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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Hardy Country, by Charles G. Harper
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Hardy Country
+       Literary landmarks of the Wessex Novels
+
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+
+
+Release Date: September 7, 2014  [eBook #46801]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HARDY COUNTRY***
+
+
+This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
+
+      [Picture: Weymouth: St. Mary Street and statue of George III.]
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   THE
+                              HARDY COUNTRY
+
+
+                          LITERARY LANDMARKS OF
+                        THE      WESSEX     NOVELS
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    BY
+                            CHARLES G. HARPER
+                 AUTHOR OF “THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY,” ETC.
+
+    “Here shepherds pipe their rustic song,
+    Their flocks and rural nymphs among.”
+
+                           [Picture: Medallion]
+
+                       _ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                          ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
+
+                                   1904
+
+
+
+
+_PREFACE_
+
+
+_Dorsetshire_, _the centre of the_ “_Hardy Country_,” _the home of the
+Wessex Novels_, _is a land literally flowing with milk and honey_: _a
+land of great dairies_, _of flowers and bees_, _of rural industries_,
+_where rustic ways and speech and habits of thought live long_, _and the
+kindlier virtues are not forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in
+towns_: _a land desirable for its own sweet self_, _where you may see the
+beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey of which I
+have spoken_, _and where that flow of milk is no figure of speech_.  _You
+may indeed hear the swish of it in the milking pails at almost every turn
+of every lane_.
+
+_Thatch survives in every village_, _as nowhere else_, _and here quaint
+towns maintain their quaintness at all odds_, _while elsewhere foolish
+folk seek to be—as they phrase it_—“_up to date_.”  _It is good_, _you
+think_, _who explore these parts_, _to be out of date and reckless of all
+the tiresome worries of modernity_.
+
+_Spring is good in Dorset_, _summer better_, _autumn—when the kindly
+fruits of the earth are ingathered and __the smell of pomace is sweet in
+the mellow air—best_.  _Winter_?  _Well_, _frankly_, _I don’t know_.
+
+_To all these natural advantages has been added in our generation the
+romantic interest of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels of rural life and
+character_, _in which real places are introduced with a lavish hand_.
+_The identity of those places is easily resolved_; _and_, _that feat
+performed_, _there is that compelling force in his genius which
+inevitably_, _sooner or later_, _magnetically draws those who have read_,
+_to see for themselves what manner of places and what folk they must be
+in real life_, _from whose characteristics such poignant tragedy_, _such
+suave and admirable comedy_, _have been evolved_.  _I have many a time
+explored Egdon_, _and observed the justness of the novelist’s description
+of that sullen waste_: _have traversed Blackmoor Vale_, _where_ “_the
+fields are never brown and the springs never dry_,” _but where the
+roads—it is a cyclist’s criticism—are always shockingly bad_: _in fine_,
+_have visited every literary landmark of the Wessex Novels_.  _If I have
+not found the rustics so sprack-witted as they are in_ THE RETURN OF THE
+NATIVE _and other stories—why_, _I never expected so to find them_, _for
+I did not imagine the novelist to be a reporter_.  _But—this is in
+testimony to the essential likeness to life of his women—I know_
+“_Bathsheba_”; _only she is not a farmer_, _nor in_ “_Do’set_,” _and I
+have met_ “_Viviette_” _and_ “_Fancy_.”  _They were called by other
+names_, _’tis true_; _but they were_, _and are_, _those distracting
+characters come to life_.
+
+_A word in conclusion_.  _No attempt has here been made to solemnly_
+“_expound_” _the novelist_.  _He_, _I take it_, _expounds himself_.  _Nor
+has it been thought necessary to exclude places simply for the reason
+that they by some chance do not find mention in the novels_.  _These
+pages are_, _in short_, _just an attempt to record impressions received
+of a peculiarly beautiful and stimulating literary country_, _and seek
+merely to reflect some of the joy of the explorer and the enthusiasm of
+an ardent admirer of the novelist_, _who here has given tongues to trees
+and a voice to every wind_.
+
+                                                        CHARLES G. HARPER.
+
+PETERSHAM, SURREY,
+      _July_ 1904.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAP.                                                             PAGE
+         I.  PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED;               1
+             FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD
+        II.  WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX               9
+       III.  WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL                  16
+        IV.  STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE                26
+         V.  THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD             35
+        VI.  THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER            47
+       VII.  DORCHESTER                                             62
+      VIII.  DORCHESTER (_continued_)                               74
+        IX.  SWANAGE                                                84
+         X.  SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE                                92
+        XI.  CORFE CASTLE                                          105
+       XII.  WAREHAM                                               114
+      XIII.  WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS                        122
+       XIV.  BERE REGIS                                            133
+        XV.  THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY                        148
+       XVI.  DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND             168
+             YEOVIL
+      XVII.  SHERBORNE                                             178
+     XVIII.  SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH                 191
+       XIX.  SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH                 205
+             (_continued_)
+        XX.  WEYMOUTH                                              214
+       XXI.  THE ISLE OF PORTLAND                                  222
+      XXII.  WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER                   232
+     XXIII.  WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE                             246
+      XXIV.  BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE                                  257
+       XXV.  WIMBORNE MINSTER                                      270
+      XXVI.  WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY                       277
+     XXVII.  WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY (_continued_)         288
+    XXVIII.  WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH           297
+      XXIX.  OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW                    302
+             INDEX                                                 313
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+Weymouth: St. Mary Street and Statue of George III.     _Frontispiece_
+Fawley Magna                                                         3
+High Street, Oxford, _Facing_                                        4
+High Street, Winchester                                             11
+Winchester Cathedral, _Facing_                                      14
+Weyhill Fair                                                        24
+Salisbury Cathedral                                                 30
+Stonehenge                                                          32
+Pentridge                                                           36
+Eastbury                                                            41
+Blandford Forum                                                     45
+The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew                            49
+Weatherbury Castle                                                  50
+The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle                                     51
+Piddletown                                                          55
+A Quaint Corner in Piddletown                                       57
+Lower Walterstone Farm; Original of “Bathsheba’s                    59
+Farm” in _Far from the Madding Crowd_
+Ten Hatches, Dorchester                                             69
+Dorchester Gaol                                                     75
+The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester                                   77
+Colyton House, Dorchester                                           79
+The Old Church, Swanage                                             89
+Encombe                                                             95
+Corfe Castle                                                        99
+Corfe Castle, _Facing_                                             106
+Approach to Wareham: The Walls of Wareham                          116
+Wareham                                                            119
+The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon Abbey                                   123
+Woolbridge House                                                   125
+Woolbridge House: Entrance Front                                   127
+Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath, _Facing_                                128
+Chamberlain’s Bridge                                               130
+Rye Hill, Bere Regis                                               131
+Bere Regis                                                         135
+Bere Regis                                                         137
+Bere Regis: Interior of Church                                     141
+“Toothache,” Bere Regis                                            143
+“Headache,” Bere Regis                                             143
+Bere Regis: The Turberville Window                                 145
+Stinsford Church; the “Mellstock” of _Under the                    149
+Greenwood Tree_
+Birthplace of Thomas Hardy                                         158
+Birthplace of Thomas Hardy                                         159
+The Duck Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn in                 161
+_The Return of the Native_
+Tincleton                                                          163
+An Egdon Farmstead                                                 165
+A Farm on Egdon                                                    166
+Cross-in-Hand, _Facing_                                            170
+Batcombe                                                           171
+Tomb of “Conjuring Minterne”                                       173
+Melbury House, _Facing_                                            174
+Sherborne Abbey Church, _Facing_                                   184
+Long Burton                                                        192
+Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum                                        194
+Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore                             195
+Cerne Abbas                                                        201
+The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey, _Facing_                               202
+The Cerne Giant                                                    203
+Cerne Abbas                                                        206
+Wolveton House                                                     207
+Weymouth and Portland from the Ridgeway                            209
+The Wishing Well, Upwey                                            211
+Weymouth Harbour                                                   219
+Sandsfoot Castle                                                   223
+Bow and Arrow Castle                                               229
+Portisham                                                          233
+The Road out of Abbotsbury                                         235
+Sheep-Shearing in Wessex, _Facing_                                 236
+West Bay, Bridport                                                 239
+High Street and Town Hall, Bridport                                243
+Sutton Poyntz: the “Overcombe” of _The Trumpet                     247
+Major_
+Bincombe                                                           249
+Poxwell Manor                                                      251
+Owermoigne: the Smugglers’ Haunt in _The Distracted                253
+Preacher_
+Lulworth Cove                                                      254
+Lulworth Cove                                                      255
+Lytchett Heath: The Equestrian Effigy of George                    256
+III.: Entrance to Charborough Park, _Facing_
+Bournemouth: The Invalids’ Walk                                    258
+Poole Quay                                                         267
+Sturminster Marshall: Anthony Etricke’s Tomb,                      270
+Wimborne Minster, _Facing_
+The Wimborne Clock Jack                                            273
+Wimborne Minster: the Minster and the Grammar                      274
+School, _Facing_
+The Tower, Charborough Park                                        281
+Weather-vane at Shapwick: the “Shapwick Monster”                   283
+The Maypole, Shillingstone                                         285
+Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn                             286
+Marnhull                                                           289
+Gold Hill, Shaftesbury                                             295
+The Observatory, Horton, _Facing_                                  298
+Horton Inn: the “Lorton Inn” of _Barbara of the                    299
+House of Grebe_
+Monmouth Ash                                                       300
+Bingham’s Melcombe                                                 303
+Milton Abbas, _Facing_                                             306
+Milton Abbas, an Early “Model” Village                             307
+Abbot Milton’s Rebus, Milton Abbey                                 309
+Milton Abbey                                                       310
+Turnworth House                                                    311
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+      PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD
+
+IN the literary partition of England, wherein the pilgrim may discover
+tracts definitely and indissolubly dedicated to Dickens, to Tennyson, to
+Ingoldsby, and many another, no province has been so thoroughly annexed
+or so effectively occupied as that associated with the Wessex novels
+written by Mr. Thomas Hardy.  He holds Wessex in fee-simple, to the
+exclusion of all others; and so richly topographical are all those
+romances, that long ere sketch-maps showing his literary occupancy of it
+were prepared and published in the uniform edition of his works, there
+were those to whom the identity of most of his scenes offered no manner
+of doubt.  By the circumstances of birth and of lifelong residence, the
+“Wessex” of the novels has come to denote chiefly his native county of
+Dorset, and in especial the neighbourhood of Dorchester, the county town;
+but Mr. Hardy was early an expansionist, and his outposts were long ago
+thrown forward, to at last make his Wessex in the domain of letters
+almost coterminous with that ancient kingdom of Saxon times, which
+included all England south of the Thames and west of Sussex, with the
+exception of Cornwall.  The very excellent sketch-map prepared for the
+definitive edition of Mr. Hardy’s works very clearly shows the
+comparative density of the literary settlements he has made.  Glancing at
+it, you at once perceive that what he chooses to term “South
+Wessex”—named in merely matter-of-fact gazetteers Dorsetshire—is thickly
+studded with names of his own mintage, unknown to guidebook or ordnance
+map, and presently observe that the surrounding divisions of Upper,
+North, Mid, Outer, and Lower Wessex—as who should say Hampshire,
+Berkshire, Wilts, Somerset, and Devon—are, to follow the simile already
+adopted, barely colonised.
+
+His nearest frontier-post towards London is Castle Royal, to be
+identified with none other than Windsor; while near by are Gaymead
+(Theale), Aldbrickham (Reading), and Kennetbridge (Newbury).  In the
+midst of that same division of North Wessex, or Berkshire, are marked
+Alfredston and Marygreen, respectively the little town of Wantage,
+birthplace of Alfred the Great, and the small village of Fawley Magna,
+placed on the draughty skyline of the bare and shivery Berkshire downs.
+
+Then, near the eastern border of Upper Wessex is Quartershot, or
+Aldershot, and farther within its confines Stoke-Barehills, by which name
+Basingstoke and the unclothed uplands partly surrounding it are
+indicated.  Its “gaunt, unattractive, ancient church” is accurately
+imaged in a phrase, and it is just as true that the most familiar object
+of the place is “its cemetery, standing among some picturesque mediæval
+ruins beside the railway”; for indeed Basingstoke cemetery and the fine
+ruins of the chapel once belonging to the religious who, piously by
+intent, but rather blasphemously to shocked ears, styled themselves the
+“Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost,” stand immediately without the railway
+station.  At Stoke-Barehills, Jude and Sue, visiting the Agricultural
+Show, were observed by Arabella, Jude’s sometime wife, with some
+jealousy.
+
+                         [Picture: Fawley Magna]
+
+Finally, northernmost of all these transfigured outer landmarks, is
+Christminster, the university town and city of Oxford, whose literary
+name in these pages derives from the cathedral of Christ there.  This
+remote corner of his kingdom is especially and solely devoted to the
+grievous story of _Jude the Obscure_, a pitiful tale of frustrated
+ambition, originally published serially in _Harper’s Magazine_, under the
+much more captivating, if less descriptive, title of _Hearts Insurgent_.
+The story opens at Fawley Magna, to whose identity a clue is found in the
+name of Fawley given the unhappy Jude.  The village, we are told, was “as
+old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an upland
+adjoining the undulating North Wessex downs.  Old as it was, however, the
+well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained
+absolutely unchanged. . . .  Above all, the original church, hump-backed,
+wood-turreted and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either
+cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilised as pigsty
+walls, garden-seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the
+flower-beds of the neighbourhood.  In place of it a tall new building of
+German-Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a
+new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had
+run down from London and back in a day.”  Who was that obliterator thus
+held up to satire?  Inquiries prove the church to have been rebuilt in
+1866, and its architect to have been none other than G. E. Street, R.A.,
+than whom the middle Victorian period had no more accomplished architect.
+Truly enough, its design is something alien, but candour compels the
+admission that, however detached from local traditions, it is really a
+very fine building, and its designer quite undeserving of so slighting a
+notice.
+
+                      [Picture: High Street, Oxford]
+
+From Fawley the scene of Jude’s tragedy changes to Christminster, the
+Oxford of everyday commerce.  Oft had he, as a boy, seen from this
+vantage-point the faint radiance of its lights reflected from the sky at
+night, twenty miles away.  His anticipations and disillusionments, his
+strong resolves and stumblings by the way, over stumbling-blocks of his
+own and of extraneous making, picture a strong character brought low,
+like Samson by Delilah—cheated of scholarly ambition by the guardians of
+learning, who open its gates only to wealth or scholarships acquired by
+early opportunity.  Take _Jude the Obscure_ as you will, it forms a
+somewhat serious indictment of university procedure: “They raise pa’sons
+there, like radishes in a bed.  ’Tis all learning there—nothing but
+learning, except religion.”  Jude sought learning there, and Holy Orders,
+but never rose beyond his trade of stonemason, and, after many fitful
+wanderings through Wessex, ends tragically at Oxford.
