The Woodlanders

with folds, as in Flemish “Last Suppers.” Creedle and the boy fetched and carried with amazing alacrity, the latter, to

all these knowing things, Mr. Creedl

orked hard in helping me to bring things to such perfection today. ‘Giles,’ says I, though he’s maister. Not that I should cal

reach a long way back in

esterday. Ah, many’s the patriarch I’ve seed come and go in this parish! There, he’s calling for more pla

eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually snuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mere glimmers drowned in their own grease. Creedle now appeared with a speciall

ick, involuntary nod and blink, an

o that for, Creedle?” said Gi

maister,” mildly expostulated Creedle,

. He went over to Grace, and hope

nly a sprinkle on my

t well,” gallantly

lbury b

t bear these little mishaps.” But there could be discerned in

s Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty. In his mind’s eye, before

mpany on this account were obliged to put up with old packs for their round game, that had been lying by in a drawer ever since the time that Gliles’s grandmother was alive. Each card had a great stain in the middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp and excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens wo

hold’ a wa’

se marks’ are

table; then an exclamation, an argument, a dealing of

weight in his words, and by praising the party in a patronizing tone, when

ndoned cards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury by the fire, it was the timber-merchant who stood with his back to the mantle in a proprietary attitude, from which post of vantage he critically regard

d not join in the movement. Then Giles felt that all was over. As for her, she was thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measure that she had been accustomed to trea

the abandoned cards. Grace assented to the proposal, and the woma

een told by men of science — what do you call ’em? Phrenologists. You can’t teach her anything new. She’

-players still pursuing their game doggedly in the corner, where they had completely covered Giles’s ma

y, as they struck down the lane under boughs which f

ch a tone as to show that he stood no lower, if

the doctor’s house could be seen, they observed a light

ot abed yet,” sa

no doubt,” sa

about here by day, he could at least afford to go to bed

after the scenes of the evening. “It is natural enough,” he replied. “What can a ma

life for a girl like Grace, after what she’s been accustomed to. I didn’t foresee that in sending her to boarding-school and letting her travel, and w

their play, could be heard coming along in the rear, vociferously singing a son

may g

ay go

to the d

sort of society we’ve been asked to meet,” he said. “For us old fo

room surveying the general displacement of furniture with no ecstatic feeling; rather the reverse, indeed. At last he entered th

ust be tired. You’d

ister, I would say. But ’tis well to t

broad the wood-embers on the broad hearth, till it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with

ise to; and the briskest Horner-and-Cleeves cider ever wrung down, leaving out the spice and sperrits I put into it, while that egg-flip would ha’ passed through muslin, so little curdled ’twere. ’Twas good enough t

o, that it was

t what that snail might as well have c

t sn

dge of her plate when I brought it out; and so it

ce did a sna

ore than the dead; but

laces, that was where

ect him to be? I don’t care who the man is, snails and caterpillars alw

se?” said Giles, with a s

there; I don’t mind ’em myself — them small ones, for they were born on cabbage, and they’ve lived on cabbage, so they must be made of cabbage. But she, the close-mouthed li

bers, and lining his forehead more than ever. “Do you know, Robert,” he said, “that she’s been acc

They shouldn’t have schooled her so monstrous high, or else bachelor men

said Winterborne, ris

ype="