is that the bailiff is dismissed for thieving,
and that I have formed a resolution to have no bailiff at all, but to
manage everything with my own head and hands."

The men breathed an audible breath of amazement.

"The next matter is, have you heard anything of Fanny?"

"Nothing, ma'am."

"Have you done anything?"

"I met Farmer Boldwood," said Jacob Smallbury, "and I went with him
and two of his men, and dragged Newmill Pond, but we found nothing."

"And the new shepherd have been to Buck's Head, by Yalbury, thinking
she had gone there, but nobody had seed her," said Laban Tall.

"Hasn't William Smallbury been to Casterbridge?"

"Yes, ma'am, but he's not yet come home.  He promised to be back by
six."

"It wants a quarter to six at present," said Bathsheba, looking at
her watch.  "I daresay he'll be in directly.  Well, now then"--she
looked into the book--"Joseph Poorgrass, are you there?"

"Yes, sir--ma'am I mane," said the person addressed.  "I be the
personal name of Poorgrass."

"And what are you?"

"Nothing in my own eye.  In the eye of other people--well, I don't
say it; though public thought will out."

"What do you do on the farm?"

"I do do carting things all the year, and in seed time I shoots the
rooks and sparrows, and helps at pig-killing, sir."

"How much to you?"

"Please nine and ninepence and a good halfpenny where 'twas a bad
one, sir--ma'am I mane."

"Quite correct.  Now here are ten shillings in addition as a small
present, as I am a new comer."

Bathsheba blushed slightly at the sense of being generous in public,
and Henery Fray, who had drawn up towards her chair, lifted his
eyebrows and fingers to express amazement on a small scale.

"How much do I owe you--that man in the corner--what's your name?"
continued Bathsheba.

"Matthew Moon, ma'am," said a singular framework of clothes with
nothing of any consequence inside them, which advanced with the toes
in no definite direction forwards, but turned in or out as they
chanced to swing.

"Matthew Mark, did you say?--speak out--I shall not hurt you,"
inquired the young farmer, kindly.

"Matthew Moon, mem," said Henery Fray, correctingly, from behind her
chair, to which point he had edged himself.

"Matthew Moon," murmured Bathsheba, turning her bright eyes to the
book.  "Ten and twopence halfpenny is the sum put down to you, I
see?"

"Yes, mis'ess," said Matthew, as the rustle of wind among dead
leaves.

"Here it is, and ten shillings.  Now the next--Andrew Randle, you are
a new man, I hear.  How come you to leave your last farm?"

"P-p-p-p-p-pl-pl-pl-pl-l-l-l-l-ease, ma'am, p-p-p-p-pl-pl-pl-pl-please,
ma'am-please'm-please'm--"

"'A's a stammering man, mem," said Henery Fray in an undertone, "and
they turned him away because the only time he ever did speak plain
he said his soul was his own, and other iniquities, to the squire.
'A can cuss, mem, as well as you or I, but 'a can't speak a common
speech to save his life."

"Andrew Randle, here's yours--finish thanking me in a day or two.
Temperance Miller--oh, here's another, Soberness--both women I
suppose?"

"Yes'm.  Here we be, 'a b'lieve," was echoed in shrill unison.

"What have you been doing?"

"Tending thrashing-machine and wimbling haybonds, and saying 'Hoosh!'
to the cocks and hens when they go upon your seeds, and planting
Early Flourballs and Thompson's Wonderfuls with a dibble."

"Yes--I see.  Are they satisfactory women?" she inquired softly of
Henery Fray.

"Oh mem--don't ask me!  Yielding women--as scarlet a pair as ever
was!" groaned Henery under his breath.

"Sit down."

"Who, mem?"

"Sit down."

Joseph Poorgrass, in the background twitched, and his lips became
dry with fear of some terrible consequences, as he saw Bathsheba
summarily speaking, and Henery slinking off to a corner.

"Now the next.  Laban Tall, you'll stay on working for me?"

"For you or anybody that pays me well, ma'am," replied the young
married man.

"True--the man must live!" said a woman in the back quarter, who had
just entered with clicking pattens.

"What woman is that?" Bathsheba asked.

"I be his lawful wife!" continued the voice with greater prominence
of manner and tone.  This lady called herself five-and-twenty, looked
thirty, passed as thirty-five, and was forty.  She was a woman who
never, like some newly married, showed conjugal tenderness in public,
perhaps because she had none to show.

"Oh, you are," said Bathsheba.  "Well, Laban, will you stay on?"

"Yes, he'll stay, ma'am!" said again the shrill tongue of Laban's
lawful wife.

"Well, he can speak for himself, I suppose."

"Oh Lord, not he, ma'am!  A simple tool.  Well enough, but a poor
gawkhammer mortal," the wife replied.

"Heh-heh-heh!" laughed the married man with a hideous effort of
appreciation, for he was as irrepressibly good-humoured under ghastly
snubs as a parliamentary candidate on the hustings.

The names remaining were called in the same manner.