+
+Since _Jude the Obscure_ was written Oxford has gained another historic
+personality, none the less real than the great figures of actual life who
+have trodden the pavements of its High Street.  You may follow all the
+innermost thoughts of that mere character in a novel, and see fully
+exposed the springs that produce his actions; and thus he is made seem
+more human than all your Wolseys and great dignitaries, whose doings,
+smothered in dust, and whose motives, buried deep beneath their own
+subterfuges and the dark imaginings of historians with little but ancient
+verbiage to rely upon, seem only the spasmodic, involuntary capers of so
+many irresponsible jumping-jacks.  Nowadays, when I think of Oxford, it
+is to recall poor Jude Fawley’s fascination by it, like the desire of the
+moth for the star, or for the candle that eventually scorches its wings
+and leaves it maimed and dying.  “It is a city of light,” he exclaimed,
+not knowing (as how should he have known?) that the light it emits is but
+the phosphorescent glow of decay.  And when I walk the High Street, “the
+main street—that ha’n’t another like it in the world,” it is not of
+Newman or his fellow Tractarians I think, but of Jude the stonemason,
+feeling with appreciative technical fingers the mouldings and crumbling
+stones of its architecture.
+
+In one novel, _A Pair of Blue Eyes_, Mr. Hardy has made an expedition far
+beyond the confines of his Wessex.  Away beyond “Lower Wessex,” or
+Devonshire—itself scarce more than incidentally referred to in the whole
+course of his writings—he takes the reader to the north coast of
+Cornwall, the “furthest westward of all those convenient corners wherein
+I have ventured to erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of
+country life and passions; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond,
+the vague border of the Wessex kingdom, on that side which, like the
+westering verge of modern American settlements, was progressive and
+uncertain.”
+
+“Castle Boterel” he styles the stage of his tragical story of _A Pair of
+Blue Eyes_; a place to be found on maps under the style and title of
+Boscastle.  That tiny port and harbour on the wildest part of a wild
+coast obtains its name, in a manner familiar to all students of Cornish
+topography, by a series of phonetic corruptions.  Originally the site of
+a castle owned by the Norman family of De Bottreaux, its name has in the
+course of centuries descended from that knightly designation to that it
+now bears.  Leland, four hundred years ago, described the place as “a
+very filthy Toun and il kept,” and probably had still in mind and in
+nostrils when he wrote the scent of the fish-cellars and the fish-offal
+which to this day go largely towards making up the bouquet of most of the
+smaller Cornish fishing-ports.
+
+Still, as in Leland’s time, goes the little brook, running down from the
+tremendously hilly background “into the Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles,” and
+still the harbour remains, from the mariner’s point of view, “a pore
+Havenet, of no certaine Salvegarde,” winding, as it does, in the shape of
+a double S, between gigantic rocky headlands, and most difficult of
+approach or exit.  It will thus be guessed, and guessed rightly, that,
+although poor as a harbour, Boscastle is a place of commanding
+picturesqueness.  Its Cornish atmosphere, too, confers upon it another
+distinction.  In the romantic mind of the novelist the district is
+“pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery.
+The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal
+soliloquy of the waters, the bloom, of dark purple cast, that seems to
+exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an
+atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.”
+
+But it is not always like that at Boscastle.  There are days of bright
+sunshine, when the sea is in colour something between a sapphire and an
+opal, when the cliffs reveal unexpected hues and the sands of
+Trebarrow—the “Trebarwith Strand” of the novel—shine golden, in contrast
+with the dark slaty headland of Willapark Point—the “cliff without a
+name” where Elfride, the owner of that pair of blue eyes, saves the prig,
+Henry Knight, by the singular expedient none other than the author of the
+Wessex novels would have conceived.  The average reader may perhaps be
+allowed his opinion that it had been better for Elfride had she saved her
+underclothing and allowed Knight to drop from his precarious hand-hold on
+the cliff’s edge into the sea below waiting for him.
+
+The town of “St. Launce’s” mentioned in the book is of course Launceston,
+and “Endelstow” is the village of St. Juliot’s.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+                WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX
+
+BUT, to have done with these preliminary triflings in the marches of the
+Hardy Country, let us consider in what way the Londoner may best come to
+a thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land.  On all counts—by force
+of easy access, and by its ancient circumstance—Winchester is indicated.
+“The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore-time capital of
+Wessex,” stands at the gate of this literary country and hard by the
+confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and history it is
+closely akin.  At one in feeling with that hoary hunting preserve, it is
+itself modern in but little measure, and loves to linger upon memories of
+the past.  Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical
+counters with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty
+game of history was played; but do, by the presence of their works, make
+the least impressionable feel that they were creatures of blood and
+fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake nations; groping darkly in
+superstition, without doubt, but perceiving the light, distant and dim,
+and striving with all the strength of their strong natures to win toward
+it.  They fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had done for
+paganism, and were not—it really seems necessary to insist upon
+it—creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals are sealed; but
+lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and hated, and despaired
+and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with perhaps even greater keenness,
+than any Edwardian liege of this twentieth century.  Still runs the
+Itchen, bright and clear as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed,
+to be in their turn ousted in governance by the Norman-French; and still,
+although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of Norman
+domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed, stolid, and
+long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and Wessex, and in him that
+ancient kingdom, although unknown to modern political geographies,
+survives.
+
+Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and for your
+intrinsic worth, alike.  Changing, although ever so slowly, with the
+years, your developments make, not as elsewhere, for black bitterness of
+heart and vain regrets for the things of sweet savour and good report,
+swept away into the dustheaps and potsherds of “progress,” but for
+content and happy assent.  In these later years, for example, it has
+occurred to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior
+and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England, ruling
+at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in A.D. 901, and buried here in a spot
+still shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey.  That is a noble,
+heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to commemorate the
+millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough keeping with
+Winchester’s ancient dignity.
+
+                    [Picture: High Street, Winchester]
+
+Near by, where its imposing bulk is reared up against the giant
+background of St. Giles’s Hill, you may still see and hear the Itchen
+rushing furiously under the old City Mill by Soke Bridge, where dusty
+millers have ground corn for a thousand years.  Released from the
+mill-leat, the stream regains its placid temper and wanders suavely along
+daisy-dappled meads to St. Cross, and so at last to lose itself in
+Southampton Water; still fishful all the way, as in the days of old Izaak
+Walton himself, who lies in the south transept of the cathedral yonder,
+and has a sanctified place in these liberal-minded times in a tabernacle
+of the restored reredos, in the glorious company of the apostles, the
+saints, kings and bishops, who form a very mixed concourse in that
+remarkable structure.  I fear that if they were all brought to life and
+introduced to one another, they would not form the happiest of families.
+
+But that’s as may be.  From this vantage-point by King Alfred’s statue—or
+“Ælfred,” as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the
+unscholarly—you may see, as described in Tess, “the sloping High Street,
+from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the mediæval cross
+to the bridge”; but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low
+Norman tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being beckoned
+afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane, and, diligently
+inquiring, at last find it.  Best it is to come to the cathedral by way
+of that aforesaid mediæval cross in the High Street, hard by the
+curiously overhanging penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry,
+which, to the astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a
+backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike space of
+trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old residences of cathedral
+dignitaries with nothing to do and exceedingly good salaries for doing
+it.  It has been remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some
+sixty per cent. of the famous men whose careers are included in the
+_Dictionary of National Biography_ were the sons of clergymen.  No wonder
+at all, I take it, in this, for it is merely nature’s compensating swing
+of the pendulum.  The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing
+up energy for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest
+empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest scoundrels too,
+have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of the Church.
+
+That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a history to its
+squatness—a history bound up with the tragical death of Rufus.  The grave
+of the Red King in the cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story
+whose inner history has never been, and never will be, fully explained;
+but by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless king’s death
+at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced by the glanced arrow said to
+have been aimed at the wild red deer by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem
+that the clergy were more intimately connected with that “accident” than
+was seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of that
+time.  It must not be forgotten that the king had despoiled the Church
+and the Church’s high dignitaries with a thorough and comprehensive
+spoliation, nor can it be blinked that certain of them had denounced him
+and prophesied disaster with an exactness of imagery possible only to
+those who had prepared the fulfilment of their boding prophecies.  “Even
+now,” said one, “the arrow of retribution is fixed, the bow is
+stretched.”  This was not metaphor, merely: they prophesied who had with
+certainty prepared fulfilment.  And when the thing was consummated and
+the body of the Red King was buried in the choir beneath the original
+central tower, the ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was
+not, according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the
+insufficient support given to its great crushing weight by the inadequate
+pillars, but to the fact that one was buried beneath who had not received
+the last rites of the Church.  If indeed that be so, the mills of God
+certainly do grind slowly.
+
+For the rest, the cathedral is the longest in England.  Longer than Ely,
+longer than St. Albans, it measures from east to west no less than 556
+feet.  As we read in the story of _Lady Mottisfont_, Wintoncester, among
+all the romantic towns in Wessex, is for this reason “probably the most
+convenient for meditative people to live in; since there you have a
+cathedral with nave so long that it affords space in which to walk and
+summon your remoter moods without continually turning on your heel, or
+seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll under cover from the
+rain or sun.  In an uninterrupted course of nearly three hundred steps
+eastward, and again nearly three hundred steps westward amid those
+magnificent tombs, you can, for instance, compare in the most leisurely
+way the dry dustiness which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and
+bishops with the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of
+commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest out-of-doors.
+Then, if you are in love, you can, by sauntering in the chapels and
+behind the episcopal chantries with the bright-eyed one, so steep and
+mellow your ecstasy in the solemnities around that it will assume a rarer
+and fairer tincture.”
+
+                     [Picture: Winchester Cathedral]
+
+In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old Guildhall every
+evening at eight o’clock, the sentimental survival of an old-time very
+real and earnest ordinance; the West Gate remains in the wall, hard by
+the fragments of the royal castle; down in the lower extremity of the
+city the bishop’s palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered,
+ivy-covered walls: much in fine remains of Winchester’s ancient state.
+
+But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for Salisbury.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+                  WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL
+
+FROM Wintoncester to Melchester—that is to say, from Winchester to
+Salisbury—is twenty-three miles if you go by way of Stockbridge and
+Winterslow; if by the windings of the valley roads by King’s Somborne and
+Mottisfont, anything you like, from thirty upwards, for it is a devious
+route and a puzzling.  We will therefore take the highway and for the
+present leave the byways severely alone.
+
+The high road goes in an ascent, a white and dusty streak, from
+Winchester to Stockbridge, the monotonous undulations of the chalky downs
+relieved here and there on the skyline by distant woods, and the wayside
+varied at infrequent intervals by murmurous coppices of pines, in whose
+sullen depths the riotous winds lose themselves in hollow undertones or
+absolute silences.  But before the traveller comes thus out into the
+country, he must, emerging from the West Gate, win to the open through
+the recent suburb of Fulflood; for “Winton” as its natives lovingly name
+it, and as the old milestones on this very road agree to style it, has
+after many years of slumber waked to life again, and is growing.  It is
+not a large nor a bustling suburb, this recent fringe upon Winchester’s
+ancient kirtle, and you are soon out of it and breasting the slope of
+Roebuck Hill.  Here, looking back, the tragic outlines of the prison,
+with grey-slated roof and ugly octagonal red-brick tower, cut the
+horizon: an unlovely palimpsest set above the mediæval graciousness of
+the ancient capital of all England, but one that has become, in some
+sort, a literary landmark in these later years, for it figures in the
+last scene of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_.  In the last chapter of that
+strenuous romance you shall read how from the western gate of the city
+two persons walked on a certain morning with bowed heads and gait of
+grief.  They were Angel Clare, the husband, and ’Liza-Lu, the sister of
+poor Tess, come to witness the hoisting of the black flag upon the tower
+of that inimical building.  They witnessed this proof that “‘Justice’ was
+done, and the President of the Immortals (in Æschylean phrase) had ended
+his sport with Tess,” not from this Stockbridge road, but from the first
+milestone on the road to Romsey, whence the city may be seen “as in an
+isometric drawing” set down in its vale of Itchen, “the broad cathedral
+tower with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the
+spires of St. Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the college, and, more to
+the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day
+the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.  Behind the city swept
+the rotund upland of St. Catherine’s Hill; further off, landscape beyond
+landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging
+above it.”
+
+Turning away from the contemplation of these things, and overpassing the
+crest of Roebuck Hill and its sponsorial inn, the road dips down suddenly
+into the tiny village of Weeke, whose name is sometimes, with romantic
+mediævalism, spelled “Wyke.”  For myself, did I reside there, I would
+certainly have my notepaper stamped “Wyke next Winchester,” and find much
+satisfaction therein.  Wyke consists, when fully summed up, of a
+characteristic rural Hampshire church, with little wooden belfry and
+walls of flint and red brick, of some scattered farms and of a roadside
+pond, a great prim red-bricked house of Georgian date, and a row of
+pollard limes on a grassy bank overlooking the road.
+
+And then?  Then the road goes on, past more uplands, divided into fields
+whose smooth convexity gives the appearance of even greater size than
+they possess: every circumstance of their featureless rotundity disclosed
+from the highway across the sparse hedges, reduced by free use of the
+billhook to the smallest semblance of a hedge, consistent with the
+preservation of a boundary.  Wayside trees are to seek, and the wayfarer
+pants in summer for lack of shade, and in winter is chilled to the bone,
+as the winds roam free across Worthy downs.
+
+Such is the way up Harestock Hill; not so grim as perhaps this
+description may convey, but really very beautiful in its sort, with a few
+cottages topping the rise where a signpost points a road to Littleton and
+Crawley, and where the white-topped equatorial of an observatory serves
+to emphasise a wholly unobstructed view over miles of sky.  It is only
+from vast skyfields such as this that one hears the song of the skylark
+on those still summer days when the sky is of the intensest azure blue
+and the bees are busy wherever the farmer has left nooks for the
+wild-flowers to grow.  On such days the dark woods of Lainston, crowning
+the distant ridge, lend a welcome shade.  Fortunately they are easy of
+access, for the road runs by them and an inconspicuous stile leads
+directly into one of the rook-haunted alleys of those romantic avenues
+with which the place is criss-crossed.  A slightly marked footpath
+through undergrowth thickly spread with the desiccated leaves of autumns
+past, where the hedgehog hides and squirrels and wild life of every kind
+abound, leads by a crackling track of dried twigs and the empty husks of
+last year’s beech-nuts to another stile and across a byroad into another
+of the five grand avenues leading to Lainston House, a romantically
+gloomy, but architecturally very fine, late seventeenth-century mansion
+embowered amid foliage, with a ruined manorial chapel close at hand in a
+darkling corner amid the close-set mossy boles of the trees.  The spot
+would form an ideal setting for one of the Wessex tales, and indeed has a
+part in a sufficiently queer story in actual life.  That tale is now
+historic—how Walpole’s “Ælia Lælia Chudleigh” was in 1745 privately
+married, in this now roofless chapel, to Captain Hervey, a naval officer
+who afterwards succeeded to the title of third Earl of Bristol.  “Miss
+Chudleigh,” however, she still continued to be at Court.  Twenty-five
+years later she was the heroine of a bigamy case, having married, while
+her first husband was living, Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston.  This was
+that lively lady who, Walpole tells us, “went to Ranelagh as Iphigenia,
+but as naked as Andromeda.”
+
+The ruined chapel has long been in that condition.  Its font lies, broken
+and green with damp, on the grass, and the old ledger-stones that cover
+the remains of Chudleighs and Dawleys, successive owners of the manor,
+are cracked and defaced.  The “living” of Lainston is worth £60 per
+annum, and goes with that of the neighbouring village of Sparsholt, the
+vicar holding it by virtue of preaching here once a year.  Stress of
+weather occasionally obliges him to perform this duty under the shelter
+of an umbrella, when his congregation, like that of the saint who
+preached to the birds, is composed chiefly of rooks and jackdaws.  But
+their responses are not always well timed, and the notes of the jackdaw
+sound uncommonly like the scoffings of the ribald.
