Far from the Madding Crowd

and daughters' sakes we should feel real thanks giving."

"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!

"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 severe 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."