"Now I think I have done with you," said Bathsheba, closing the book
and shaking back a stray twine of hair.  "Has William Smallbury
returned?"

"No, ma'am."

"The new shepherd will want a man under him," suggested Henery Fray,
trying to make himself official again by a sideway approach towards
her chair.

"Oh--he will.  Who can he have?"

"Young Cain Ball is a very good lad," Henery said, "and Shepherd Oak
don't mind his youth?" he added, turning with an apologetic smile to
the shepherd, who had just appeared on the scene, and was now leaning
against the doorpost with his arms folded.

"No, I don't mind that," said Gabriel.

"How did Cain come by such a name?" asked Bathsheba.

"Oh you see, mem, his pore mother, not being a Scripture-read woman,
made a mistake at his christening, thinking 'twas Abel killed Cain,
and called en Cain, meaning Abel all the time.  The parson put it
right, but 'twas too late, for the name could never be got rid of in
the parish.  'Tis very unfortunate for the boy."

"It is rather unfortunate."

"Yes.  However, we soften it down as much as we can, and call him
Cainy.  Ah, pore widow-woman! she cried her heart out about it
almost.  She was brought up by a very heathen father and mother, who
never sent her to church or school, and it shows how the sins of the
parents are visited upon the children, mem."

Mr. Fray here drew up his features to the mild degree of melancholy
required when the persons involved in the given misfortune do not
belong to your own family.

"Very well then, Cainey Ball to be under-shepherd.  And you quite
understand your duties?--you I mean, Gabriel Oak?"

"Quite well, I thank you, Miss Everdene," said Shepherd Oak from the
doorpost.  "If I don't, I'll inquire."  Gabriel was rather staggered
by the remarkable coolness of her manner.  Certainly nobody without
previous information would have dreamt that Oak and the handsome
woman before whom he stood had ever been other than strangers.  But
perhaps her air was the inevitable result of the social rise which
had advanced her from a cottage to a large house and fields.  The
case is not unexampled in high places.  When, in the writings of the
later poets, Jove and his family are found to have moved from their
cramped quarters on the peak of Olympus into the wide sky above it,
their words show a proportionate increase of arrogance and reserve.

Footsteps were heard in the passage, combining in their character
the qualities both of weight and measure, rather at the expense of
velocity.

(All.) "Here's Billy Smallbury come from Casterbridge."

"And what's the news?" said Bathsheba, as William, after marching to
the middle of the hall, took a handkerchief from his hat and wiped
his forehead from its centre to its remoter boundaries.

"I should have been sooner, miss," he said, "if it hadn't been for
the weather."  He then stamped with each foot severely, and on
looking down his boots were perceived to be clogged with snow.

"Come at last, is it?" said Henery.

"Well, what about Fanny?" said Bathsheba.

"Well, ma'am, in round numbers, she's run away with the soldiers,"
said William.

"No; not a steady girl like Fanny!"

"I'll tell ye all particulars.  When I got to Casterbridge Barracks,
they said, 'The Eleventh Dragoon-Guards be gone away, and new troops
have come.' The Eleventh left last week for Melchester and onwards.
The Route came from Government like a thief in the night, as is his
nature to, and afore the Eleventh knew it almost, they were on the
march.  They passed near here."

Gabriel had listened with interest.  "I saw them go," he said.

"Yes," continued William, "they pranced down the street playing 'The
Girl I Left Behind Me,' so 'tis said, in glorious notes of triumph.
Every looker-on's inside shook with the blows of the great drum to
his deepest vitals, and there was not a dry eye throughout the town
among the public-house people and the nameless women!"

"But they're not gone to any war?"

"No, ma'am; but they be gone to take the places of them who may,
which is very close connected.  And so I said to myself, Fanny's
young man was one of the regiment, and she's gone after him.  There,
ma'am, that's it in black and white."

"Did you find out his name?"

"No; nobody knew it.  I believe he was higher in rank than a
private."

Gabriel remained musing and said nothing, for he was in doubt.

"Well, we are not likely to know more to-night, at any rate,"
said Bathsheba.  "But one of you had better run across to Farmer
Boldwood's and tell him that much."

She then rose; but before retiring, addressed a few words to them
with a pretty dignity, to which her mourning dress added a soberness
that was hardly to be found in the words themselves.

"Now mind, you have a mistress instead of a master. I don't yet know
my powers or my talents in farming; but I shall do my best, and if
you serve me well, so shall I serve you.  Don't any unfair ones among
you (if there are any such, but I hope not) suppose that because I'm
a woman I don't understand the difference between bad goings-on and
good."

(All.) "No'm!"

(Liddy.) "Excellent well said."

"I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are
up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield.  In short, I
shall astonish you all."

(All.) "Yes'm!"

"And so good-night."

(All.) "Good-night, ma'am."

Then this small thesmothete stepped from the table, and surged out of
the hall, her black silk dress licking up a few straws and dragging
them along with a scratching noise upon the floor.  Liddy, elevating
her feelings to the occasion from a sense of grandeur, floated
off behind Bathsheba with a milder dignity not entirely free from
travesty, and the door was closed.