+
+One emerges from Lainston woods only to perceive this to be a district of
+many woodlands.  Across the road is Northwood, where, close by Eastman’s
+great school, are thick coppices of hazels and undergrowths that the
+primroses and bluebells love.  In another direction lies Sparsholt.  None
+may tell what the “Spar” in the place-name of this or the other Sparsholt
+in Berkshire means, but “holt” signifies a wood; and thus we may perceive
+that the surroundings must still wear very much the aspect they owned
+when the name was conferred.  Sparsholt has no guidebook
+attractions—nothing but its old thatched cottages and quiet surroundings
+to recommend it.  But the fragrant scent of the wood-smoke from cottage
+hearths is over all.  You may see its blue filmy wreaths curling upwards
+on still days, against the dark background of foliage.  It is a rustic
+fragrance never forgotten, an aroma which, go whithersoever you will,
+brings back the sweet memory of days that were, and the sound of a voice
+in more actual fashion than possible to the notes of a well-remembered
+song, or the scent of a rose.
+
+They are not woods of forest trees that beset this district, but hillside
+tangles of scrub oaks, of hazels and alders, where the wild-flowers make
+a continual glory in early spring.  There are the labyrinths of No Man’s
+Land, the intricacies of Privet and Crab Wood, through whose bosquets run
+the long-deserted Roman road from Winchester to Old Sarum, and the
+nameless spinneys dotted everywhere about.  Away on the horizon you may
+perceive a monument, capping a hill.  It is no memorial of gallantries in
+war, but is the obelisk erected on Farley Mount to the horse of a certain
+“Paulet St. John,” which jumped with him into a chalk-pit twenty-five
+feet deep, emerging, with his rider, unhurt.  That was in 1733.  An
+inscription tells how that wonderful animal was afterwards entered for
+the Hunters’ Plate, under the name of “Beware Chalk Pit,” at the races on
+Worthy downs, and won it.
+
+Continuing on to Stockbridge, whose race-meeting has recently been
+abolished, the way grows grim indeed, with that Roman grimness
+characteristic of all the Wessex chalky down country.  The road is long,
+and at times, when the sun is setting and the landscape fades away in
+purple twilight, the explorer becomes obsessed, against all reason, with
+the weird notion that the many centuries of civilisation are but a dream
+and the distant ages come back again.  To this bareness the pleasant
+little town of Stockbridge, situated delightfully in the valley of the
+Anton, is a gracious interlude.  In its old churchyard the curious may
+still see the whimsical epitaph to John Bucket, landlord of the “King’s
+Head” inn, who died, aged 67, in 1802:
+
+    And is, alas! poor Bucket gone?
+    Farewell, convivial honest John.
+    Oft at the well, by fatal stroke
+    Buckets like pitchers must be broke.
+    In this same motley shifting scene,
+    How various have thy fortunes been.
+    Now lifting high, now sinking low,
+    To-day the brim would overflow.
+    Thy bounty then would all supply
+    To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry.
+    To-morrow sunk as in a well,
+    Content unseen with Truth to dwell.
+    But high or low, or wet or dry,
+    No rotten stave could malice spy.
+    Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise
+    And claim thy station in the skies;
+    Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine,
+    Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign.
+
+In 1715, when the poet Gay rode horseback to Exeter and wrote a rhymed
+account of his journey for the Earl of Burlington, he described
+Stockbridge in doleful dumps.  Why?  Because for seven years there had
+been no election:
+
+    Sad melancholy ev’ry visage wears;
+    What! no election come in seven long years!
+    Of all our race of Mayors, shall Snow alone
+    Be by Sir Richard’s dedication known?
+    Our streets no more with tides of ale shall float!
+    Nor cobblers feast three years upon one vote.
+
+Some of this seems cryptic, but it is explained by the fact of Sir
+Richard Steele having published, September 22nd, 1713, a quarto pamphlet
+entitled _The Importance of Dunkirk considered_ . . . _in a letter to the
+Bailiff of Stockbridge_, whose name was John Snow.  The number of voters
+at Stockbridge was then about seventy, and its population chiefly
+cobblers.  To say it was a corrupt borough is merely to state what might
+be said of almost every one at that time; but it seems to have been
+especially notable, even above its corrupt fellows, for a contemporary
+chronicler is found writing: “It is a very wet town and the voters are
+wet too.”  He then continues, as one deploring the depreciation of
+securities, “The ordinary price of a vote is £60, but better times may
+come.”  But when elections only came septennially, the wet voters who
+subsisted three years upon one vote must have gone dry, poor fellows, an
+unconscionable while.
+
+Some ten miles north of Stockbridge, on the road past Andover, and
+overlooking the valley of the Anton, is Weyhill, a Hardy landmark of
+especial importance, for it is the point whence starts that fine tale,
+_The Mayor of Casterbridge_, described in its sub-title as “The Life and
+Death of a Man of Character.”  It is a pleasant country of soft riverain
+features by which you who seek to make pilgrimage to this spot shall
+fare, coming into the quiet, cheerful little market-town of Andover, and
+thenceforward near by the villages which owe their curiously feminine
+names to their baptismal river, the Anton.  There you shall find Abbot’s
+Ann and Little Ann, and I daresay, if you seek long enough, Mary Ann
+also.  Weyhill, a hamlet in the parish of Penton Mewsey, is a
+place—although to look at it, you might not suspect so—of hoary
+antiquity, and its Fair—still famous, and still the largest in
+England—old enough to be the subject of comment in _Piers Plowman’s
+Vision_, in the line:
+
+    At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair.
+
+Alas that such things should be! this old-time six-days’ annual market is
+now reduced to four.  It is held between October 10th and 13th, and
+divided into the Sheep, Horse, Hops, Cheese, Statute or Hiring, and
+Pleasure Fairs.  On each of these days the three miles’ stretch of road
+from Andover is thronged with innumerable wayfarers and made unutterably
+dusty by the cabs and flys and the dense flocks of sheep and cattle on
+their way to the Fair ground.
+
+There are quaint survivals at Weyhill Fair.  An umbrella-seller may
+still, with every recurrent year, be seen selling the most bulgeous and
+antique umbrellas, some of them almost archaic enough to belong to the
+days of Jonas Hanway, who introduced the use of such things in the
+eighteenth century; and unheard-of village industries display their
+produce to the astonished gaze.  Here, for example, you see an exhibit of
+modern malt-shovels, together with the maker of them, the “W. Choules
+from Penton” whose name is painted up over his unassuming corner; and
+although the Londoner has probably never heard of, and certainly never
+seen, malt-shovels, the making of them is obviously still a living
+industry.
+
+Greatly to the stranger’s surprise, Weyhill, although in fact situated
+above the valley of the Anton, does not appear to be situated on a hill
+at all.  The road to “Weydon Priors,” by which name it figures in _The
+Mayor of Casterbridge_, is indeed, as the novelist sufficiently hints, of
+no very marked features.  It is “a road neither straight nor crooked,
+neither level nor hilly,” and at times other than Fair-time is as quiet a
+country road—for a high road—as you shall meet; and, except for that one
+week in the year, Weyhill is as a derelict village.  There, on a grassy
+tableland, stand, deserted for fifty-one weeks out of every fifty-two,
+the whitewashed booths and rows of sheds that annually for a brief space
+do so strenuous a trade, and scarce a human being comes into view.  Even
+now, just as in the beginning of the story, Weyhill does not grow:
+“Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon.”
+
+                         [Picture: Weyhill Fair]
+
+It is on the last day of the old six-days’ Fair, in 1829, that the story
+opens, with a man and woman—the woman carrying a child—walking along this
+dusty road.  That they were man and wife was, according to the novelist’s
+sardonic humour, plain to see, for they carried along with them a “stale
+familiarity, like a nimbus.”  The man was the hay-trusser, Michael
+Henchard, whose after rise to be Mayor of Casterbridge and whose final
+fall are chronicled in the story.  This opening scene is merely in the
+nature of a prologue, disclosing the itinerant hay-trusser seeking work,
+coming to the Fair and there selling his wife for five guineas to the
+only bidder, a sailor—the second chapter resuming the march of events
+eighteen years later.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+                 STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE
+
+RETURNING to Stockbridge, _en route_ for Salisbury, eight miles more of
+roads of the same unchanging characteristics, but growing more
+plentifully carpeted with crushed flints as we advance, bring us to
+Wiltshire and to a junction with the Exeter Road from Andover at Lobcombe
+Corner.  In the neighbourhood are “the Wallops,” as local parlance refers
+to a group of three villages, Over and Nether Wallop, with the wayside
+settlement of Little (or Middle) Wallop in between.  It is this
+last-named to which Mr. Hardy refers when he tells how the ruined and
+broken-hearted Mayor of Casterbridge, fleeing from the scene of his
+vanished greatness and resuming his early occupation of hay-trusser,
+became employed at a “pastoral farm near the old western highway. . . .
+He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that,
+situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually
+nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless
+spot only half as remote.”  Dorchester, otherwise Casterbridge, is in
+fact just forty-nine and a half miles distant, down this old Exeter Road.
+
+In less than another mile on our westward way the sight of a solitary
+house in all this apparently uninhabited wilderness arouses speculations
+in the pilgrim’s mind—speculations resolved on approach, when the sight
+of the recently restored picture-sign of the “Pheasant,” reared up on its
+posts on the short grass of the open down, opposite its door, proclaims
+this to be the old coaching inn once famed as “Winterslow Hut.”  None
+ever spoke of the inn in those days as the “Pheasant,” although that was
+the sign of it, plainly to be seen; as “Winterslow Hut” it was always
+known, and a more lonely, forbidding place of seclusion from the haunts
+of man it would be difficult to find.  It was once, appropriately enough,
+the retreat of a lonely, forbidding person—the self-selected place of
+exile from society of Hazlitt, the essayist, who, parting from his wife
+at the village of West Winterslow (whence the inn takes its name of
+“Winterslow Hut”) two miles away, lived here from 1819 to 1828.  Here he
+wrote the essays on “Persons one would wish to have seen,” and the much
+less sociable essay, “On Living to One’s Self”—an art he practised here
+to his own satisfaction and the cheerful resignation of the many persons
+with whom he quarrelled.  And here he saw the Exeter Mail and the
+stage-coaches go by, and must have found the place even lonelier, in the
+intervals after their passing, than it seems now that the Road, as an
+institution, is dead and the Rail conveys the traffic to and from
+Salisbury and the west, some two miles distant, across country hidden
+from view from this point beneath the swelling shoulders of the
+unchanging downs.
+
+Salisbury spire is soon seen, when the long drop into the valley of the
+Wiltshire Avon, down Three Mile Hill, begins; its slender spire, the
+tallest in England, thrusting its long needle-point 404 feet into the
+blue, and oddly peering out from the swooping sides of the downs, long
+before any suspicion of Sarum itself—as the milestones style it—has
+occupied the mind of the literary pilgrim.
+
+Salisbury, like some bland and contented elderly spinster, does not look
+its age.  When you are told how Old Sarum was abandoned, New Sarum
+founded, and everything recreated _ad hoc_ at the command of Bishop
+Poore, impelled thereto by a vision, in the then customary way, you are
+so impressed with what we are used to regard as such thoroughly
+“American” proceedings that you forget, in the apparent modernity of such
+a method, how very long ago all this was done.  This great change of site
+took place about 1220, and sixty years later the great cathedral,
+remarkable and indeed unique among all our cathedrals for being designed
+and built, from the laying of the foundation stone to the roofing-in of
+the building, in one—the Early English—style, was completed.  It was
+actually a century later that the spire itself was finished.
+
+Much of this seeming youthfulness of Salisbury is due to the regularity
+of plan upon which the city is laid out, and to the comparative breadth
+of its streets.  To that phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch,
+whose like certainly could never have been met with outside the pages of
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_, Salisbury seemed “a very desperate sort of place; an
+exceedingly wild and dissipated city.”  Here we smile superior, although
+it is true that in his short story, _On the Western Circuit_, Mr. Hardy
+presents Melchester, as he names this fair city, as given over to blazing
+orgies in the progress of Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting
+merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than
+they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he
+should have been.  Granting the truth of this picture of Melchester Fair,
+it is to be observed that this is but an interlude in a twelvemonth’s
+programme of polished, decorous, and well-ordered urbanity.  Its
+character is more truly portrayed in _Jude the Obscure_, where Sue
+Bridehead having gone to the city, to enter the Training College in the
+Close, her cousin Jude follows her.  He found it “a quiet and soothing
+place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly
+learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment.”  It was here
+he obtained work at his trade of stonemason, labouring on the restoration
+of the cathedral; here that Sue shocked his ecclesiastical and mediæval
+bent, meeting his suggestion that they should sit for a talk in the
+cathedral by the proposal that she would rather wait in the railway
+station: “That’s the centre of town life now—the cathedral has had its
+day!”  To his shocked interjection, “How modern you are!” she replied
+defensively, “I am not modern, either.  I am more ancient than
+mediævalism, if you only knew”; meaning thereby that she was enamoured of
+classicism and the old pagans.
+
+To Sue the cathedral was not unsympathetic merely by force of that
+clear-cut regularity which impresses most beholders with a sense of a
+splendid, but cold, perfection.  There are those who compare this great
+fane with Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere:
+
+    Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
+    Dead perfection, no more;
+
+but while those critics are critics only of design and carved stones, who
+would welcome something in its regular features paralleled by a
+tip-tilted nose in a human face, Sue was obviously preoccupied by the
+sense that it, not alone among cathedrals, has outlived the devotional
+needs that produced it, and is little more than a magnificent museum of
+architectural antiquities.  That magnificence would be even more complete
+and pronounced had not the egregious James Wyatt been let loose upon the
+“restoration” of it, towards the close of the eighteenth century, when he
+cast out and destroyed most of its internal adornments, and pulled down
+and utterly obliterated the beautiful detached bell tower, coeval with
+the cathedral itself, which stood, away from it, on the north side.
+
+It is perhaps worthy of remark that there may be noticed in the cathedral
+the tomb, with somewhat bombastic inscription, of Dr. D’Albigny
+Turberville, the seventeenth-century oculist, who died, aged 85, in 1696.
+The flagrant Latin, which tells us that his fame shall perish no sooner
+than this marble, does not allow for human forgetfulness, nor for the
+advances of science.
+
+The Normal School in the Close, whence Sue escaped, after being confined
+to her room as a punishment for her night’s escapade with Jude, is a
+prominent building, described as “an ancient edifice of the fifteenth
+century, once a palace . . . with mullioned and transomed windows, and a
+courtyard in front shut in from the road by a wall.”
+
+                      [Picture: Salisbury Cathedral]
+
+From the ever-impending tragedy of Jude’s ambitions it is a relief to
+turn to the pure comedy of Betty Dornell, the first Countess of Wessex,
+in that collection of diverting short stories, _A Group of Noble Dames_.
+Looking upon those two old inns, the “Red Lion” in the High Street and
+the “White Hart,” we are reminded that it was to the first-named that
+Betty resorted with that husband with whom, although married at an early
+age, she had not lived.
+
+“‘Twice we met by accident,’ pleaded Betty to her mother.  ‘Once at
+Abbot’s Cernel and another time at the “Red Lion,” Melchester.’
