Far from the Madding Crowd quotes

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character.

“But she has her faults,” said Gabriel.

“And the greatest of them is⁠—well, what it is always.”

“Beating people down? ay, ’tis so.”

The young woman, whose eyelids were apparently inclined to fall together on the smallest provocation of silence, yawned without parting her lips to any inconvenient extent, whereupon Gabriel caught the infection and slightly yawned in sympathy.

“I wish we were rich enough to pay a man to do these things,” she said.

“As we are not, we must do them ourselves,” said the other; “for you must help me if you stay.”

Oak, upon hearing these remarks, became more curious to observe her features, but this prospect being denied him by the hooding effect of the cloak, and by his aerial position, he felt himself drawing upon his fancy for their details.

In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

Had Gabriel been able from the first to get a distinct view of her countenance, his estimate of it as very handsome or slightly so would have been as his soul required a divinity at the moment or was ready supplied with one.

The sluggish day began to break.

Even its position terrestrially is one of the elements of a new interest, and for no particular reason save that the incident of the night had occurred there Oak went again into the plantation.

This well-favoured and comely girl soon made appreciable inroads upon the emotional constitution of young Farmer Oak.

Love, being an extremely exacting usurer

(a sense of exorbitant profit, spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially, is at the bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak’s feelings were as sensitive as the money-market …

He liked saying “Bathsheba” as a private enjoyment instead of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly small.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was hardly ill-mannered at all.

“I don’t love you,” she said.

“But I love you—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.”

She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was hardly ill-mannered at all. “I don’t love you,” she said.

“But I love you⁠—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.”

“Oh Mr. Oak—that’s very fine! You’d get to despise me.”

“Never,” said Mr. Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms.

“I shall do one thing in this life⁠—one thing certain⁠—that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”

His voice had a genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.

“That’s the very thing I had been thinking myself!” he naively said.

Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of honesty.

Bathsheba was decidedly disconcerted.

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 shortcut that way, but it has been known to fail.

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.

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.

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.

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—

… 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.

“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.

“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!

“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?”

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.”

“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.”

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.

“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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

… the northward, and murky to the east, where, over the snowy down or ewe-lease on Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently resting upon the ridge, the only half of the sun yet visible burnt rayless, like a red and flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone.

The whole effect resembled a sunset as childhood resembles age.

In other directions, the fields and sky were so much of one colour by the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts the horizon occurred;

“No, no; I don’t agree with’ee there,” said Mark Clark.

“God’s a perfect gentleman in that respect.”

“Good works good pay, so to speak it,” attested Joseph Poorgrass.

“And long horse-hair settles for the drunk, with horse-hair pillows at each end,” said Mr. Clark.

“Likewise looking-glasses for the pretty, and lying books for the wicked.”

A firm loud tread was now heard stamping outside; the door was opened about six inches, and somebody on the other side exclaimed—

“Well, somebody has—and look here, neighbours,”

Gabriel, though one of the quietest and most gentle men on earth, rose to the occasion, with martial promptness and vigour.

“That’s my fist.”

His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once. If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him; a feeling not mastering him was entirely latent. Stagnant or rapid, it was never slow.

He was always hit mortally, or he was missed.

He had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for good or for evil. Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the details, he was serious throughout all.

She resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady flow of this man’s life.

But a resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

She trembled, turned, and said “Good morning.” His tone was so utterly removed from all she had expected as a beginning. It was lowness and quiet accentuated: an emphasis of deep meanings, their form, at the same time, being scarcely expressed.

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.

In the same way, to say a little is often to tell more than to say a great deal. Boldwood told everything in that word.

Yet Farmer Boldwood, whether by nature kind or the reverse to kind, did not exercise kindness, here.

The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.

Bathsheba, not being the least in love with him, was eventually able to look calmly at his offer.

Still the reluctance remained. She said in the same breath that it would be ungenerous not to marry Boldwood, and that she couldn’t do it to save her life.

Bathsheba’s was an impulsive nature under a deliberative aspect.