OUTSIDE THE BARRACKS--SNOW--A MEETING

For dreariness nothing could surpass a prospect in the outskirts of a
certain town and military station, many miles north of Weatherbury,
at a later hour on this same snowy evening--if that may be called a
prospect of which the chief constituent was darkness.

It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing
any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love
becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope:
when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at
opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation
does not prompt to enterprise.

The scene was a public path, bordered on the left hand by a river,
behind which rose a high wall.  On the right was a tract of land,
partly meadow and partly moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a
wide undulating upland.

The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this
kind than amid woodland scenery.  Still, to a close observer, they
are just as perceptible; the difference is that their media of
manifestation are less trite and familiar than such well-known ones
as the bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf.  Many are not
so stealthy and gradual as we may be apt to imagine in considering
the general torpidity of a moor or waste.  Winter, in coming to the
country hereabout, advanced in well-marked stages, wherein might
have been successively observed the retreat of the snakes, the
transformation of the ferns, the filling of the pools, a rising of
fogs, the embrowning by frost, the collapse of the fungi, and an
obliteration by snow.

This climax of the series had been reached to-night on the aforesaid
moor, and for the first time in the season its irregularities were
forms without features; suggestive of anything, proclaiming nothing,
and without more character than that of being the limit of something
else--the lowest layer of a firmament of snow.  From this chaotic
skyful of crowding flakes the mead and moor momentarily received
additional clothing, only to appear momentarily more naked thereby.
The vast arch of cloud above was strangely low, and formed as it were
the roof of a large dark cavern, gradually sinking in upon its floor;
for the instinctive thought was that the snow lining the heavens and
that encrusting the earth would soon unite into one mass without any
intervening stratum of air at all.

We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics; which were
flatness in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall
behind it, and darkness as to both.  These features made up the mass.
If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if any
thing could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath.  The
indistinct summit of the facade was notched and pronged by chimneys
here and there, and upon its face were faintly signified the oblong
shapes of windows, though only in the upper part.  Below, down to the
water's edge, the flat was unbroken by hole or projection.

An indescribable succession of dull blows, perplexing in their
regularity, sent their sound with difficulty through the fluffy
atmosphere.  It was a neighbouring clock striking ten.  The bell was
in the open air, and being overlaid with several inches of muffling
snow, had lost its voice for the time.

About this hour the snow abated: ten flakes fell where twenty had
fallen, then one had the room of ten.  Not long after a form moved
by the brink of the river.

By its outline upon the colourless background, a close observer
might have seen that it was small.  This was all that was positively
discoverable, though it seemed human.

The shape went slowly along, but without much exertion, for the snow,
though sudden, was not as yet more than two inches deep.  At this
time some words were spoken aloud:--

"One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  Five."

Between each utterance the little shape advanced about half a dozen
yards.  It was evident now that the windows high in the wall were
being counted.  The word "Five" represented the fifth window from the
end of the wall.

Here the spot stopped, and dwindled smaller.  The figure was
stooping.  Then a morsel of snow flew across the river towards the
fifth window.  It smacked against the wall at a point several yards
from its mark.  The throw was the idea of a man conjoined with the
execution of a woman.  No man who had ever seen bird, rabbit, or
squirrel in his childhood, could possibly have thrown with such utter
imbecility as was shown here.

Another attempt, and another; till by degrees the wall must have
become pimpled with the adhering lumps of snow.  At last one fragment
struck the fifth window.

The river would have been seen by day to be of that deep smooth sort
which races middle and sides with the same gliding precision, any
irregularities of speed being immediately corrected by a small
whirlpool.  Nothing was heard in reply to the signal but the gurgle
and cluck of one of these invisible wheels--together with a few small
sounds which a sad man would have called moans, and a happy man
laughter--caused by the flapping of the waters against trifling
objects in other parts of the stream.

The window was struck again in the same manner.

Then a noise was heard, apparently produced by the opening of the
window.  This was followed by a voice from the same quarter.

"Who's there?"

The tones were masculine, and not those of surprise.  The high
wall being that of a barrack, and marriage being looked upon with
disfavour in the army, assignations and communications had probably
been made across the river before to-night.

"Is it Sergeant Troy?" said the blurred spot in the snow,
tremulously.

This person was so much like a mere shade upon the earth, and the
other speaker so much a part of the building, that one would have
said the wall was holding a conversation with the snow.

"Yes," came suspiciously from the shadow. "What girl are you?"

"Oh, Frank--don't you know me?" said the spot.  "Your wife, Fanny
Robin."

"Fanny!" said the wall, in utter astonishment.

"Yes," said the girl, with a half-suppressed gasp of emotion.

There was something in the woman's tone which is not that of the
wife, and there was a manner in the man which is rarely a husband's.
The dialogue went on:

"How did you come here?"

"I asked which was your window.  Forgive me!"

"I did not expect you to-night.  Indeed, I did not think you would
come at all.  It was a wonder you found me here.  I am orderly
to-morrow."