+
+“‘O, thou deceitful girl!’ cried Mrs. Dornell.  ‘An accident took you to
+the “Red Lion” whilst I was staying at the “White Hart”!  I remember—you
+came in at twelve o’clock at night and said you’d been to see the
+cathedral by the light o’ the moon!’
+
+“‘My ever-honoured mamma, so I had!  I only went to the “Red Lion” with
+him afterwards.’”
+
+Nine miles to the north of Melchester stands Stonehenge, reached after
+their flight through the deserted midnight streets of the city by Tess
+and Angel Clare, vainly endeavouring to elude justice after the murder of
+the sham D’Urberville at Sandbourne.  The night was “as dark as a cave,”
+and a stiff breeze blew as they came out upon the black solitudes of
+Salisbury Plain.  For some miles they had proceeded thus, when “on a
+sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front,
+rising sheer from the grass.  They had almost struck themselves against
+it.
+
+“‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel.
+
+“‘It hums,’ said she.  ‘Hearken!’
+
+“The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the
+note of some gigantic one-stringed harp.”  It was indeed Stonehenge, “a
+very Temple of the Winds.”
+
+And here, as the night wore away, and Tess lay sleeping on the Altar
+Stone, and the great trilithons began to show up blackly against the
+coming dawn, the figure of a man advancing towards them appeared rising
+out of the hollows of the great plain.  At the same time Clare heard the
+brush of feet behind him: they were surrounded.  Thoughts of resistance
+came to him; but “‘It’s no use, sir,’ said the foremost plain-clothes
+man: ‘There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is
+reared.’”  And so they stood watching while Tess finished her sleep.
+
+Stonehenge sadly requires such romantic passages as this to renew its
+interest, for, truth to tell, the first glimpse of this mysterious
+monument of prehistoric ages is wofully disappointing.  No use to strive
+against that disappointment as you come up the long rises from Amesbury
+under the midday sun and see its every time-worn cranny displayed
+mercilessly in the impudent eye of day: the interval between anticipation
+and realisation is too wide, and the apparent smallness and
+insignificance of the great stone circles must, although unwillingly, be
+allowed.  This comparative insignificance is, however, largely the effect
+of their almost boundless environment of vast downs, tumid with the
+attendant circles of prehistoric tumuli, each tumulus or barrow crowned
+with its clump of trees, like the tufted plumes of a hearse.
+
+                          [Picture: Stonehenge]
+
+Mystery continues to shroud the origin of Stonehenge, which was probably
+standing when the Romans first overran Britain, and seems by the most
+reasoned theories to have really been a Temple of the Sun.  Its name is
+only the comparatively modern one of “Stanenges,” or “the hanging
+stones,” given by the Saxons, who discovered it with as much astonishment
+as exhibited by any one of a later age, and so named it, not from any
+reference to the capital punishment of _sus. per coll._, but from the
+great lintel-stones that are laid flat upon the tall rude columns, and
+may fancifully be said to hang in mid-air, at a height of twenty-five
+feet.
+
+Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a “monument to all time,” speak
+not according to knowledge, for the poor old relic is becoming sadly
+weatherworn and decrepit, and has aged rapidly of late years.  No good
+has been wrought it by the fussy interferences and impertinences of
+“scientific” men, who, taking advantage of an alleged necessity for
+shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the soil and strove to wrest
+its secret by the method of sifting the spadesful of earth and stone
+chippings.  Then a last indignity befell it.  Sir Edward Antrobus, of
+Amesbury, lord of the manor, claimed Stonehenge as his manorial property,
+and, erecting a barbed-wire fence around it, levied a fee of a shilling a
+head for admission through the turnstiles that click you through, for all
+the world as though you were entering some Earl’s Court Exhibition.  The
+impudence that has found it possible to do these things, in defiance of
+undoubted public rights of way, bulks majestically—much larger than
+Stonehenge itself, whose grey pile it indeed belittles and vulgarises.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+                THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD
+
+IT is thirty-eight and a half miles from Salisbury to Dorchester, the
+“Casterbridge” of the novels, along the old coach-road to Exeter.
+Speaking as an exploratory cyclist, I would ten times rather go the
+reverse way, from west to east, for the gradients are all against the
+westward traveller, and westerly winds are the prevailing airs during
+summer and autumn.  It is, indeed, a terribly difficult road, exposed,
+and very trying in its long rises.  One charming interlude there is,
+three miles from Salisbury, at the beautifully situated little village of
+Coombe Bissett, set down in the deep valley of an affluent of the
+Wiltshire Avon; but it is heartbreaking work climbing out of it again, up
+the inclines of Crowden Down.  At eight miles’ distance from Salisbury
+the old Woodyates Inn, long since re-christened the “Shaftesbury Arms,”
+stands in a lonely situation beside the road, looking regretful for
+bygone coaching days.  Its old name, deriving from “wood-gates,”
+indicated its position on the south-western marches of the wooded
+district of Cranborne Chase.  When railways disestablished coaches and
+the road resumed its solitude, the old inn became for a time the home of
+William Day’s training establishment for racehorses.  He tells, in his
+recollections, of the drinking habits of the old Wiltshire farmers in
+general, and of two in particular, who used to call at Woodyates when on
+their way to or from Salisbury.  They would talk, over the fire and their
+glasses of grog, somewhat in this fashion of their drunken exploits when
+riding home horseback: “Well, John, I fell off ten times.”  “Yes, Thomas,
+and I fell off a dozen times: you see, I rode the old black horse, and he
+always jerks me about so.”  It was said that there was scarcely a yard of
+ground over the eight miles that these worthies had not fallen on to from
+their horses.
+
+                           [Picture: Pentridge]
+
+At the distance of a mile from the coach-road at this point, where, by
+the way, we leave Wilts and enter Dorset, is the Hardy landmark of
+“Trantridge,” to be identified with the little village of Pentridge set
+down on the map.  It was to Trantridge that Tess came early in her
+career, from her home at Marnhull in the Vale of Blackmore, to take
+service with Mrs. Stoke-D’Urberville of The Slopes, relict of Mr. Simon
+Stoke, merchant or money-lender, who had unwarrantably assumed the name,
+the crest, and arms of the knightly D’Urbervilles—dead and gone and
+powerless to resent the affront.  It would be useless to seek The Slopes,
+rising in all the glory of its new crimson brick “like a geranium bloom
+against the subdued colours around”; but plain to see, not far away, is
+the “soft azure landscape of the Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest
+land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England, of undoubted
+primæval date.”  It was in the Chase that the ruin of Tess was wrought by
+Alec D’Urberville.
+
+The exceedingly rustic village of Pentridge nestles under the lee of a
+long, partly wooded hill, probably the “ridge” referred to in the
+place-name.  In the little highly restored or rebuilt church with the
+stone spirelet is now to be seen, since August, 1902, when it was
+erected, the plain white marble tablet:
+
+                               TO THE MEMORY OF
+                               ROBERT BROWNING,
+
+           of Woodyates, in this parish, who died Nov. 25th, 1746,
+                     and is the first known forefather of
+                          Robert Browning, the poet.
+
+                  He was formerly footman and butler in the
+                                Bankes family.
+
+                    “All service ranks the same with God.”
+
+                                                                 BROWNING.
+
+                                _This Tablet_
+            was erected by some of the poet’s friends and admirers
+                                    1902.
+
+Much reflected glory doubtless accrues to “the Bankes family” from this
+tablet, which owes its being to the exertions of Dr. F. J. Furnivall.  It
+seems that the poet’s ancestor, after severing his connection with the
+Bankes, became landlord of the Woodyates Inn, and churchwarden here.
+
+This entrance to Dorsetshire is not so favourable an one as that, for
+example, from Somerset, by Templecombe and Stalbridge or Sherborne, where
+Dorset is indeed like unto the Land of Promise, a land flowing with milk
+and honey, where herds of cattle low musically in mead or byre, and the
+earth is alluvial—rich, deep, and sticky.
+
+Here is the more arid, elevated country of open down; chalky, and
+producing only coarse grass, pine-trees, bracken, and furze—a
+sheep-grazing, as opposed to a cattle-rearing, district.  Dorset is
+indeed a greatly varied county in the character of its soils.  The
+sheep-grazing districts may be said to be this of the north-east border,
+and those other stretches of lofty, almost waterless chalk downs, running
+due east and west, parallel with the coast, with a similarly lengthy, but
+broader, stretch in a like direction, from where the downs rise from the
+Stour at Sturminster Marshall, past Milton Abbas and Cerne Abbas, on to
+Beaminster.  In between these are the valleys of the River Frome—the
+“Vale of Great Dairies” of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, and the “Vale of
+Little Dairies” in the same story, otherwise Blackmore Vale.  A glance at
+the map will show the River Frome flowing in its “green trough of
+sappiness and humidity” from the neighbourhood of Beaminster, past
+Chilfroom, Frome Vanchurch, and Frampton, which most obviously take their
+name from the stream, to Dorchester, Moreton, Wool, and Wareham, whence
+it pours its enriching waters into Poole Harbour; and another glance will
+discover the Vale of Little Dairies, or Blackmore, bounded by Blandford
+and Minterne Magna, and the heights of High Stoy on the south, and by
+Shaftesbury, Wincanton, and Sherborne on the north; including within its
+compass Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton, together with a host of small
+villages.  The natural outlet of this last district—which, despite the
+name of “Little Dairies,” given to it in the pages of the novels, is a
+larger area than that of the Frome valley, and of course produces in the
+aggregation more—is the railway junction of Templecombe, which, beyond
+being a mere junction, is also an exceedingly busy and bustling place for
+the receipt of all this dairy produce of Blackmore.
+
+Such are, roughly, the main agricultural divisions of Dorset, which is,
+to the hard-working farmer who is his own bailiff, with his family to aid
+in the dairy-work, still a county where ends may be made to meet, with a
+considerable selvedge or overlapping to sweeten his industry.  Despite a
+very general belief current in towns, there are still considerable
+numbers of these families.  The farmer and his wife have largely grown
+out of the rustic speech, and their sons and daughters—the daughters
+especially, the adaptive dears!—have got culture for leisure moments, but
+they are none the less practical for that.  A generation ago, perhaps,
+things were not so pleasing, for the then would-be up-to-date attempted
+the absurdity of aping the leisured classes, while seeking to carry on
+farming and obtain a living by it.  Such as those came to grief, and were
+rightly the butts of outside observers, as well as of moralists of their
+own class.  A thorough-going farmer of that period, who saw the daughters
+of his neighbour going on the way to their music-lesson, reported his
+feelings and sayings as follows:
+
+“While I and an’ my wife were out a-milken, they maidens went by, an’ I
+zaid to her, ‘Where be they maidens a-gwoin’?’ an’ she zaid, ‘Oh! they be
+a-gwoin’ to their music.’  An’ I zaid, ‘Oh! a-gwoin’ to their music at
+milken-time!  That ’ull come to zom’ehat, that wull.’”  And it doubtless
+did come to a pretty considerable deal, if—as a doctor might say—the
+course of the disease was normal.
+
+Resuming the main road, which for the distance of a mile beyond Woodyates
+is identical with the old Roman road, the Via Iceniana, that ancient
+relic of a past civilisation may presently be seen parting company from
+the modern highway, and going off by itself, to the left, across the
+downs, making for the great fortified hill of Badbury Rings.  It is known
+locally as the Achling Dyke, and is somewhat conspicuously elevated above
+the bracken, the gorse, and heather of these wilds.
+
+Now, passing a few scattered cottages, we come—in fifteen miles from
+Coombe Bissett—to a village, the first on this lonely main road.  Tarrant
+Hinton, this welcome village, stands on a sparkling little stream,
+without doubt the “tarrant,” or torrent, whence it and a small sisterhood
+of neighbouring settlements obtain a generic name.  There are Tarrant
+Gunville, Tarrant Monkton, Tarrant Rawston, Tarrant Rushton, Tarrant
+Keynston, and Tarrant Crawford; and then, as below the last-named place
+the little stream falls into the Stour, there are no more Tarrants.
+
+                           [Picture: Eastbury]
+
+To Tarrant Gunville belongs Eastbury Park, a place of Hardyesque and
+romantic aspect; but, so far, not made the vehicle of any of his stories.
+It has, to be sure, a story of its own—a tale of vaulting ambition which
+fell on t’other side.  Eastbury was built, like many another ponderous
+and overgrown mansion of the eighteenth century, by Vanbrugh, to the
+commission of George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who,
+growing enormously rich by long-continued peculation, blossomed out as a
+patron of the arts and a friend of literature.  But before his huge house
+could be completed he was gathered to his fathers and to judgment upon
+his illegitimate pickings, leaving all his wealth to his grandnephew,
+George Bubb Dodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, who lavished £140,000 on
+the completion of the works.  Here he too became a patron, and
+entertained the literary men of his time until 1762, when, dying, the
+property went to Earl Temple, who, unable to afford the expense of
+maintaining the immense place, actually offered—and offered in vain—an
+income of £200 a year to any one who would reside at Eastbury and keep it
+in repair.  As this bait failed, the great house was dismantled and
+demolished, piecemeal, in 1795, only one wing remaining to attest its
+former grandeur.
+
+But traces of that grandeur are not wanting, from the iron railings,
+stone piers, and decorative kerbs, carved boldly with an acanthus-leaved
+design, that conduct into the demesne, to the magnificent clumps of
+beeches and other forest trees studding the sward of what was the park;
+and that remaining wing itself, still disclosing in its arcade, or
+loggia, something of Vanbrugh’s design.
+
+Eastbury, of course, is haunted—so much is to be expected of such a
+place; but those who have seen the headless coachman and his ghostly
+four-in-hand issuing from the park gates, or returning, are growing
+scarce, and times are become so sceptical that even they cannot obtain
+credence.  So, with a sigh for the decay of belief, we will e’en on
+through Pimperne down to Blandford, which good town, of fine dignified
+classic architectural presence, the coach-road enters in a timid
+back-doors manner, down a narrow byway.
+
+Blandford is further dignified by that curious pedantic Latinity very
+marked in many Dorsetshire place-names.  In this manner it is made to
+figure as “Blandford Forum,” a rendering of “Blandford Market.”  In Mr.
+Thomas Hardy’s pages it is “Shottsford Forum,” and so appears in his
+story of _Barbara of the House of Grebe_, in _Far from the Madding
+Crowd_, and again in _The Woodlanders_, wherein it is stated, from the
+mouth of a rustic character, that “Shottsford is Shottsford still: you
+can’t victual your carcass there unless you’ve got money, and you can’t
+buy a cup of genuine there, whether or no”; this last a sad drawback from
+the amenities of a delightful town.  But there is a very excellent pump,
+and an historic, in the broad High Street, whereon, cast in enduring
+iron, it may be read how a certain John Bastard, a “considerable sharer”
+in the great calamity by which Blandford was burnt in 1731, “humbly
+erected this monument, in grateful Acknowledgement of the Divine Mercy,
+That has since raised this Town, Like the Phoenix from its Ashes, to its
+present flourishing and beautiful State.”  That, it will be allowed, is
+rather a fine, curly, and romantic way of putting it.  A rider to this
+inscription goes on to say that in 1899 the Corporation of Blandford
+converted the pump into a drinking-fountain, and that the Blandford
+Waterworks Company, not halting in good deeds, gratuitously supplies the
+water.