An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit, she often performed actions of the greatest temerity with a manner of extreme discretion. Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions;

Bathsheba’s was an impulsive nature under a deliberative aspect. An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit, she often performed actions of the greatest temerity with a manner of extreme discretion.

Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts.

Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds.

In an instant Bathsheba’s face coloured with the angry crimson of a Danby sunset. But she forbore to utter this feeling, and the reticence of her tongue only made the loquacity of her face the more noticeable.

The next thing Gabriel did was to make a mistake.

“Perhaps you don’t like the rudeness of my reprimanding you, for I know it is rudeness; but I thought it would do good.”

“Oh, what shall I do—what shall I do!” she again exclaimed, wringing her hands. “I won’t send for him. No, I won’t!”

The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself.

It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no enunciation to prove it so. The “No, I won’t” of Bathsheba meant virtually, “I think I must.”

The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself. It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no enunciation to prove it so.

The “No, I won’t” of Bathsheba meant virtually, “I think I must.”

She followed her assistants through the gate, and lifted her hand to one of them. Laban answered to her signal.

The case, however, was a promising one. Gabriel was not angry: he was simply neutral, although her first command had been so haughty.

Such imperiousness would have damned a little less beauty; and on the other hand, such beauty would have redeemed a little less imperiousness.

She went out when the horse was heard, and looked up. A mounted figure passed between her and the sky, and drew on towards the field of sheep, the rider turning his face in receding. Gabriel looked at her.

It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice.

God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town.

Flossy catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops’ croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint—like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite—snow-white ladies’-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter’s night-shade, and the black-petaled doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of the …

This picture of today in its frame of four hundred years ago did not produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which is implied by the contrast of date. In comparison with cities, Weatherbury was immutable.

The citizen’s Then is the rustic’s Now.

In London, twenty or thirty-years ago are old times; in Paris ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a mark on its face or tone.

So the chatter was all on her side.

There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba’s; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel’s.

Full of this dim and temperate bliss, he went on to fling the ewe over upon her other side, covering her head with his knee, gradually running the shears line after line round her dewlap;

but this tender devotion was to a great extent unknown to his mistress, and as much as was known was somewhat thanklessly received.

Women are never tired of bewailing man’s fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy.

As watching is best done invisibly, she usually carried a dark lantern in her hand, and every now and then turned on the light to examine nooks and corners with the coolness of a metropolitan policeman.

“And was ever anything so meanly done as what I did—to skulk away like that from a man who was only civil and kind!” Clearly she did not think his barefaced praise of her person an insult now.

It was a fatal omission of Boldwood’s that he had never once told her she was beautiful.

that projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for circumspection, was foreign to Troy.

With him the past was yesterday; the future, tomorrow; never, the day after.

On this account he might, in certain lights, have been regarded as one of the most fortunate of his order.

It is not a denial of anything to have been always without it, and what Troy had never enjoyed he did not miss; but, being fully conscious that what sober people missed he enjoyed, his capacity, though really less, seemed greater than theirs.

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan

—a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society; and the possibility of the favour gained being transitory had reference only to the future.

“And

I would rather have curses from you than kisses from any other woman; so I’ll stay here.

”

“I won’t speak of morals or religion—my own or anybody else’s.

Though perhaps I should have been a very good Christian if you pretty women hadn’t made me an idolater.

”

“But why is it so?—Of course I ask for mere pastime.”

“Because you are so distracting⁠—and I am so distracted.”

“Why, you only saw me the other night!”

“That makes no difference.

The lightning works instantaneously. I loved you then, at once⁠—as I do now.

”

It was almost foreign to her intrinsic nature. Introduced as lymph on the dart of Eros, it eventually permeated and coloured her whole constitution.

Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage.

Perhaps in no minor point does woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be false—except, indeed, in that of being utterly sceptical on strictures that she knows to be true.

Introduced as lymph on the dart of Eros, it eventually permeated and coloured her whole constitution. Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage.

Perhaps in no minor point does woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be false

—except, indeed, in that of being utterly sceptical on strictures that she knows to be true.

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance.

When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition.

Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

Bathsheba was not conscious of guile in this matter. Though in one sense a woman of the world, it was, after all, that world of daylight coteries and green carpets wherein cattle form the passing crowd and winds the busy hum;

“

His being higher in learning and birth than the ruck o’ soldiers is anything but a proof of his worth. It show’s his course to be down’ard.

”

“Yes; you must be a blind thing, Liddy!” she said, in reckless abandonment and grief. “

Oh, I love him to very distraction and misery and agony!

Don’t be frightened at me, though perhaps I am enough to frighten any innocent woman. Come closer—closer.” She put her arms round Liddy’s neck. “I must let it out to somebody; it is wearing me away!

“He is not bad at all … My poor life and heart, how weak I am!” she moaned, in a relaxed, desultory way, heedless of Liddy’s presence. “Oh, how I wish I had never seen him!

Loving is misery for women always.

I shall never forgive God for making me a woman, and dearly am I beginning to pay for the honour of owning a pretty face.” She freshened and turned to Liddy suddenly.

“

He is a sort of steady man in a wild way, you know. That’s better than to be as some are, wild in a steady way.

I am afraid that’s how I am. And promise me to keep my secret—do, Liddy! And do not let them know that I have been crying about him, because it will be dreadful for me, and no good to him, poor thing!”

“

Oh no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that ’tis getting on that way sometimes.

Ah! miss,” she said, after having drawn her breath very sadly in and sent it very sadly out, “I wish I had half your failing that way. ’Tis a great protection to a poor maid in these illegit’mate days!”

“Well, never mind arguing—never mind. One thing is sure: you were all but mine, and now you are not nearly mine. Everything is changed, and that by you alone, remember.

You were nothing to me once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is from the first!

Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!”

“Keep the gate close!” shouted Gabriel. “He has stolen the horse!”

Gabriel looked at the driver of the gig, and saw a woman⁠—Bathsheba, his mistress.

On hearing his voice she had turned her face away from the light. Coggan had, however, caught sight of her in the meanwhile.

Another peal of laughter. Troy then closed the door, and locked himself in.

Throughout the whole of that night Boldwood’s dark form might have been seen walking about the hills and downs of Weatherbury like an unhappy Shade in the Mournful Fields by Acheron.

… the square figure sitting erect upon the horse, the head turned to neither side, the elbows steady by the hips, the brim of the hat level and undisturbed in its onward glide, until the keen edges of Boldwood’s shape sank by degrees over the hill.

To one who knew the man and his story there was something more striking in this immobility than in a collapse.

The clash of discord between mood and matter here was forced painfully home to the heart; and, as in laughter there are more dreadful phases than in tears, so was there in the steadiness of this agonized man an expression deeper than a cry.

So the dance began.

As to the merits of “The Soldier’s Joy,” there cannot be, and never were, two opinions.

It has been observed in the musical circles of Weatherbury and its vicinity that this melody, at the end of three-quarters of an hour of thunderous footing, still possesses more stimulative properties for the heel and toe than the majority of other dances at their …

Oak’s eyes followed the serpentine sheen to the other side, where it led up to a huge brown garden-slug, which had come indoors tonight for reasons of its own.

It was Nature’s second way of hinting to him that he was to prepare for foul weather.

Oak sat down meditating for nearly an hour. During this time two black spiders, of the kind common in thatched houses, promenaded the ceiling, ultimately dropping to the floor.

Such was the argument that Oak set outwardly before him.

But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines.

It is possible that there was this golden legend under the utilitarian one: “I will help to my last effort the woman I have loved so dearly.”

Then came the peal.

It hardly was credible that such a heavenly light could be the parent of such a diabolical sound.

“How terrible!” she exclaimed, and clutched him by the sleeve. Gabriel turned, and steadied her on her aerial perch by holding her arm.

“Yes, if it hadn’t been for that wretched rain I should have cleared two hundred as easy as looking, my love,” he was saying. “Don’t you see, it altered all the chances?

To speak like a book I once read, wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country’s history; now, isn’t that true?