"You said I was to come."

"Well--I said that you might."

"Yes, I mean that I might.  You are glad to see me, Frank?"

"Oh yes--of course."

"Can you--come to me!"

"My dear Fan, no!  The bugle has sounded, the barrack gates are
closed, and I have no leave.  We are all of us as good as in the
county gaol till to-morrow morning."

"Then I shan't see you till then!"  The words were in a faltering
tone of disappointment.

"How did you get here from Weatherbury?"

"I walked--some part of the way--the rest by the carriers."

"I am surprised."

"Yes--so am I.  And Frank, when will it be?"

"What?"

"That you promised."

"I don't quite recollect."

"O you do!  Don't speak like that.  It weighs me to the earth.  It
makes me say what ought to be said first by you."

"Never mind--say it."

"O, must I?--it is, when shall we be married, Frank?"

"Oh, I see.  Well--you have to get proper clothes."

"I have money.  Will it be by banns or license?"

"Banns, I should think."

"And we live in two parishes."

"Do we?  What then?"

"My lodgings are in St. Mary's, and this is not.  So they will have
to be published in both."

"Is that the law?"

"Yes.  O Frank--you think me forward, I am afraid!  Don't, dear
Frank--will you--for I love you so.  And you said lots of times you
would marry me, and--and--I--I--I--"

"Don't cry, now!  It is foolish.  If I said so, of course I will."

"And shall I put up the banns in my parish, and will you in yours?"

"Yes"

"To-morrow?"

"Not to-morrow.  We'll settle in a few days."

"You have the permission of the officers?"

"No, not yet."

"O--how is it?  You said you almost had before you left
Casterbridge."

"The fact is, I forgot to ask.  Your coming like this is so sudden
and unexpected."

"Yes--yes--it is.  It was wrong of me to worry you.  I'll go away
now.  Will you come and see me to-morrow, at Mrs. Twills's, in North
Street?  I don't like to come to the Barracks.  There are bad women
about, and they think me one."

"Quite, so.  I'll come to you, my dear.  Good-night."

"Good-night, Frank--good-night!"

And the noise was again heard of a window closing.  The little spot
moved away.  When she passed the corner a subdued exclamation was
heard inside the wall.

"Ho--ho--Sergeant--ho--ho!" An  expostulation followed, but it was
indistinct; and it became lost amid a low peal of laughter, which was
hardly distinguishable from the gurgle of the tiny whirlpools
outside.

FARMERS--A RULE--AN EXCEPTION

The first public evidence of Bathsheba's decision to be a farmer in
her own person and by proxy no more was her appearance the following
market-day in the cornmarket at Casterbridge.

The low though extensive hall, supported by beams and pillars,
and latterly dignified by the name of Corn Exchange, was thronged
with hot men who talked among each other in twos and threes, the
speaker of the minute looking sideways into his auditor's face and
concentrating his argument by a contraction of one eyelid during
delivery.  The greater number carried in their hands ground-ash
saplings, using them partly as walking-sticks and partly for poking
up pigs, sheep, neighbours with their backs turned, and restful
things in general, which seemed to require such treatment in the
course of their peregrinations.  During conversations each subjected
his sapling to great varieties of usage--bending it round his back,
forming an arch of it between his two hands, overweighting it on the
ground till it reached nearly a semicircle; or perhaps it was hastily
tucked under the arm whilst the sample-bag was pulled forth and a
handful of corn poured into the palm, which, after criticism, was
flung upon the floor, an issue of events perfectly well known to
half-a-dozen acute town-bred fowls which had as usual crept into the
building unobserved, and waited the fulfilment of their anticipations
with a high-stretched neck and oblique eye.

Among these heavy yeomen a feminine figure glided, the single one of
her sex that the room contained.  She was prettily and even daintily
dressed.  She moved between them as a chaise between carts, was heard
after them as a romance after sermons, was felt among them like a
breeze among furnaces.  It had required a little determination--far
more than she had at first imagined--to take up a position here, for
at her first entry the lumbering dialogues had ceased, nearly every
face had been turned towards her, and those that were already turned
rigidly fixed there.

Two or three only of the farmers were personally known to Bathsheba,
and to these she had made her way.  But if she was to be the
practical woman she had intended to show herself, business must
be carried on, introductions or none, and she ultimately acquired
confidence enough to speak and reply boldly to men merely known to
her by hearsay.  Bathsheba too had her sample-bags, and by degrees
adopted the professional pour into the hand--holding up the grains
in her narrow palm for inspection, in perfect Casterbridge manner.

Something in the exact arch of her upper unbroken row of teeth, and
in the keenly pointed corners of her red mouth when, with parted
lips, she somewhat defiantly turned up her face to argue a point with
a tall man, suggested that there was potentiality enough in that
lithe slip of humanity for alarming exploits of sex, and daring
enough to carry them out.  But her eyes had a softness--invariably a
softness--which, had they not been dark, would have seemed mistiness;
as they were, it lowered an expression that might have been piercing
to simple clearness.

