1. DECEMBER AND JANUARY, 1835-36 In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which renders worthy of record some experiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencing the issue was a Christmas visit. In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect who had just begun the practice of his profession in the midland town of... more...

PREFACE This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar officials in Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters, and other places, is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of fifty or sixty years ago. One is... more...

AN UPBRAIDING Now I am dead you sing to me   The songs we used to know,But while I lived you had no wish   Or care for doing so. Now I am dead you come to me   In the moonlight, comfortless;Ah, what would I have given alive   To win such tenderness! When you are dead, and stand to me   Not differenced, as now,But like again, will you be cold   As when we lived, or how? "These... more...

PREFACE. This slightly-built romance was the outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater to them as men. But, on the publication of the book people seemed to be less struck with these high aims of the author... more...

1. I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steep road which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the Street of Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singular peninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is connected with the... more...

THE SON’S VETO CHAPTER I To the eyes of a man viewing it from behind, the nut-brown hair was a wonder and a mystery.  Under the black beaver hat, surmounted by its tuft of black feathers, the long locks, braided and twisted and coiled like the rushes of a basket, composed a rare, if somewhat barbaric, example of ingenious art.  One could understand such weavings and coilings being wrought to last... more...

I.  WHAT WAS SEEN FROM THE WINDOW OVERLOOKING THE DOWN In the days of high-waisted and muslin-gowned women, when the vast amount of soldiering going on in the country was a cause of much trembling to the sex, there lived in a village near the Wessex coast two ladies of good report, though unfortunately of limited means.  The elder was a Mrs. Martha Garland, a landscape-painter’s widow, and the... more...

Part First "Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women… O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?"—Esdras.   I  The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart... more...

AN IMAGINATIVE WOMAN When William Marchmill had finished his inquiries for lodgings at a well-known watering-place in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel to find his wife.  She, with the children, had rambled along the shore, and Marchmill followed in the direction indicated by the military-looking hall-porter ‘By Jove, how far you’ve gone!  I am quite out of breath,’ Marchmill said, rather... more...

Phase the First:   The Maiden, I-XI I On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation... more...