 outside these volumes in which their lives and
conversations are detailed.
    Moreover, the village called Weatherbury, wherein the scenes of the present
story of the series are for the most part laid, would perhaps be hardly
discernible by the explorer, without help, in any existing place nowadays;
though at the time, comparatively recent, at which the tale was written, a
sufficient reality to meet the descriptions, both of backgrounds and personages,
might have been traced easily enough. The church remains, by great good fortune,
unrestored and intact1 and a few of the old houses; but the ancient malt-house,
which was formerly so characteristic of the parish, has been pulled down these
twenty years; also most of the thatched and dormered cottages that were once
lifeholds. The heroine's fine old Jacobean house would be found in the story to
have taken a witch's ride of a mile or more from its actual position; though
with that difference its features are described as they still show themselves to
the sun and moonlight. The game of prisoner's-base, which not so long ago seemed
to enjoy a perennial vitality in front of the worn-out stocks, may, so far as I
can say, be entirely unknown to the rising generation of schoolboys there. The
practice of divination by Bible and key, the regarding of valentines as things
of serious import, the shearing-supper, the long smock-frocks, and the
harvest-home, have, too, nearly disappeared in the wake of the old houses; and
with them has gone, it is said, much of that love of fuddling to which the
village at one time was notoriously prone. The change at the root of this has
been the recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on
the local traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory
labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history, more fatal
than any other thing to the preservation of legend, folk-lore, close
inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities. For these the
indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to the soil of one
particular spot by generation after generation.
                                                                            T.H.
    1895 - 1902.
 

                                   Chapter I

                    Description of Farmer Oak - An Incident

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