Strange to say of a woman in full bloom and vigor, she always allowed
her interlocutors to finish their statements before rejoining with
hers.  In arguing on prices, she held to her own firmly, as was
natural in a dealer, and reduced theirs persistently, as was
inevitable in a woman.  But there was an elasticity in her firmness
which removed it from obstinacy, as there was a _naivete_ in her
cheapening which saved it from meanness.

Those of the farmers with whom she had no dealings (by far the
greater part) were continually asking each other, "Who is she?"
The reply would be--

"Farmer Everdene's niece; took on Weatherbury Upper Farm; turned away
the baily, and swears she'll do everything herself."

The other man would then shake his head.

"Yes, 'tis a pity she's so headstrong," the first would say.  "But we
ought to be proud of her here--she lightens up the old place.  'Tis
such a shapely maid, however, that she'll soon get picked up."

It would be ungallant to suggest that the novelty of her engagement
in such an occupation had almost as much to do with the magnetism
as had the beauty of her face and movements.  However, the interest
was general, and this Saturday's _debut_ in the forum, whatever it
may have been to Bathsheba as the buying and selling farmer, was
unquestionably a triumph to her as the maiden.  Indeed, the sensation
was so pronounced that her instinct on two or three occasions was
merely to walk as a queen among these gods of the fallow, like a
little sister of a little Jove, and to neglect closing prices
altogether.

The numerous evidences of her power to attract were only thrown into
greater relief by a marked exception.  Women seem to have eyes in
their ribbons for such matters as these.  Bathsheba, without looking
within a right angle of him, was conscious of a black sheep among the
flock.

It perplexed her first.  If there had been a respectable minority on
either side, the case would have been most natural.  If nobody had
regarded her, she would have taken the matter indifferently--such
cases had occurred.  If everybody, this man included, she would have
taken it as a matter of course--people had done so before.  But the
smallness of the exception made the mystery.

She soon knew thus much of the recusant's appearance.  He was a
gentlemanly man, with full and distinctly outlined Roman features,
the prominences of which glowed in the sun with a bronze-like
richness of tone.  He was erect in attitude, and quiet in demeanour.
One characteristic pre-eminently marked him--dignity.

Apparently he had some time ago reached that entrance to middle age
at which a man's aspect naturally ceases to alter for the term of
a dozen years or so; and, artificially, a woman's does likewise.
Thirty-five and fifty were his limits of variation--he might have
been either, or anywhere between the two.

It may be said that married men of forty are usually ready and
generous enough to fling passing glances at any specimen of moderate
beauty they may discern by the way.  Probably, as with persons
playing whist for love, the consciousness of a certain immunity under
any circumstances from that worst possible ultimate, the having to
pay, makes them unduly speculative.  Bathsheba was convinced that
this unmoved person was not a married man.

When marketing was over, she rushed off to Liddy, who was waiting
for her beside the yellow gig in which they had driven to town.
The horse was put in, and on they trotted--Bathsheba's sugar, tea,
and drapery parcels being packed behind, and expressing in some
indescribable manner, by their colour, shape, and general lineaments,
that they were that young lady-farmer's property, and the grocer's
and draper's no more.

"I've been through it, Liddy, and it is over.  I shan't mind it
again, for they will all have grown accustomed to seeing me there;
but this morning it was as bad as being married--eyes everywhere!"

"I knowed it would be," Liddy said.  "Men be such a terrible class of
society to look at a body."

"But there was one man who had more sense than to waste his time upon
me."  The information was put in this form that Liddy might not for a
moment suppose her mistress was at all piqued.  "A very good-looking
man," she continued, "upright; about forty, I should think.  Do you
know at all who he could be?"

Liddy couldn't think.

"Can't you guess at all?" said Bathsheba with some disappointment.

"I haven't a notion; besides, 'tis no difference, since he took less
notice of you than any of the rest.  Now, if he'd taken more, it
would have mattered a great deal."

Bathsheba was suffering from the reverse feeling just then, and they
bowled along in silence.  A low carriage, bowling along still more
rapidly behind a horse of unimpeachable breed, overtook and passed
them.

"Why, there he is!" she said.

Liddy looked.  "That!  That's Farmer Boldwood--of course 'tis--the
man you couldn't see the other day when he called."

"Oh, Farmer Boldwood," murmured Bathsheba, and looked at him as he
outstripped them.  The farmer had never turned his head once, but
with eyes fixed on the most advanced point along the road, passed as
unconsciously and abstractedly as if Bathsheba and her charms were
thin air.

"He's an interesting man--don't you think so?" she remarked.

"O yes, very.  Everybody owns it," replied Liddy.

"I wonder why he is so wrapt up and indifferent, and seemingly so far
away from all he sees around him."

"It is said--but not known for certain--that he met with some bitter
disappointment when he was a young man and merry.  A woman jilted
him, they say."

"People always say that--and we know very well women scarcely ever
jilt men; 'tis the men who jilt us.  I expect it is simply his nature
to be so reserved."