+
+The pilgrim who, arriving in Blandford hot, dusty and thirsty, and
+perhaps mindful of that alleged impossibility of buying a cup of genuine,
+essays to drink from the fountain, is at first surprised at the keen
+interest taken in his proceedings by a quickly collecting group of
+urchins.  Their curiosity appears to be in the nature of surprise at the
+sight of a grown man drinking water, but light is shed upon it when,
+pressing hard the obstinate knob that releases the fount, the thing
+suddenly gives way and squirts half a pint or so up his sleeve.  This is
+a never-failing form of entertainment to the youth of Blandford, and a
+cheap one.
+
+Not once, but several times has Blandford been destroyed by fire.  It
+owed these disasters to the old Dorsetshire fashion of thatched roofs,
+and only in time, by dint of repeated happenings in this sort, learned
+wisdom.  This light dawned at the time when the classic revival in
+architecture was flourishing, and thus, as already hinted, Blandford’s
+High Street is wholly of that character.  Classicism does not often make
+for beauty in English towns, but here the general effect is admirable,
+and although the stone of the fine church-tower—designed in the same
+taste—is of a jaundiced greenish-yellow hue, it is a noble feature.
+
+Blandford’s natives have sometimes won to a great deal more than local
+fame; witness Alfred Stevens, the designer of the Wellington monument in
+St. Paul’s Cathedral, who was born in 1817, in Salisbury Street, that
+back-doors coach-road entrance into the town already mentioned.
+Willowes, the unhappy husband of Barbara, of the House of Grebe, was a
+descendant of one of the old families of glass-painters of Shottsford
+mentioned in that story, and more particularly referred to by Aubrey, the
+antiquary, who says: “Before the Reformation, I believe there was no
+country or great town in England but had glasse painters.  Old Harding of
+Blandford in Dorsetshire, where I went to schoole, was the only country
+glasse painter that ever I knew.  Upon play daies I was wont to visit his
+shop and furnaces.  He dyed about 1643, aged about 83 or more.”  That
+craft has long since died out from the town.
+
+                        [Picture: Blandford Forum]
+
+A beautiful backward view of the town is obtained on leaving it, over the
+Town Bridge that spans the sluggish, lily-grown Stour, at the entrance to
+Lord Portman’s noble park of Bryanstone.  Here a dense overarching canopy
+of trees gives a grateful shade on summer days and frames the distant
+prospect whence the classic tower of the church grandly rises.  The
+entrance-gates to the domain of Bryanstone are jealously kept locked and
+guarded, but there be ways of circumventing this churlish exclusiveness
+and of seeing the astonishingly beautiful scenery of the park, as the
+present writer has by chance discovered for himself.  You, at the cost of
+some effort in hill-climbing, take the defences in the rear, and entering
+away back by the farmstead and workshops of the estate, come down by the
+finest of the scenery to those selfsame locked gates at these outskirts
+of Blandford, to observe and hear with some secret satisfaction the
+expressed horror of the lodge-keeper, only too anxious to let you out and
+be rid of you.
+
+But, for the unenterprising, there is a sufficiently beautiful distant
+view of the park and of the new mansion from the Town Bridge.  A former
+Lord Portman in 1780 employed James Wyatt to build him a classic mansion
+which remained until the rule of the present owner of the title, who
+demolished and replaced it with the fine mansion designed by Norman Shaw,
+R.A., and built in red brick and Portland stone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+               THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER
+
+FROM this point the old coach-road becomes astonishingly hilly, so that
+mere words cannot accurately portray it, and recourse must be had to the
+eloquent armoury of the printer’s case to set it forth in any truly
+convincing manner.  The series of semicircular dumpling hills is not
+adequately to be shadowed forth by the aid of mere brackets—we must
+picture them thus:
+
+                [Picture: Representation of Hills in Type]
+
+and, to give some notion of the quality of the surface during the heats
+of summer, let a glaring white surface five inches deep in dust and
+powdered flint be imagined, the whole stirred up into a stifling halo of
+floating particles by the frequent passage of a flock of sheep.  Such is
+the Exeter Road between Blandford and Dorchester in the merry months of
+summer.
+
+Five miles of this bring us to the village of Winterborne Whitchurch,
+anciently referred to as “Album Monasterium” or “Blaunch Minster,”
+situated in the stony bottom where the little stream called the
+Winterborne does not in summer flow across the road.  John Wesley,
+grandfather of the more famous John, the founder of Methodism, was vicar
+of this parish in 1658, and on the Restoration was dispossessed, when he
+took to a life of itinerant preaching amid the hills and dales of
+Dorsetshire, not altogether dissimilar from that of his celebrated
+grandson.  Here, about 1540, was born George Turberville, the poet.  To
+this succeeds, in less than another three miles, Milborne St. Andrew, on
+the less dried up Mill Bourne.  This, the “Millpond St. Jude’s” alluded
+to in _Far from the Madding Crowd_, is a pretty place, of an old-world
+coaching interest, reflected from its partly thatched “Royal Oak” inn and
+the post office, once the “White Hart,” with the imposing effigy of a
+white hart still prominent on its cornice, in company with those of two
+foxes and a row of miniature cannon.  Up along a byroad, past the
+feathery poplars that lend so feminine an air of beauty to the village,
+is the church, and then the Manor House Farm, once the residence of the
+Mansell Pleydells, who since the building of Whatcombe House, near by
+Winterborne Whitchurch, in 1758, have left this residence to farming.
+The red-brick pillars of the entrance-gates remain—partly ruined and
+standing foolishly, without a trace of the old carriage drive that once
+went between them—on the grass, surmounted still with sculptured displays
+of military trophies surrounding a cartouche bearing the lichened arms of
+the Pleydells, including an inescutcheon of pretence showing that before
+they allied themselves with a Mansell they married money with a Morton.
+It is a fine house, full of character, with unusually—and somewhat
+foreign-looking—high-pitched roof.  Grand old trees lead up to it, and in
+the distance one perceives a manorial pigeon-house, against the skyline.
+The old drive led round to the other side of the mansion, where it is
+divided from the meadows by a moatlike cut in the Mill Bourne, now,
+however, richer in mud than in water, and crossed by a brick bridge.  We
+can picture Lady Constantine, the susceptible young and wealthy widow of
+the defunct Sir Blount, stealing at night over this bridge, to visit
+Swithin St. Cleeve, stargazing in his lonely tower on the hilltop.  In
+the garden, with its sundial, are pretty old-world box-edged flower-beds
+and shady arbours.  Foundations of many demolished buildings are
+traceable in the meadows.
+
+           [Picture: The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew]
+
+The scene of _Two on a Tower_ is a selection from various places.  “The
+tower,” Mr. Hardy writes to me, “had two or three originals—Horton,
+Charborough, etc.”  Those other places are duly described in these pages,
+but the “etc.” covers the curious brick obelisk built on the summit of
+the earthwork-encircled hill near by this old manor-house of Milborne St.
+Andrew, and called Weatherbury Castle.  Standing on this “fir-shrouded
+hilltop,” one may see, for many miles around, summer conflagrations among
+the furze on Bere Heath, the tall tower in Charborough Park, which, much
+more than this obelisk, resembles Swithin’s observatory, and, near at
+hand, below, this old manor-house, the “Welland House” of the story.
+From this eyrie, too, you perceive the old Exeter Road swooping whitely
+downhill, and hear the hum of threshing-machines, coming up, like the
+drowsy buzz of insects, from the vale.
+
+                      [Picture: Weatherbury Castle]
+
+It is not difficult to detect sarcasm in the description of this hill.
+It “was (according to some antiquaries) an old Roman camp—if it were not
+(as others insisted) an old British castle, or (as the rest swore) an old
+Saxon field of Witanagemote—with remains of an outer and an inner vallum,
+a winding path leading up between their overlapping ends by an easy
+ascent.”
+
+                [Picture: The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle]
+
+Not so easy, really—indeed, demanding a rather strenuous climb.  And when
+you are on the crest of that ancient glacis (impregnable it might well
+have been when men fought hand to hand) it is with some difficulty you
+penetrate the dense woodland growing within this _ceinture_.  Little can
+in these times be seen of the obelisk from without: only from one
+particular view-point can you observe its ultimate inches and the metal
+ball that caps it, rising mysteriously from amid the topmost branches of
+the fir-trees.  Its situation is exactly described in the story: “The
+gloom and solitude which prevailed round the base were remarkable.  The
+sob of the environing trees” (how like, by the way, to that passage in
+Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s _Ruddigore_, “the sob of the breeze is heard in the
+trees”) “was here expressively manifest, and, moved by the light breeze,
+their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted pendulums,
+while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar’s sides, or occasionally
+clicked in catching each other.  Below the level of their summits the
+masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never pierced that
+moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation.  Pads of moss grew in the joints
+of the stonework, and here and there shade-loving insects had engraved on
+the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning, but curious and
+suggestive.”
+
+[Picture: E.M.P. inscription on obelisk] The why or purpose of this
+slight brick structure are lost.  The only clue, afforded by the
+inscription on a stone tablet set in the lichened bricks, points to it
+being the handiwork of a Pleydell.  It was, in fact, built by Edmund
+Morton Pleydell, but his purpose, if indeed he had one beyond a singular
+notion of ornament, has passed, with himself, beyond these voices; and
+the neglected condition of the monument—if indeed it be a monument—fully
+bears out the moral reflection in _Two on a Tower_.  “Here stood this
+aspiring piece of masonry, erected as the most conspicuous and
+ineffaceable reminder of a man that could be thought of; and yet the
+whole aspect of the memorial betokened forgetfulness.  Probably not a
+dozen people within the district knew the name of the person
+commemorated, while perhaps not a soul remembered whether the column were
+hollow or solid, whether with or without a tablet explaining its date and
+purpose.”
+
+Regaining the high road and passing uphill by where the Dewlish toll-gate
+once stood, and by an up-and-down course infinitely varied as to
+gradient, we come at length down to the valley of the Piddle, and to
+Piddletown, the “Weatherbury” of _Far from the Madding Crowd_, where
+Gabriel Oak, come down in the world by the agency of Fate and his foolish
+young sheep-dog, took service with his distractingly elusive dear,
+Bathsheba Everdene, the lady-farmer.  Weatherbury, as Mr. Hardy
+regretfully tells us, is not the Weatherbury he once knew.  It has indeed
+been very largely rebuilt, and the rather stern and prim limestone
+cottages that stand prominently in one of its several streets do not
+altogether prepossess one in favour of this village that is not quite a
+townlet and yet may quite possibly resent the more rustic definition.
+The “several” streets are, after all, rather roads, with rows of houses
+and cottages less integrally than incidentally there, and the several are
+perhaps reducible to a term less connotive of number; but they run in
+unexpected directions and uncovenanted angles, and so make an imposing
+show, comparable with the effect produced by six supers who, by judicious
+stage-management in passing and repassing, can be made to represent an
+army.  But the Piddle, running sparkling and clear through Piddletown,
+redeems the conjoined effect of those streets and gives the place a final
+and definitive _cachet_ of rurality, by no means belied by the very
+large, though very rustic, church—happily still unrestored, and, with its
+tall pews and fine Jacobean carved oak choir-gallery, a perfect picture
+of an ancient Wessex place of worship.  Hardean village choirs and
+Gabriel Oak’s bass voice take, if it be possible, an even greater air of
+actuality to the pilgrim who enters here.
+
+The interest of Piddletown church is added to by the fine and curious
+bowl font, diapered in an unusual pattern, and by the tombs of the
+Martins of Athelhampton, who lie mediævally recumbent in effigy in their
+own chapel, quite unconcerned, although scored over with the initials of
+the undistinguished, and although their old manor-house of Athelhampton,
+near by, on the road to Bere Regis, has since the time they became
+extinct passed through several alien hands.  Poor old fellows!  Their
+somewhat threatening motto, under their old monkey crest, of “He who
+looks at Martin’s ape Martin’s ape shall look at him!” has lost any point
+it ever had.
+
+                          [Picture: Piddletown]
+
+A touching epitaph desires your prayers for two of the family:
+
+    Here lyeth the body of Xpofer Martyn Esquyer,
+    Sone and heyre unto Syr Willym Martyn, knyght,
+    Pray for there Soules with harty desyre
+    That bothe may be sure of Eternall lyght;
+    Calling to Remembraunce that ev’ry wyhgt
+    Most nedys dye, and therefor lett us pray
+    As other for us may do Another day.
+
+This church of Piddletown, or “Weatherbury,” is the scene of Sergeant
+Troy’s belated remorse and of the acute misery of that incident where,
+coming by the light of a lantern and planting flowers on Fanny Robin’s
+grave, he sleeps in the porch while the rain-storm breaks and the
+storm-water from the gurgoyles of the tower spouts furiously over the
+spot.
+
+“The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle’s jaws directed all its
+vengeance into the grave.  The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion,
+and boiled like chocolate.  The water accumulated and washed deeper down,
+and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into the night. . . .  The
+flowers so carefully planted by Fanny’s repentant lover began to move and
+writhe in their bed.  The winter-violets turned slowly upside down, and
+became a mere mat of mud.  Soon the snowdrops and other bulbs danced in
+the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron.  Plants of the tufted
+species were loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.”
+
+The street beside the church retains a good deal of its quaint features
+of thatch and plaster, with deep eaves where the house-martins build.  A
+pretty corner including an old thatched house with architectonic windows
+closely resembling those of a Queen Anne bureau, and supported on pillars
+having a cousinship with classic art, is especially noticeable.
+
+                 [Picture: A quaint corner in Piddletown]
+
+If we wish to see the old mansion that served as model for Bathsheba’s
+farm, we shall not find it in Piddletown, but must turn aside and proceed
+up the valley of the Piddle, in the direction of Piddlehinton and
+Piddletrenthide—usually termed “Longpiddle.”  Before reaching these, at
+the distance of rather over a mile, we come to Lower Walterstone, where,
+behind noble groups of beeches, horse-chestnuts, and sycamores growing on
+raised grassy banks, it will be found, in the shape of a Jacobean mansion
+eloquently portrayed by the novelist:
+
+“By daylight, the bower of Oak’s new-found mistress, Bathsheba Everdene,
+presented itself as a hoary building, of the Jacobean stage of Classic
+Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion which told
+at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the
+manorial hall upon a small estate around it, now altogether effaced as a
+distinct property, and merged in the vast tract of a non-resident
+landlord which comprised several such modest demesnes.  Fluted pilasters,
+worked from the solid stone, decorated its front, and above the roof
+pairs of chimneys were here and there linked by an arch, some gables and
+other unmanageable features still retaining traces of their Gothic
+extraction.  Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions
+upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or sengreen sprouted
+from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings.  A gravel walk leading
+from the door to the road in front was incrusted at the sides with more
+moss—here it was a silver-green variety, the nut-brown of the gravel
+being visible to the width of only a foot or two in the centre.  This
+circumstance, and the generally sleepy air of the whole prospect here,
+together with the animated and contrasting state of the reverse façade,
+suggested to the imagination that, on the adaptation of the building for
+farming purposes, the vital principle of the house had turned round
+inside its body, to face the other way.”