”

She had passed the last milestone by a good long distance, and began to look wistfully towards the bank as if calculating upon another milestone soon. The crutches, though so very useful, had their limits of power.

Mechanism only transfers labour, being powerless to supersede it, and the original amount of exertion was not cleared away; it was thrown into the body and arms.

She was exhausted, and each swing forward became fainter. At last she swayed sideways, and fell.

but extremity of feeling lessens the individuality of the weak, as it increases that of the strong. She said again in the same tone, “I’ll believe that the end lies five posts forward, and no further, and so get strength to pass them.”

This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.

She passed five posts and held on to the fifth.

Being thus assignable to no breed, he was the ideal embodiment of canine greatness—a generalization from what was common to all. Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form.

Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power, and even the suffering woman threw her idea into figure.

In her reclining position she looked up to him just as in earlier times she had, when standing, looked up to a man.

“That my romance has come to an end.”

“All romances end at marriage.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. You grieve me to my soul by being smart at my expense.”

… sea, and by the time that horse, man, and corpse entered Yalbury Great Wood, these silent workings of an invisible hand had reached them, and they were completely enveloped, this being the first arrival of the autumn fogs, and the first fog of the series.

The air was as an eye suddenly struck blind.

The wagon and its load rolled no longer on the horizontal division between clearness and opacity, but were imbedded in an elastic body of a monotonous pallor throughout.

At that moment hasty steps were heard in the entry, and the door opened to admit the figure of Gabriel Oak, followed by the maid of the inn bearing a candle.

He stared sternly at the one lengthy and two round faces of the sitters, which confronted him with the expressions of a fiddle and a couple of warming-pans.

Joseph Poorgrass blinked, and shrank several inches into the background.

“

I feel too good for England: I ought to have lived in Genesis by rights, like the other men of sacrifice, and then I shouldn’t have b-b-been called a d-d-drunkard in such a way!

”

‘Grace that, grace that, grace that, grace that,’—that I know.” Other words followed to the same effect. The boy was of the dunce class apparently; the book was a psalter, and this was his way of learning the collect.

In the worst attacks of trouble there appears to be always a superficial film of consciousness which is left disengaged and open to the notice of trifles

, and Bathsheba was faintly amused at the boy’s method, till he too passed on.

Reaching the town, Troy descended into a side street and entered a pair of gates surmounted by a board bearing the words, “Harrison, stone and marble mason.”

Within were lying about stones of all sizes and designs, inscribed as being sacred to the memory of unnamed persons who had not yet died.

Troy was so unlike himself now in look, word, and deed, that the want of likeness was perceptible even to his own consciousness. His method of engaging himself in this business of purchasing a tomb was that of an absolutely unpractised man.

A beholder was convinced that nothing on earth could be more hideous than those he saw on the north side until he went round to the south. Of the two on this latter face, only that at the south-eastern corner concerns the story.

It was too human to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a man, too animal to be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to be called a griffin.

This horrible stone entity was fashioned as if covered with a wrinkled hide;

The sight, coming as it did, superimposed upon the other dark scenery of the previous days, formed a sort of climax to the whole panorama, and it was more than he could endure.

Sanguine by nature, Troy had a power of eluding grief by simply adjourning it.

He could put off the consideration of any particular spectre till the matter had become old and softened by time.

This very morning the illusion completed its disappearance, and, as it were, all of a sudden, Troy hated himself. The suddenness was probably more apparent than real.

A coral reef which just comes short of the ocean surface is no more to the horizon than if it had never been begun, and the mere finishing stroke is what often appears to create an event which has long been potentially an accomplished thing.

He stood and meditated—a miserable man. Whither should he go? “He that is accursed, let him be accursed still,” was the pitiless anathema written in this spoliated effort of his new-born solicitousness.

He stood and meditated—a miserable man. Whither should he go? “He that is accursed, let him be accursed still,” was the pitiless anathema written in this spoliated effort of his new-born solicitousness.

A man who has spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing his course.

Troy had, since yesterday, faintly reversed his; but the merest opposition had disheartened him. To turn about would have been hard enough under the greatest providential encouragement;

He slowly withdrew from the grave. He did not attempt to fill up the hole, replace the flowers, or do anything at all.