"Simply his nature--I expect so, miss--nothing else in the world."

"Still, 'tis more romantic to think he has been served cruelly, poor
thing'!  Perhaps, after all, he has!"

"Depend upon it he has.  Oh yes, miss, he has!  I feel he must have."

"However, we are very apt to think extremes of people.  I shouldn't
wonder after all if it wasn't a little of both--just between the
two--rather cruelly used and rather reserved."

"Oh dear no, miss--I can't think it between the two!"

"That's most likely."

"Well, yes, so it is.  I am convinced it is most likely. You may take
my word, miss, that that's what's the matter with him."

SORTES SANCTORUM--THE VALENTINE

It was Sunday afternoon in the farmhouse, on the thirteenth of
February.  Dinner being over, Bathsheba, for want of a better
companion, had asked Liddy to come and sit with her.  The mouldy pile
was dreary in winter-time before the candles were lighted and the
shutters closed; the atmosphere of the place seemed as old as the
walls; every nook behind the furniture had a temperature of its own,
for the fire was not kindled in this part of the house early in the
day; and Bathsheba's new piano, which was an old one in other annals,
looked particularly sloping and out of level on the warped floor
before night threw a shade over its less prominent angles and hid
the unpleasantness.  Liddy, like a little brook, though shallow, was
always rippling; her presence had not so much weight as to task
thought, and yet enough to exercise it.

On the table lay an old quarto Bible, bound in leather.  Liddy
looking at it said,--

"Did you ever find out, miss, who you are going to marry by means of
the Bible and key?"

"Don't be so foolish, Liddy.  As if such things could be."

"Well, there's a good deal in it, all the same."

"Nonsense, child."

"And it makes your heart beat fearful.  Some believe in it; some
don't; I do."

"Very well, let's try it," said Bathsheba, bounding from her seat
with that total disregard of consistency which can be indulged in
towards a dependent, and entering into the spirit of divination at
once.  "Go and get the front door key."

Liddy fetched it.  "I wish it wasn't Sunday," she said, on returning.
"Perhaps 'tis wrong."

"What's right week days is right Sundays," replied her mistress in a
tone which was a proof in itself.

The book was opened--the leaves, drab with age, being quite worn away
at much-read verses by the forefingers of unpractised readers in
former days, where they were moved along under the line as an aid to
the vision.  The special verse in the Book of Ruth was sought out by
Bathsheba, and the sublime words met her eye.  They slightly thrilled
and abashed her.  It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the
concrete.  Folly in the concrete blushed, persisted in her intention,
and placed the key on the book.  A rusty patch immediately upon the
verse, caused by previous pressure of an iron substance thereon, told
that this was not the first time the old volume had been used for the
purpose.

"Now keep steady, and be silent," said Bathsheba.

The verse was repeated; the book turned round; Bathsheba blushed
guiltily.

"Who did you try?" said Liddy curiously.

"I shall not tell you."

"Did you notice Mr. Boldwood's doings in church this morning, miss?"
Liddy continued, adumbrating by the remark the track her thoughts had
taken.

"No, indeed," said Bathsheba, with serene indifference.

"His pew is exactly opposite yours, miss."

"I know it."

"And you did not see his goings on!"

"Certainly I did not, I tell you."

Liddy assumed a smaller physiognomy, and shut her lips decisively.

This move was unexpected, and proportionately disconcerting.  "What
did he do?" Bathsheba said perforce.

"Didn't turn his head to look at you once all the service."

"Why should he?" again demanded her mistress, wearing a nettled look.
"I didn't ask him to."

"Oh no.  But everybody else was noticing you; and it was odd he
didn't.  There, 'tis like him.  Rich and gentlemanly, what does he
care?"

Bathsheba dropped into a silence intended to express that she had
opinions on the matter too abstruse for Liddy's comprehension, rather
than that she had nothing to say.

"Dear me--I had nearly forgotten the valentine I bought yesterday,"
she exclaimed at length.

"Valentine! who for, miss?" said Liddy.  "Farmer Boldwood?"

It was the single name among all possible wrong ones that just at
this moment seemed to Bathsheba more pertinent than the right.

"Well, no.  It is only for little Teddy Coggan.  I have promised him
something, and this will be a pretty surprise for him.  Liddy, you
may as well bring me my desk and I'll direct it at once."

Bathsheba took from her desk a gorgeously illuminated and embossed
design in post-octavo, which had been bought on the previous
market-day at the chief stationer's in Casterbridge.  In the centre
was a small oval enclosure; this was left blank, that the sender
might insert tender words more appropriate to the special occasion
than any generalities by a printer could possibly be.

"Here's a place for writing," said Bathsheba.  "What shall I put?"

"Something of this sort, I should think," returned Liddy promptly:--

   "The rose is red,
   The violet blue,
   Carnation's sweet,
   And so are you."

"Yes, that shall be it.  It just suits itself to a chubby-faced child
like him," said Bathsheba.  She inserted the words in a small though
legible handwriting; enclosed the sheet in an envelope, and dipped
her pen for the direction.