+
+The way from Piddletown to Dorchester, passing the hamlet singularly and
+interestingly named “Troy Town,” which, although itself intrinsically
+without visible interest, invites speculation, presently passes over
+Yellowham Hill, clothed in luxuriant woods.  This spot, the “Yalbury
+Hill” of Troy’s excruciatingly pitiful meeting with Fanny Robin, figures,
+together with the woodlands—the “Yalbury Great Wood” of _Under the
+Greenwood Tree_—in several others among the Wessex stories.  Coming to it
+in old times, the coaches changed horses at the “Buck’s Head” inn, now
+quite disestablished and forgot, save for the humorous description of it
+to be found in the pages of _Far from the Madding Crowd_.  Unswervingly
+the highway passes over its crest and down on the other side, the
+wayfarer along it watched by bright-eyed squirrels and the other lesser
+fauna of this dense covert, while he thinks himself unobserved.  It is a
+lovely road, but you should see it and its encompassing woods in autumn,
+when the October sunshine, with that characteristic golden sheen peculiar
+to the time of year, falls between the rich red trunks of the firs on to
+the golden-brown of the dried bracken; when the acorns are ripe on the
+dwarf oaks and fall with startling little crashes into the sere leaves of
+the undergrowth; when the nuts are ripe on the hazels and the
+squirrels—too busy now to follow the wayfarer’s movements—are
+industriously all day long gathering store of them over against winter.
+Then Yellowham Woods are at their finest.
+
+     [Picture: Lower Walterstone Farm: Original of Bathsheba’s farm]
+
+Where the descent from this eminence reaches an intermediate level,
+preparatory to diving again downwards, the road takes a curve through the
+park-lands of Kingston House, a stately but cold-looking mansion of
+stone, figuring in that first novel, _Desperate Remedies_, as “Knapwater
+House.”  The bias of the architect, as he then was, is prominently
+displayed in Mr. Hardy’s description of it: “The house was regularly and
+substantially built of clean grey freestone throughout, in that plainer
+fashion of Greek classicism which prevailed at the latter end of the last
+century, when the copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic
+variations in the Roman orders.  The main block approximated to a square
+on the ground plan, having a projection in the centre of each side,
+surmounted by a pediment.  From each angle of the north side ran a line
+of buildings lower than the rest, turning inwards again at their farthest
+end, and forming within them a spacious open court, within which
+resounded an echo of astounding clearness.  These erections were in their
+turn backed by ivy-covered ice-houses, laundries, and stables, the whole
+mass of subsidiary buildings being half buried beneath close-set shrubs
+and trees.”
+
+Leaving aside, for the present, an exploration of Stinsford, down the
+next turning, to come later to a particular and intimate discussion of
+it, we proceed to Dorchester, whose houses, and those of its allied
+suburb of Fordington, are now seen, crowning the ridge on which the old
+county town stands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+                                DORCHESTER
+
+DORCHESTER, the “Casterbridge” of the novels, stands upon or, more
+correctly, above, the River Frome, and from that circumstance derived its
+ancient Roman name of Durnovaria, whose Latinity Mr. Hardy has exploited
+in the name of “Durnover” he confers upon Fordington.  The Romans
+themselves did by no means invent their name for the station they founded
+here, but just adapted the title given by the native tribe of Durotriges
+to their settlement.  Those natives, who were of Welsh stock, styled
+their habitation by the sufficiently Welsh name of Dwrinwyr, which, like
+all Cymric place-names, was descriptive and alluded to its watery
+situation.
+
+The approach to Dorchester has suffered in late years, in the pictorial
+point of view, from the decay and destruction of many of those
+magnificent old elms that once formed a noble introduction along this,
+the “London Road”; but it is not wholly to be bankrupted of beauty, for,
+although Dorchester may continue to grow, it is not in this direction
+that its suburbs will be thrown out.  The flat water-meadows of the Frome
+forbid building operations here, and in effect say, at the bridge
+immediately below where Fordington on its ridge stands on the thitherward
+bank of the stream—“thus far and no farther!”  From this approach,
+looking to where Fordington’s houses die away on the left hand, and to
+where the chalky downs begin to rise, you may obtain a distant view of
+the novelist’s residence, a house he himself designed, standing beside
+the Wareham Road near where an old turnpike-gate stood, and called from
+it “Max Gate.”  Looking, however, straight ahead, the road into
+Dorchester is seen becoming a street and going with inflexible Roman
+directness through the town, with the ancient church tower of Fordington
+slightly to the left, and the equally ancient church of St. Peter’s
+immediately in front, in the centre of the town, where the two main
+streets cross.  Attendant modern churches and chapels, and the Town Hall,
+with spires, act as satellites.  To the right hand, rising bulky from the
+huddled mass of houses, is a grey building which but a little experience
+of touring in England identifies without need of inquiry as the gaol.
+
+Dorchester, figuring as the “Casterbridge” of that mayor whose surprising
+history is set forth in that powerful story, bulks large in the whole
+series of Wessex novels—as how could it fail of doing, seeing that the
+novelist himself was born at Upper Bockhampton, only three miles away?
+In masterly fashion he has described its salient points, as they were
+before modernity had come to obliterate them, or at least to take off the
+sharp edge of their singularity.  He has expended much thought upon Roman
+Dorchester, and speculated upon what manner of place it was fifteen
+hundred years ago.  “Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street,
+alley, and precinct.  It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed
+dead men of Rome.  It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep
+about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier
+or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest
+for a space of fifteen hundred years.”  Nay, even within the precincts of
+his own garden, on the edge of the rotund upland that looks so wanly down
+upon the railway, relics of the legionaries have been discovered.  Three
+of those stout warriors were there found.  “Each body was fitted with,
+one may almost say, perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the
+head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other, the
+tight-fitting situation being strongly suggestive of the chicken in the
+egg-shell.”
+
+More attuned to modern times is that description of Dorchester as it
+appeared when Susan, Henchard’s wife, with Elizabeth-Jane, entered it
+from the London Road that evening.  Wonderfully observed and true is that
+passage where the light of the street lamps, glimmering through those
+engirdling trees that were then, even more than now, the great feature of
+the town, is made a snug and comforting contrast with the outside
+country, seeming “strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering
+its nearness to life.”  Then the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of
+the people, as reflected in the character of the goods displayed in shop
+windows, is neatly shown, in a list of those objects: the hay-rakes, the
+seed-lips, butter-firkins, hoes and spades and mattocks; the
+horse-embrocations, scythes, reaping-hooks, and hedger’s and ditcher’s
+gloves, articles all of everyday requirement.
+
+The “grizzled church” to which they came was St. Peter’s, whose tower
+showed “how completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had
+been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in the crevices
+thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass, almost as far up as the
+very battlements.”  Yes, and so one vividly remembers it; but restoration
+has recently made away with all these evidences of age, and cleaned the
+stonework and renewed and pointed it, greatly to the aid of the tower’s
+structural stability, ’tis true, but the very death of picturesque
+effect.  There is a pleasing thing here, at the foot of this tower, where
+High East Street and High West Street join.  It is the bronze life-sized
+statue, in his habit as he lived, of “Pa’son Barnes,” otherwise the
+Reverend William Barnes, the Dorset poet, described by Thomas Hardy as he
+is represented here—“an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak,
+knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his
+shoulders and a stout staff in his hand.”  This quaint figure, whose life
+and thoughts and writings were racy of the soil whence he sprang—he was
+born in the Vale of Blackmore—was for many years a quite inadequately
+rewarded schoolmaster, and only late in life was given, first the living
+of Whitcomb, and then that of Winterborne Came, near Dorchester.  His
+poems in the Dorsetshire vernacular, long known and admired, were not
+pecuniarily successful.  “What a mockery is life!” said he.  “They praise
+me, and take away my bread!  They may be putting up a statue to me some
+day, when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live.  I asked for
+bread, and they gave me a stone!”
+
+Prophetic indeed! for here is the statue, with beneath it the
+inscription:
+
+                                WILLIAM BARNES
+                                  1801–1886
+
+and the quotation from one of his own folk-poems:
+
+    Zoo now I hope his kindly fëace
+    Is gone to vind a better plëace,
+    But still wi’ vo’k a’ left behind
+    He’ll always be a kept in mind.
+
+The mural monument of a sixteenth-century Thomas Hardy, within the
+church, attracts attention.  The inscription states him to have been
+“esquire” and of Melcombe Regis, and goes on to describe his benefactions
+to the town and the gratitude of the “Baylives and Burgisses” therefor.
+To “commend to posterity an example soe worthy of imitation,” they
+erected this tablet.  He is said to be the common ancestor of Admiral Sir
+Thomas Hardy, the friend and comrade of Nelson, and of Thomas Hardy, the
+novelist.
+
+Still from this tower of St. Peter’s sounds the curfew chime, with the
+stroke of eight o’clock every evening, as described in the story; its
+“peremptory clang” the signal for shop-shutting throughout the town.
+“Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol,
+another from the gable of an alms-house, with a preparative creak of
+machinery more audible than the note of the bell.”
+
+In High East Street stands, just as described, the principal inn—I
+suppose in these times one should, for fear of disrespect say “hotel”—of
+Dorchester, the “King’s Arms,” white-faced, with the selfsame “spacious
+bow-window projected into the street over the main portico,” the whole
+not too imposing for comfort, and not too homely for dignity.  It was a
+coaching house in days gone by.  From a step above the pavement on the
+opposite side of the street Susan and Elizabeth-Jane, amid the crowd,
+witnessed the dinner given to the mayor, and through the archway Boldwood
+carried Bathsheba, fainting at the news of her husband’s death.
+
+Equally white-faced, but a good deal more picturesque, is the “White
+Hart,” down at the end, or the beginning if you will, of the sloping
+street, as you enter the town.  By it runs the Frome, and in its
+courtyard on market-days may be seen such a concourse of carriers’ carts
+as rarely witnessed nowadays.  Dorchester is a busy carrying centre, by
+no means spoiled in that respect by railways, which yet fail to reach
+many of its surrounding villages.
+
+The brick bridge that here spans the Frome, and the stone bridge some
+distance farther away, spanning a branch of the same stream out away in
+the meads, have their parts in the _Mayor of Casterbridge_.  “These
+bridges had speaking countenances.  Every projection in each was worn
+down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from generations
+of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year made restless
+movements against these parapets, as they had stood there, meditating on
+the aspect of affairs.  In the case of the more pliable bricks and
+stones, even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the same mixed
+mechanism.  The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint;
+since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the
+coping off and throw it down into the river, in reckless defiance of the
+magistrates.  For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of
+the town—those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in
+crime.  Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their
+meditations in preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so
+clear.”  He goes on to tell how there was a marked difference in quality
+between the frequenters of the near bridge of brick and the far one of
+stone.  The more thoroughgoing failures and those with the most
+threadbare characters, or with no characters at all, save bad ones,
+preferred the near bridge: to reach it entailed less trouble, and it was
+not for such as them to mind the glare of publicity.
+
+“The _misérables_ who would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer
+stamp.  They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is
+called ‘out of a situation’ from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient
+of the professional class—shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get
+rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more
+weary time between dinner and dark.”  These unfortunates gazed steadily
+into the river, never turning to notice passers-by, and indeed shrinking
+from observation.  And so day by day they looked and looked in the
+stream, until at last their bodies were sometimes found in it.
+
+                    [Picture: Ten Hatches, Dorchester]
+
+When Henchard’s ruin was complete, he too began to frequent the stone
+bridge, and would have ended in the same way, not at the bridge itself,
+but over in the meadows where the many branches of the Frome are
+regulated and controlled by a number of sluices known as Ten Hatches.
+“To the east of Casterbridge lay moors and meadows, through which much
+water flowed.  The wanderer in this direction, who should stand still for
+a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these
+waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones,
+from near and far parts of the moor.  At a hole in a rotten weir they
+executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone
+breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic
+cymballing; and at Durnover Weir they hissed.  The spot at which their
+instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence
+during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds.”
+
+The ruined mayor, to whom, and not the cold, successful Donald Farfrae,
+the reader’s sympathies go out, would have ended all his troubles here
+with a plunge in the waters, had it not been for the ghastly floating
+Skimmington effigy of himself he saw floating down the current as he was
+about to drop in.
+
+“Gray’s Bridge,” as the stone structure on the London Road is known, is
+that toward which Bob Loveday, in the _Trumpet Major_, gazed anxiously,
+awaiting the coach bearing his Matilda, and across it, of course, on
+their way to Longpiddle, went those “Crusted Characters,” telling stories
+in the carrier’s cart jogging along with them so comfortably from the
+“White Hart.”
+
+The fateful, almost sentient, character many natural objects are made to
+assume in the march of Mr. Hardy’s tragic stories is expressly shown in
+his description of the Roman amphitheatre of Maumbury, at the farther or
+western extremity of Dorchester, beside the road to Weymouth.  He styles
+it “the Ring, on the Budmouth Road,” and explains how “it was to
+Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly
+of the same magnitude.”  It is not, as might be gathered from this
+passage, a building, like the Coliseum, but a vast amphitheatre formed by
+earthworks.  Used by the Romans as the scene of their gladiatorial
+displays, it has doubtless witnessed many an act of savage cruelty, but
+is now a solitude.  A sinister place it has been always, for, when
+executions were public affairs, the gallows stood within the old arena;
+and until well into the eighteenth century the populace came to it in
+thousands to witness the execution of felons where, before the dawn of
+the Christian era, fighting men had struggled to the death: where
+perhaps, in early Christian times, in the days of the Diocletian
+persecution, Christians had been sacrificed.  It was here, in 1705, that
+Mary Channing was executed, under the most fearful circumstances of
+barbarity belonging to the penalties prescribed for _petit treason_.  The
+crimes known by that name included several forms of rebellion against
+authority, among them the murder of a husband by a wife.  A husband being
+then, much more than now, in the eyes of the law in a position of
+authority over his wife, to murder him was not merely murder—it was
+_petit treason_ as well, and therefore deserving of exceptional
+punishment.  Mary Brookes, married by the wish of her parents, against
+her own inclination, to one Richard Channing of Dorchester, a grocer,
+almost ruined him by her extravagance, and then poisoned him by giving
+him white mercury, first in rice-milk, and twice afterwards in a glass of
+wine.  At the Summer Assizes, 1704, she was found guilty and condemned to
+death.  On March 21st, 1705, accordingly, she was strangled here, in this
+arena, and then burned, the horrible spectacle being witnessed by ten
+thousand persons.  She was but nineteen years of age.  This Golgotha was
+disestablished in 1767, when the gallows was removed to the decent
+solitudes of Bradford Down, a mile and a half along the Exeter Road, on
+the way to Bridport.  It was to this spot that a mayor of Dorchester
+desired to escort a distinguished traveller leaving the town, after being
+presented with the customary address.  “May I be allowed to accompany
+your Highness as far as the gallows?” he asked, greatly to the dismay of
+that departing Serenity, to whom the allusion seemed more ill-omened than
+really it was.  It is a tale told of many places and many mayors, and he
+would be a clever commentator who should distinguish the real original.
+
+The lone amphitheatre of Maumbury has thus, it will be seen, real
+tragical associations fitting it for the novelist’s more sombre humours.
+He tells how intrigues were there carried forward, how furtive and
+sinister meetings happened within the rim of these ancient earthworks,
+and how, although the patching up of long-standing feuds might be
+attempted on this spot, seldom had it been the place of meeting of happy
+lovers.  In this ring, then, the reconciliation of Susan and Henchard
+took place, after eighteen years, and was but the prelude to miseries and
+disasters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+                         DORCHESTER (_continued_)
+
+HENCHARD’S house—“one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old
+brick,” there are many such here—was in the neighbourhood of North
+Street, and not far from that Corn Exchange where Bathsheba was wont, on
+market days, to mingle with the burly farmers and corn-factors, like a
+yacht among ironclads, displaying for inspection the sample wheat in her
+outstretched palm.