He simply threw up his cards and forswore his game for that time and always.

Going out of the churchyard silently and unobserved—none of the villagers having yet risen—he passed down some fields at the back, and emerged just as secretly upon the high road. Shortly afterwards he had gone from the village.

She hated questioning Liddy about her husband’s movements, and indeed had hitherto sedulously avoided doing so; but now all the house knew that there had been some dreadful disagreement between them, and it was futile to attempt disguise.

Bathsheba had reached a stage at which people cease to have any appreciative regard for public opinion.

“What makes you think he has gone there?” she said.

He went away vexed with himself, and ashamed of having for this one time in his life done anything which could be called underhand.

Poor Boldwood had no more skill in finesse than a battering-ram, and he was uneasy with a sense of having made himself to appear stupid and, what was worse, mean.

But he had, after all, lighted upon one fact by way of repayment. It was a singularly fresh and fascinating fact, and though not without its sadness it was pertinent and real.

This pleasant notion was now continually in his mind. Six years were a long time, but how much shorter than never, the idea he had for so long been obliged to endure!

Jacob had served twice seven years for Rachel: what were six for such a woman as this?

He tried to like the notion of waiting for her better than that of winning her at once.

This pleasant notion was now continually in his mind.

Six years were a long time, but how much shorter than never, the idea he had for so long been obliged to endure!

Jacob had served twice seven years for Rachel: what were six for such a woman as this? He tried to like the notion of waiting for her better than that of winning her at once.

For many a year in Weatherbury, Joseph told, with the air of a man who had had experiences in his time, that he touched with his own hand the hoof of Bess as she lay upon the board upon his shoulder.

If, as some thinkers hold, immortality consists in being enshrined in others’ memories, then did Black Bess become immortal that day if she never had done so before.

Meanwhile Troy had added a few touches to his ordinary make-up for the character, the more effectually to disguise himself, and though he had felt faint qualms on first entering, the metamorphosis effected by judiciously “lining” his face with a wire rendered him safe from …

“Do you remember when I carried you fainting in my arms into the King’s Arms, in Casterbridge?

Every dog has his day: that was mine.

”

“I don’t know—at least, I cannot tell you.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

My treatment of you was thoughtless, inexcusable, wicked! I shall eternally regret it.

“Christmas!” He said nothing further till he added: “Well, I’ll say no more to you about it till that time.”

Bathsheba was in a very peculiar state of mind, which showed how entirely the soul is the slave of the body, the ethereal spirit dependent for its quality upon the tangible flesh and blood.

It is hardly too much to say that she felt coerced by a force stronger than her own will, not only into the act of promising upon this singularly remote and vague matter, but into the emotion of fancying that she ought to promise.

Christmas-eve came, and a party that Boldwood was to give in the evening was the great subject of talk in Weatherbury. It was not that the rarity of Christmas parties in the parish made this one a wonder, but that Boldwood should be the giver.

The announcement had had an abnormal and incongruous sound, as if one should hear of croquet-playing in a cathedral aisle, or that some much-respected judge was going upon the stage.

That the party was intended to be a truly jovial one there was no room for doubt. A large bough of mistletoe had been brought from the woods that day, and suspended in the hall of the bachelor’s home.

You see all these things will come to light if you go back, and they won’t sound well at all. Faith, if I was you I’d even bide as you be—a single man of the name of Francis.

A good wife is good, but the best wife is not so good as no wife at all.

Now that’s my outspoke mind, and I’ve been called a long-headed feller here and there.”

Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct, and Bathsheba was astonishing all around her now, for her philosophy was her conduct, and she seldom thought practicable what she did not practise.

She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

Troy recumbent in his wife’s lap formed now the sole spectacle in the middle of the spacious room.

The household convulsion had made her herself again. The temporary coma had ceased, and activity had come with the necessity for it.

Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct, and Bathsheba was astonishing all around her now, for her philosophy was her conduct, and she seldom thought practicable what she did not practise.

She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.