"What fun it would be to send it to the stupid old Boldwood, and how
he would wonder!" said the irrepressible Liddy, lifting her eyebrows,
and indulging in an awful mirth on the verge of fear as she thought
of the moral and social magnitude of the man contemplated.

Bathsheba paused to regard the idea at full length.  Boldwood's had
begun to be a troublesome image--a species of Daniel in her kingdom
who persisted in kneeling eastward when reason and common sense said
that he might just as well follow suit with the rest, and afford her
the official glance of admiration which cost nothing at all.  She was
far from being seriously concerned about his nonconformity.  Still,
it was faintly depressing that the most dignified and valuable man
in the parish should withhold his eyes, and that a girl like Liddy
should talk about it.  So Liddy's idea was at first rather harassing
than piquant.

"No, I won't do that.  He wouldn't see any humour in it."

"He'd worry to death," said the persistent Liddy.

"Really, I don't care particularly to send it to Teddy," remarked her
mistress.  "He's rather a naughty child sometimes."

"Yes--that he is."

"Let's toss as men do," said Bathsheba, idly.  "Now then, head,
Boldwood; tail, Teddy.  No, we won't toss money on a Sunday, that
would be tempting the devil indeed."

"Toss this hymn-book; there can't be no sinfulness in that, miss."

"Very well.  Open, Boldwood--shut, Teddy.  No; it's more likely to
fall open.  Open, Teddy--shut, Boldwood."

The book went fluttering in the air and came down shut.

Bathsheba, a small yawn upon her mouth, took the pen, and with
off-hand serenity directed the missive to Boldwood.

"Now light a candle, Liddy.  Which seal shall we use? Here's a
unicorn's head--there's nothing in that.  What's this?--two
doves--no.  It ought to be something extraordinary, ought it not,
Liddy? Here's one with a motto--I remember it is some funny one, but
I can't read it. We'll try this, and if it doesn't do we'll have
another."

A large red seal was duly affixed.  Bathsheba looked closely at the
hot wax to discover the words.

"Capital!" she exclaimed, throwing down the letter frolicsomely.
"'Twould upset the solemnity of a parson and clerke too."

Liddy looked at the words of the seal, and read--

   "MARRY ME."

The same evening the letter was sent, and was duly sorted in
Casterbridge post-office that night, to be returned to Weatherbury
again in the morning.

So very idly and unreflectingly was this deed done.  Of love as a
spectacle Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love subjectively
she knew nothing.

Shortly after he proposes, Gabriel learns that Bathsheba has moved away to the town of Weatherbury. One night, Gabriel awakens to the sound of the sheep bells, indicating that the herd is running quickly. He gets up and finds that the 200 sheep who were still pregnant have been driven off the edge of a cliff by his young and overeager sheepdog. This loss is a financial catastrophe for Gabriel, and he has to sell everything he owns in order to pay off his remaining debts. The story resumes in February, in the town of Casterbridge, where a gathering is taking place for men looking for work to meet with prospective employers. Gabriel is there, eager to find work as either a bailiff or shepherd, but no one seems to want to hire him. He learns that another hiring fair is taking place the following day at Shottsford and decides to walk there, a journey which will take him through the town of Weatherbury. Along the way, he becomes tired and climbs into a wagon parked by the road in order to rest, only to awaken and find that the wagon is in motion. After he discreetly slips out of the wagon, Gabriel notices that some crops of straw are on fire at a nearby farm and that the fire is threatening to spread. Gabriel joins in to help the farmworkers control the fire, taking charge of the situation and providing effective leadership. Two women, one of whom owns the farm, observe Gabriel's hard work and send a message to him thanking him. Hoping to take advantage of this gratitude, Gabriel goes to ask if the farmer would like to hire him as a shepherd, only to realize that the owner of the farm is Bathsheba, who has inherited it from her uncle. The other farmworkers encourage her to hire Gabriel, and she agrees. As Gabriel makes his way towards accommodations for the night, he encounters a young woman walking alone. She gives him directions, and then asks that he not tell anyone he has seen her. Concerned, Gabriel gives her a small sum of money and then continues on his way. He arrives at the pub where the other farmworkers have gathered and is greeted warmly since some of the older men used to know his father and grandfather. After Gabriel has left for his room, one of the farmworkers comes hurrying in to break the news that the man working as the bailiff at Bathsheba's farm has been caught stealing and was fired from his job. What's more, Fanny Robbins, a young servant, cannot be found, and given that she has seemed depressed recently, her disappearance is alarming to Bathsheba. Several of the farmworkers go back to the farmhouse to speak with Bathsheba. She instructs them to look for Fanny the next day, including asking the soldiers at Casterbridge, since there are rumors that one of them was wooing Fanny. The next morning, Bathsheba and her servant Liddy are busy with household chores when they are surprised by the arrival of Mr. Boldwood, a prosperous farmer. Bathsheba declines to see him, since she is not dressed appropriately and Boldwood explains to the servant that he has come to ask whether any information had surfaced about Fanny's disappearance. After Boldwood departs, the other female servants explain that he is well-respected but also the subject of speculation since he has never shown any interest in getting married. After she has gotten ready, Bathsheba meets with the farmworkers to distribute their wages. She announces that she is not going to hire a new bailiff and instead plans to manage the farm herself. She also asks whether anyone has learned any news about Fanny and is informed that the regiment of soldiers previously stationed at Casterbridge has moved on to the town of Melchester, and it is assumed that Fanny has gone there as well, following her sweetheart. Bathsheba's hands-on approach is furthered signaled when she goes to the corn market to display the products of her farm, and negotiate prices with potential buyers. At the market, she is the subject of much male attention, but is surprised to notice one handsome man who does not seem intrigued by her at all. After questioning Liddy, she learns that this man is the same Farmer Boldwood who had previously called upon her. On the day before Valentine's, Liddy and Bathsheba are idly passing time and the conversation again turns to Boldwood, who had not taken any notice of Bathsheba during church services. Bathsheba mentions a valentine she is going to send to a young boy who works on the farm, and Liddy playfully suggests sending it to Boldwood instead. Bathsheba is intrigued by the idea, since she is slightly annoyed that Boldwood has shown no interest in her. They use the equivalent of a coin toss to determine the plan, and then send the anonymous valentine to Boldwood. Meanwhile, in Melchester, Fanny throws a stone at the windows of the soldier's barracks to get the attention of her lover, Sergeant Frank Troy. Troy is surprised to see her, but Fanny is anxious to hear details about when their planned marriage will take place. Frank assures her that he does plan to marry her, but that the logistical details will cause a delay. He promises to come and visit Fanny in her new lodgings as soon as possible.