+
+Down here, too, is the gaol, whose mass is seen from the meads on
+approaching the town.  It has been much altered, but the heavy stone
+gateway, together with the flanking walls of red brick, is very much as
+of old.  Happily, such things as are noticed in that gruesome short
+story, _The Withered Arm_, are things only of dreadful memory.  At that
+time the populace of Dorchester were accustomed to wait below in the
+meadows, eager to witness the executioner, the criminals—murderers,
+burglars, rick-firers, sheep and horse-stealers, even down to those
+convicted of petty larceny—being capitally condemned and hanged as high
+as, possibly indeed higher than, Haman, whose place of suspension is
+notoriously and traditionally lofty.  Gertrude Lodge, coming here for the
+cure of her withered arm by the agency of the dead man’s touch, observed,
+as all could then not help observing, those “three rectangular lines
+against the sky,” which indicated the coming execution and the morrow’s
+exhibition, to be followed by the merry-makings of Hang Fair.  When she
+enquired the hour of execution, she was told: “The same as usual—twelve
+o’clock, or as soon after as the London mail-coach gets in.  We always
+wait for that, in case of a reprieve.”
+
+                        [Picture: Dorchester Gaol]
+
+In Dorchester Gaol—we have no space here for those merely actual persons
+of flesh and blood who have been incarcerated, or who have suffered in
+it—those more real characters of fiction, Boldwood and Marston were
+confined; and hence the Shottsford watchmaker of _The Three Strangers_,
+lying under sentence of death, escaped along the downs to Higher
+Crowstairs, where, while sheltering in the ingle-nook of the cottage, two
+other strangers, one of them the hangman deputed to execute the demands
+of the law upon him on the morrow, take shelter from the weather.
+
+To follow this gloomy train a little longer, the veritable Hangman’s
+Cottage, home of this erstwhile busy functionary, at a time when
+Dorchester demanded the whole time and energies of a Jack Ketch, and not
+a very occasional visit from one common to the whole kingdom, may be
+seen, at the foot of Glydepath Lane, in a fine damp situation near the
+river.  It is one of a tiny group of heavily thatched old rustic cottages
+built of grouted flint and chalk, faced and patched with red brick, and
+held together with iron ties, so that in their old age they shall not,
+some night, altogether collapse and deposit their inhabitants among the
+potatoes, the peas, and cabbages of their fertile gardens.  Dorchester
+paid its hangman a regular salary, and in the intervals between his more
+important business, he was under engagement to perform those minor
+punishments of whipping and scourging, of putting in the stocks, and of
+pillorying, by whose plentiful administration Old England was made the
+“Merry England” of our forefathers.  Let not the reader, however, seek a
+covert satire here.  It is not to be gainsaid that it was a “Merry
+England,” for the times were so brutal that, in all such degrading and
+pitiful spectacles as these, the populace took the keenest delight.
+Sufficient for the day—! and those who made merry did not stop to
+consider that they who were now spectators might soon very likely afford
+in their own persons the same spectacle.
+
+Miserable times!  Proof of them, do you need seek it, is to be found in
+the Dorchester Museum, where the leaden weights, boldly inscribed
+“MERCY,” are pointed out as the contribution, years ago, of an
+exceptionally tender-hearted governor of the gaol to a more pitiful
+method of ending the condemned man who was to die for his crime of arson.
+
+               [Picture: The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester]
+
+The man was of unusually light weight, and, as those were the times when
+men really were slowly and painfully hanged and choked by degrees, before
+criminals were given a drop and their necks broken, it was thought a
+kindly thing on the part of this governor that he should have provided
+these heavy weights, to attach to this particular victim’s feet and so
+help to shorten his misery.
+
+This museum it was that Lucetta, keen to get the girl out of the way,
+suggested for Elizabeth Jane’s entertainment; with affected enthusiasm
+and a good deal of veiled womanly sarcasm at the expense of antiquities,
+describing how it contained “crowds of interesting things—skeletons,
+teeth, old pots and pans, ancient boots and shoes, birds’ eggs—all
+charmingly instructive.”
+
+But enough of such things, let us to other quarters.
+
+Looking on to the cheerful and prosperous South Street from the corner of
+Durngate Street is the substantial “grey façade” of Lucetta’s house,
+where lived Henchard’s lady-love, whose affections were so readily
+transferable.  The lower portion of this, the “High Place Hall” of the
+story, has suffered a transformation into business premises, but the
+resounding alleyways of Durngate Street and neighbouring lanes are as
+gloomy as those spots are described.  “At night the forms of passengers
+were patterned by the lamps in black shadows upon the pale walls,” and so
+they are still.
+
+But the description of Lucetta’s house in those pages is a composite
+picture; a good deal of it deriving from an old mansion in another part
+of the town.  This will be found by taking a narrow thoroughfare leading
+out of the north side of High West Street, and called, in different parts
+of its course, Glydepath Lane and Glydepath Street.  In this quiet byway
+is the early eighteenth-century mansion known as Colyton House, sometime
+a town residence of the Churchill family, and so named from the little
+Devonshire town of Colyton, near which is situated Ash, that old
+dwelling, now a farmhouse, whence the historic Churchills sprang.
+
+Readily to be seen, in a blank wall, is the long-filled-in archway, with
+the dreadful keystone mask, alluded to in the pages of _The Mayor of
+Casterbridge_.
+
+                   [Picture: Colyton House, Dorchester]
+
+“Originally the mask had exhibited a comic leer, as could still be
+discerned; but generations of Casterbridge boys had thrown stones at the
+mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the blows thereof had chipped off the
+lips and jaws as if they had been eaten away by disease.”  Its appearance
+is indeed of a ghastly leprous nature, infinitely shuddery.
+
+At this end of the town, out upon the Charminster road is the great Roman
+encampment of Poundbury, or, locally, “Pummery,” where Henchard spread
+that feast, deserted by those for whom it was intended, in favour of the
+rival entertainment in the West Walks, prepared by the hateful Farfrae,
+that paragon of all the business and higher virtues, whom the reader
+perversely, but not unnaturally, detests.  “Roman” it has been in this
+last passage declared, but, in truth, its origin has been as widely
+disputed as that of Weatherbury Castle, where the varying theories arouse
+Mr. Hardy’s sarcasm so markedly.  It lies without the site of the Roman
+walls of Durnovaria, and probably formed some advanced outpost or great
+camp in the long years of the Roman occupation of Britain, before the
+establishment of security and the growth of their towns.  Those Roman
+walls are now for the most part gone and their sites were long ago
+planted with avenues, now growing aged and past their prime, and ceased
+to be that clean-cut barrier between _urbs_ and _rure_ they formed of
+old, when Dorchester of pre-railway days had not grown too big for that
+girdle the Romans had set about her: a girdle not too constrictive for
+the needs of the Middle Age, nor even in the eighteenth century with any
+suspicion of tight-lacing, but all too compressive soon after the coaches
+had given way to trains, and steel rails and steam along them had sent up
+the birthrate.  A notable passage in _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ tells
+how there were not, quite a little while ago, any suburbs here, in the
+modern sense, nor any gradual fusion of town and country.  “The farmer’s
+boy could sit under his barleymow, and pitch a stone into the window of
+the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances
+standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a
+sheep stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa,’ that floated in
+at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”
+
+But those bounds have in several places been leaped, and, in especial
+where the South Walk runs, modern villas have redly replaced the golden
+grain or the green pastures.  Changed manners and customs have brought
+about this alteration, quite as much as increased population.  The four
+old traditional streets of the town, together with their more immediate
+offshoots, have been resigned more exclusively to business than of yore,
+and made less a residence.  The butchers, the bakers, the
+candlestick-makers, who would once have scorned to live anywhere else
+than over “the shop,” will now not very often condescend to make their
+homes in the upper stages of their “stores” or “establishments,” or by
+what other pretty names modern finesse elects to describe shops and
+counters and tills and such like things by which tradespeople become
+rich.
+
+And, by that same token, the business premises thus deserted for snug
+suburban villas, are themselves changing.  One could never, in modern
+times, have strictly called Dorchester generally picturesque, in the
+prominent circumstances of those four main streets: repeated
+conflagrations that destroyed most of the really old and interesting
+houses forbade that, and replaced thatch and barge-boarded gables with
+plain brick fronts, severe in unornamental rectangular windows, and
+ending on the skyline with unimaginative straight copings.  But the
+latest manifestations of these times, when they say business is a
+struggle and all trades alike carried on less for the profit of the
+purveyor, than for the good of the purchaser, are expensive carved stone
+and brick frontages, with good artistic features.  As art in this country
+only spells much expenditure of good money and as building operations are
+always costly, it is a little difficult to square all these developments
+with the talk of “hard times.”  South Street, in especial, is being
+grandly transformed, and “Napper’s Mite,” the crouching row of
+almshouses, built from the benefaction of the good Sir Robert Napper, in
+1615, made to look additionally humble by newly risen tall buildings.
+But the town authorities have not yet removed the old rusticated stone
+obelisk that stands in Cornhill, in the centre of the town, where High
+East and High West Streets, and North and South Streets meet.  It serves
+the multum-in-parvo purposes of a pump, a lamp-standard, and a
+leaning-stock for Dorchester’s weary or born-tired, and is moreover a
+landmark.  But the two dumpy little houses at the corner, which were
+properly dumpy and humble and—so to speak—knew their place, and abased
+themselves in the presence of their betters—that is to say, in the
+contiguity of St. Peter’s across the road—have been rebuilt, with the
+result that their tall upstanding pretentiousness detracts not a little
+from the height of that “grizzled tower.”
+
+And so, turning to the left at this corner, we leave Dorchester for
+Bridport, along High West Street, the quietest of all these
+thoroughfares, and looking rather “out of it,” and somewhat glad of that
+fact, in a dignified, exclusive way, typified by its aristocratic old
+houses, and its old County Hall.  It is true there are a few shops in
+High Street, but they are by no means pushful shops.  They never make
+“alarming sacrifices,” nor sell off.  Indeed, were I not fearful of
+offending susceptibility, I might declare a belief that they never sell
+anything at all, and are kept by “grown-ups,” not grown tired of playing
+at shops when they did so arrive at years supposed to be those of
+discretion.  Here is a quiet shop—where they will doubtless sell you
+something, if you really enter and firmly insist upon it—occupying one of
+the few really old and picturesque houses in the main thoroughfare; it is
+the house “by tradition” occupied by the infamous Judge Jeffreys, when
+visiting Dorchester on the business of that special occasion, the Bloody
+Assize, holden to try the unhappy wretches arraigned for their part in
+Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685.  The old house bears an inscription to this
+effect.  Over three hundred prisoners faced the judge at that awful time,
+and two hundred and ninety received sentence of death.  Of these the
+number actually executed was seventy-four, and, as the old gossip at the
+“Three Mariners” tells, portions of their bodies were gibbeted in various
+parts of the county, “different j’ints sent about the country like
+butcher’s meat.”
+
+And so we leave Dorchester and its, on the whole, grim memories, along an
+avenue, fellow to that by which the town was entered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+                                 SWANAGE
+
+THE name of Swanage shares with that of Swansea, the honour of being,
+perhaps, the most poetic that any seaside resort ever owned.  It is a
+corruption of the Danish name of “Swanic,” or “Swanwich,” and there seems
+to be no reason to doubt—although there exists a school of antiquarians
+sceptical enough to doubt it—that the place was then, as its name
+indicates, a place of swans.  Your modern antiquary, disgusted at the
+childish legends once everywhere accepted as sober historical facts,
+rushes to the other extreme, and, although a thing be obvious, will not
+allow its obviousness, unless supported by documentary or other tangible
+evidence.  He must needs disregard the self-evident, and delve deeply and
+unavailingly in attempts to prove that “things are not what they seem.”
+
+Conjectures that there was at that time a royal swannery here are based
+upon the known fondness of royal personages for preserving that bird,
+once thought a table delicacy, and upon the existence from ancient times
+of the famous Abbotsbury swannery, along this same coast.  But it is
+needless here to labour the point; and although the little stream, more
+and more pollutedly with every year of the extension of modern Swanage,
+still flows down into the sea under the name of the Swan Brook, the
+argument supported by it in favour of the obvious origin of the
+place-name shall be no further pursued.
+
+But the surrounding quarries have for many centuries past given a very
+different character to Swanage than that of a village with a marshy creek
+inhabited by swans.  Few places ever proclaimed the industries by which
+they lived more prominently than did this little port, until well within
+recent recollection.  A colliery town no more insistently obtrudes the
+circumstances by which it earns its livelihood than Swanage displayed
+evidences of its cleanly trade and craft of stone-working and
+stone-exporting.
+
+The varieties of stone from the quarries to the rear of Swanage are among
+the most famous building and decorative stones in the world; for here we
+are at the gates of Isle of Purbeck, where, not only the oolitic
+limestone of the same nature as “Portland stone” is quarried, but that
+(to antiquaries at least) far more generally known material, “Purbeck
+marble,” as well.  No ancient church or cathedral of any considerable
+size or elaboration was considered complete without shafts and font and
+other decorative features of Purbeck marble, sometimes polished, at other
+times left in its native state; and thus, from very early times until the
+beginning of the sixteenth century, when more strikingly coloured and
+patterned foreign marbles began to find their way into England, Swanage
+in particular, and Purbeck in general, enjoyed an amazing prosperity.
+
+Swanage in Mr. Hardy’s pages is “Knollsea,” and is described in _The Hand
+of Ethelberta_ as a village:—“Knollsea,” we learn, “was a seaside village
+lying snug within two headlands, as between a finger and thumb.”  A very
+true simile, as a glance on the map, upon the configuration of Swanage
+Bay, will satisfy those curious in the exactness or otherwise of literary
+images.  But time has very rapidly vitiated the justness of what
+follows:—“Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a quarrier,
+unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and had been a
+quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half and had been
+to sea.”
+
+“The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same special sort as their
+pursuits.  The quarrymen in white fustian understood practical geology,
+the laws and accidents of dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the
+ways of the world and mammon; the seafaring men, in Guernsey frocks, had
+a clearer notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies
+than of any inland town in their own country.  This, for them, consisted
+of a busy portion, the Channel, where they lived and laboured, and a dull
+portion, the vague unexplored miles of interior at the back of the ports,
+which they seldom thought of.”
+
+This charming picture of an out-of-the world place remained, very little
+blurred by change, until well on into the ’80’s of the nineteenth
+century, when it occurred to exploiting railway folk that the time was
+ripe for the construction of a branch railway from Wareham.  With the
+opening of that line the primitive houses, and the equally primitive
+people who lived in them, suffered a change almost as sudden and complete
+as though a harlequin had waved his wand over their heads.
+
+There was indeed something exceptionally primitive in the Swanage people.
+They were chiefly quarrymen, and like all quarry folk, mining the great
+blocks of stone from mother earth, a strangely reserved and isolated
+race.  A man who, felling timber, might conceivably remain all his life
+mentally detached from his occupation, following it only mechanically,
+could not long in these quarries, rich in the embalmed stoniness of
+myriads of humble creatures living in the palæozoic age, remain
+unaffected by his surroundings.  An imaginative man might, not inaptly,
+conceive himself as a phenomenally gigantic giant working in some vast
+petrified graveyard among the petrifactions of a world infinitely little;
+and, as the dyer’s hand is subdued to the dye he works in, and—a less
+classic allusion—as the photographer acquires a permanent stain from his
+collodion, he could scarce escape the almost inevitable mental twist
+resulting from the surroundings.
