 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 vegetable world in and
about Weatherbury at this teeming time; and of the animal, the metamorphosed
figures of Mr. Jan Coggan, the master-shearer; the second and third shearers,
who travelled in the exercise of their calling, and do not require definition by
name; Henery Fray the fourth shearer, Susan Tall's husband the fifth, Joseph
Poorgrass the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer, and Gabriel Oak as
general supervisor. None of these were clothed to any extent worth mentioning,
each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment the decent mean between a
high and low caste Hindoo. An angularity of lineament, and a fixity of facial
machinery in general, proclaimed that serious work was the order of the day.
    They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the Shearing-barn,
which on ground-plan resembled a church with transepts. It not only emulated the
form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity.
Whether the barn had ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings nobody
seemed to be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained. The vast porches at
the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest with corn in the
sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches of stone, broadly and boldly cut,
whose very simplicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent in erections
where more ornament has been attempted. The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced
and tied in by huge collars, curves, and diagonals, was far nobler in design,
because more wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our modern
churches. Along each side wall was a range of striding buttresses, throwing deep
shadows on the spaces between them, which were perforated by lancet openings,
combining in their proportions the precise requirements both of beauty and
ventilation.
    One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the
church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which had
dictated its original erection was the same with that to