Whereas Gabriel begins the novel at a hopeful moment with bright prospects for the future, his fortune is abruptly reversed with the loss of his flock. The loss is all the more glaring because Gabriel is such a careful and conscientious man; despite all of his efforts, everything can still be swept away. Hardy had a profound respect for nature, and the way in which nature can be both bountiful and destructive. At a moment literally ripe with promise, when the ewes are pregnant and therefore on the verge of doubling Gabriel's flock, the scene becomes one of death and grotesque destruction rather than birth and regeneration. Perhaps because Gabriel is a man attuned to the cycles of nature and the inevitable balance between growth and loss, or perhaps because he has previous experience as a humble laborer, he accepts his loss stoically. When he is at the hiring fair, Gabriel is open to accepting work as either a bailiff or a shepherd, even though the two roles were significantly different in social status and pay. The difficulty Gabriel finds in locating work reflects one of the consequences of his attempt at social mobility. He seems underqualified to work as a bailiff on one hand, but now overqualified to go back to being a shepherd since he has experience of working his own farm. However, Gabriel's innate integrity and desire to do the right thing helps to set him on the path to restoring his career. He has no obligation to help with putting out the fire, but he naturally shows leadership and good judgement, and is rewarded by quickly earning the trust of the other workers. The fact that the other men take warmly to Gabriel because of the way he behaves during the fire, and because he has family ties to the area, shows how reputations were established in a pre-industrial era. While Gabriel is quickly accepted into the Everdene farm and the surrounding community, Bathsheba faces more serious challenges. It was somewhat unconventional for a woman to own a substantial property at this time, and still more unusual for her to actively manage it herself. A farm like Bathsheba's involved a substantial and time-consuming amount of effort to be run successfully, and, as quickly becomes evident, requires courage, keen intelligence, and business savvy. Bathsheba shows the same independent spirit that distinguished her when she was helping her aunt, even though the public attention she attracts clearly makes her somewhat uncomfortable. While Bathsheba's new authority and status gives her new freedoms, it also seems to make her reckless. She doesn't have any companions or advisors, and seems to depend on a friendship with Liddy to keep her from boredom. Bathsheba's decision to send the valentine to Boldwood is related to the new autonomy and power she wields once taking on the traditionally masculine role of farmer and manager. As Karin Koehler writes, "She feels compelled to challenge Boldwood's emphatically masculine sense of self, and, prompted by Liddy's suggestion, intuits that her aim will be accomplished most effectively by a deliberate, aggressive subversion of sexual and gender norms" . The two impulsive young women egg each other on, leading to the decision to send the valentine to Boldwood. While the prank would be somewhat expected from a maidservant like Liddy, as a landowner and business person, Bathsheba should act with more discretion and foresight. Particularly as a woman, her good reputation is paramount, and she risks jeopardizing it for a childish, lighthearted prank. Although on a very different scale, Bathsheba's impulsive action is paralleled by the risky choices Fanny makes as she follows her heart. As a working-class young woman who doesn't seem to have any family members, she is in a perilous position and can easily be manipulated by an unscrupulous man. Soldiers like Troy had a reputation for womanizing, facilitated by the fact that when the troops moved on, it was easy to discard any women they had pursued affairs with. Troy's vague and ambiguous statements about plans for his marriage hint that he may not in fact be committed to legitimizing his relationship with Fanny.