+
+And as they were, and in some measure still are, individually peculiar,
+so collectively they retain their exclusiveness.  Still, with every
+recurrent Shrove Tuesday, their guild meets at Corfe, under the
+presidency of warden and steward; and even in these days it is not open
+for an outsider to become a Purbeck quarryman.  It is an industry only to
+be followed by patrimony and by due admission into its membership in the
+prescribed manner, which is that of appearing at the annual court with a
+penny loaf in one hand, a pot of beer in the other, and a sum of six
+shillings and eightpence in the pocket, ready to be duly paid down.
+
+With all the changes that have overtaken Swanage, who knows nowadays,
+save very old folk, that Swanage people are, or were, locally “Swanage
+Turks”?  When—outside Swanage, of course—you asked why so named, you were
+apt to be told “Tarks, we al’us carls ’em, ’cos they don’t know nawthen
+about anything.”  The informant in this particular instance was a Poole
+man.  None could possibly have brought this charge of comprehensive and
+thorough-going ignorance against the natives of Poole, for that ancient
+port was a sink of iniquity, and inhabited, if we are to believe the
+history books—which there is no reason we should not do—by ruffians who
+were by no means unspotted of the world, but had plumbed the depths of
+every wickedness.  Since Swanage has become the terminus of a branch
+railway and become a seaside resort, its “Turks” have acquired a very
+considerable amount of worldly wisdom, and can argue and chop logic with
+you, as well as the best.
+
+To those who knew and loved old Swanage, the change that has come with
+its tardy accessibility by rail is woeful, but to those who have not so
+known and loved, I daresay it seems, by contrast with Bournemouth, a
+place strangely undeveloped.  The trouble with the first-named is that
+development has been all too rapid, and has utterly robbed Swanage of its
+immemorial character as the port whence the famous Purbeck stone was
+shipped.  Alas! pretentious houses of a tall and terrible ugliness now
+stand in the middle of the bay, on the shore immediately in front of what
+used merely by courtesy to be called “the town,” but is now actually
+grown to that status.  The “bankers”—rows upon rows of stacked slabs of
+Purbeck stone that used to form so striking a feature of the shore, and
+were wont, to a stranger seeing them first on a moonlit night, to look so
+grisly, as though this were some close-packed seashore cemetery—the
+circumstance of facetious irony—the grown prosperity of Swanage has built
+banks, where the Swanage tradesfolk doubtless deposit heavily from the
+profits of their summer trading.
+
+                    [Picture: The Old Church, Swanage]
+
+In the distance, along the curving shore of Swanage Bay, there has arisen
+with the development of the Durlstone estate, a grand hotel, and in the
+town itself—the folly of it!—uninteresting modern commercial buildings
+have replaced the quaint old cottages that, built as they were, in a
+peculiarly local fashion, with great stone slabs and rude stone tiling,
+had their like nowhere else.  Now, the rows of newly arisen streets are
+such as have their counterparts in every town, and you can dine _à la
+carte_ or _table-d’hôte_ at the many hotels and boarding-houses, as their
+announcements boldly inform the visitor, quite as elaborately as in great
+cities.  All, without doubt, very refined and up to date, but perhaps not
+to all of us, who keep the simple and robustious appetites of our
+beginnings, so pleasing a change from the time (of which Kingsley speaks)
+when a simple glass of ale and a crust of bread and cheese at a rustic
+inn was all one wished, and certainly all one could have got.
+
+Of those times there are but little “islands,” so to speak, left in the
+surging mass of modern brick and stone.  One of them is the ancient
+church, whose tower is thought to be Saxon—the church where Ethelberta
+Petherwin, in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, marries Lord Mountclere.
+Another, tucked away behind the Town Hall, and only to be with some
+difficulty discovered, is the old village lock-up.  No dread Bastille
+this, but an affair resembling a stone tool-house, twelve feet by eight,
+and lighted only by the holes in the decaying woodwork of its
+nail-studded door.  It was built in 1803, “erected” as the old
+inscription tells us, “for the prevention of Wickedness and Vice by the
+Friends of Religion and Good Order.”  The inference to be drawn from the
+small size of this place of incarceration is that the “Wickedness and
+Vice” of Swanage were on a very insignificant scale.  Although Swanage
+has grown so greatly, and now owns a very fine and large police-station,
+it is not to be inferred that the delinquencies have increased in
+proportion, but rather that officialism has made a larger growth, and
+that Swanage, like poor old England in general, is over-governed.
+
+Among other outstanding features of Swanage, conferred upon it by the
+late Mr. Mowlem, of the London contracting firm of Mowlem and Burt, is
+the Wellington Clock Tower, the Gothic pinnacled structure now
+ornamenting the foreshore, in what were once the private gardens of “the
+Grove.”  But “the Grove” has now, like many another seashore estate, been
+cut up, and new villas now take the place of the older exclusiveness.
+
+The Clock Tower, one of the many memorials to the great Duke of
+Wellington, stood, until about 1860, on the south side of London Bridge,
+but was removed when the roadway was widened at that point.  Once
+removed, the good folk of Southwark were at a loss what to do with it,
+and so solved their difficulty by presenting its stones to Mr. Mowlem,
+the contractor.  They thought he had been saddled with a “white
+elephant,” and chuckled accordingly; but they little knew their man.  He
+considered the relic “just the thing” for his native town of Swanage, and
+accepting it with the greatest alacrity, despatched it hither, and
+presented it to his friend Mr. Docwra, of “the Grove.”  This poor old
+monument to martial glory has suffered of late, for its pinnacle has been
+blown down and replaced by a copper sheathing very like a dish-cover.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+                         SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE
+
+THAT pilgrim who, whether on foot or by cycle, shall elect to trace these
+landmarks, will find the road out of Swanage to Corfe, by way of Langton
+Matravers and Kingston a heart-breaking stretch of stony hills, whose
+blinding glare under a summer sun is provocative of ophthalmia, and whose
+severities of stone walling, in place of green hedges, recall the scenery
+of Ireland.  Herston, too, the unlovely outskirt of Swanage, is not
+encouraging.  But the world—it is a truism—is made up of all sorts, and
+here, as elsewhere, rewards come after trials.
+
+Langton Matravers, on the ridge-road, is, just as one might suppose from
+the stony nature of Purbeck, a village of stone houses, and very grim and
+unornamental ones too.  Nine hundred souls live here, and so long as the
+“Langton freestone” won from its quarries is in good demand, are happy
+enough, although subject to every extremity of weather.  The “Matravers”
+in the place-name derives from the old manorial lords, the Maltravers
+family, who dropped the “l” out of their name some time after one of
+their race, deeply implicated in the barbarous murder of Edward II.,
+proved himself a very “bad Travers” indeed, and so made his name
+peculiarly descriptive.
+
+Passing Gallows Gore Cottages—what a melodramatic address to own!—we come
+to Kingston village, along just such a road, with just such a view as
+that described in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, although, to be sure, she
+went, on that donkey-ride to Corfe, by another and very roundabout route,
+through Ulwell Gap, over Nine Barrow Down.  Ordinary folk would have gone
+by the ordinary road; but then, you see, Ethelberta was a poetess, and
+“unconventionality—almost eccentricity—was _de rigueur_” for such an one.
+Hence also that unconventional, and uncomfortable, seat on the donkey’s
+back.
+
+From this point Corfe Castle is exquisitely seen, down below the ridge,
+but situated on the course of the minor, but still mighty, backbone that
+bisects the Isle.  From hence, too, the country may be seen spread out
+like a map, “domains behind domains, parishes by the score, harbours,
+fir-woods and little inland seas mixing curiously together.”  Dipping
+down out of sight of all these distant Lands of Promise, among the richly
+wooded lanes of Kingston, the glaring limestone road is exchanged for
+shaded ways, where sunlight only filters through in patches of gold,
+looking to the imaginative as though some giant had come this way and
+dropped the contents of his money-bags.  Thatched cottages, tall elms,
+and old-fashioned roadside gardens are the features of Kingston; but
+above all these, geographically and in every other respect, is the great
+and magnificent modern church built for Lord Eldon and completed in 1880,
+after seven years’ work and a vast amount of money had been expended upon
+it.  It was designed by Street—that same “obliterator of historic
+records”—who at Fawley Magna earned Mr. Hardy’s satire; but here were no
+records to obliterate.  Certain reminiscences of the architect’s early
+studies of the early Gothic of the Rhine churches may be traced here, in
+the exterior design of the apsidal chancel, strongly resembling that of
+Fawley, but one would hesitate to apply the opprobrious term of
+“German-Gothic” to this, as a whole.  Its intention is Early English, but
+the general effect is rather of a Norman spirit informed with Early
+English details; an effect greatly accentuated by the heaviness and bulk
+of the central tower, intended by Lord Eldon to be a prominent landmark,
+and fulfilling that intention by the sacrifice of proportion to the rest
+of the building.  Cruciform plan, size, and general elaboration render
+this a church particularly unfitted for so small and so rustic a village.
+Had its needs been studied, rather than the ecclesiological tastes of the
+third Lord Eldon, the little church built many years ago for the first
+earl, the great lawyer-lord, by Repton, would have sufficed; although to
+be sure it has all the faults of the first attempts at reviving Gothic.
+
+The Earl of Eldon purchased the manor of Kingston and the residence of
+Encombe from William Morton Pitt in 1807.  Here, in that little church
+built by him, he lies, beside his “Bessie,” that Bessie Surtees with whom
+he, then plain and penniless John Scott, eloped from the old house on
+Sandhill, Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1772.  His house of Encombe, the
+“Enkworth Court,” of _The Hand of Ethelberta_, lies deep down in the glen
+of Encombe, approached by a long road gradually descending into the
+cup-like crater by the only expedient of winding round it.  Think of all
+the beautiful road scenery you have ever seen or heard of, and you will
+not have seen or been told of anything more beautiful in its especial
+kind of beauty than this sequestered road down into Lord Eldon’s retreat.
+Jagged white cliffs here and there project themselves out of the steep
+banks of grass and moss above the way, draped with a profusion of
+small-leaved ground-ivy and a wealth of hart’s-tongue ferns, and trees
+romantically shade the whole.  An obelisk erected by the great statesman,
+on a bold bluff, to the memory of his brother, Lord Stowell, adds an
+element of romance to the scene, and then, plunging into a final mass of
+tangled woodland, the grey stone elevation of the house is seen,
+ghostlike, fronting a gravel drive, in its silence and drawn blinds
+looking less like the home of some fairy princess than the residence of a
+misanthrope, who has retired beyond the reach of the world and drawn his
+blinds, with the hope of persuading any who may possibly find their way
+here that he is not at home.
+
+                            [Picture: Encombe]
+
+“Enkworth Court” was, we are told, “a house in which Pugin would have
+torn his hair,” and Encombe certainly can possess no charms for amateurs
+of Gothic.  Nor can it possibly delight students of the ancient Greek and
+Roman orders, for its architecture has classic intentions without being
+classical, and heaviness without dignity.  But its interior, if it
+likewise does not appeal to a cultivated taste in matters connected with
+the mother of all the arts, is exceptionally comfortable.  Here the old
+Chancellor, over eighty years of age, spent most of his declining days.
+“His sporting days were over; he had but little interest in gardening or
+farming; and his only reading, beside the newspaper, was a chapter in the
+Bible.  His mornings he spent in an elbow-chair by the fireside in his
+study—called his shop—which was ornamented by portraits of his deceased
+master, George III. and his living companion, Pincher, a poodle dog.”
+
+From Kingston to Corfe Castle, the bourne of innumerable summer visitors,
+is two miles.  The first glimpse of town and castle is one which clearly
+shows how aptly the site of them obtained its original name of
+Corvesgate, from the Anglo-Saxon _ceorfan_, to cut.  The site was so
+named long before castle or town were erected here, and referred to the
+passages cut or carved through the bold range of hills by the little
+river Corfe and its tributaries.  Those clefts are clearly distinguished
+from here and from the main road between Corfe and Swanage, and are
+notched twice, so deeply into the stony range, that the eminence on which
+the castle stands is less like a part of one continuous chain of hills
+than an isolated conical hill neighboured by lengthy ridges.
+
+On that islanded hill, shouldered by taller neighbours, the castle was
+built, because at this point it so effectually guarded these passes from
+the shores of Purbeck to the inland regions.  The position in these days
+seems a singular one, for from the upper slopes of those neighbours it is
+possible to look down into the castle and observe its every detail, but
+such things mattered little in days before artillery.
+
+A first impression of Corfe, if it be summer, is an impression of
+dazzling whiteness; resolved, on a nearer approach, into the pure white
+of the road and of the occasional repairs and restorations of the
+stone-built streets, the grey white of buildings past their first
+novelty, and the dead greyness of the roofing slabs of stone.  There is
+little colour in Corfe when June has gone.  The golden-green lichens and
+houseleeks of spring have been sucked dry by the summer heats and turned
+to withered rustiness, and even the grass of the pyramidical hill on
+which the castle keep is reared has little more than an exhausted
+sage-green hue.
+
+“Corvsgate Castle,” as we find it styled in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, is
+frequently the scene, at such a time of year, of meetings like that of
+the “Imperial Association” in that story.  All that is to be known
+respecting these ruins, “the meagre stumps remaining from flourishing
+bygone centuries,” is the common property of all interested in historical
+antiquities, but there is something, it may be supposed, in revisiting
+the oft-visited and in retelling the old tale, which bids defiance to
+_ennui_ and precludes satiety, even although the President’s address be a
+paraphrase of the last archæological paper, and that the echo of its
+predecessor, and so forth, in endless _diminuendo_:
+
+    And smaller fleas have lesser fleas,
+    And so _ad infinitum_.
+
+“Carfe,” as any Wessex man of the soil will name it, just as horses are
+‘harses’ and hornets become ‘harnets’ in his ancient and untutored
+pronunciation, is, as already hinted, a place of stone buildings, where
+brick, although not unknown, is remarkable.  Stone from foundation to
+roof, and stone slabs of immense size for the roofs themselves.  In a
+place where building-stone is and has been so readily found it is, of
+course, in the nature of things to find the remains of a castle that must
+have been exceptionally large and strong, and here they are, peering over
+the rooftops of the town from whatever point of view you choose.  The
+castle is as essential a feature in all views of the town as it is in
+history; and rightly too, for had it not been for that fortress there
+would have been no town.  It is a town by courtesy and ancient estate,
+and a village by size; a village that does not grow and has so far
+escaped the desecration of modern streets.  The market cross, recently
+restored to perfection from a shattered stump, and the town hall both
+declare it to have been a town, as does, or did, the existence of a
+mayor, but such things have long become vanities.  The return of two
+members to Parliament, a privilege Corfe enjoyed until reform put an end
+to it in 1832, proved nothing, for Parliamentary representation was no
+more fixed on the principle of comparative electorates than the
+representation of Ireland is now in the House of Commons.
+
+                         [Picture: Corfe Castle]
+
+The temperance interest need by no means be shocked when it is said that
+the most interesting feature of Corfe, next to the castle, is its inn.
+The church does not count; for the body of it has been uninterestingly
+rebuilt, and only the fine tower, of Perpendicular date, remains.  The
+inns, however, combine picturesqueness with the solid British comforts of
+old times and the less substantial amenities of the new.  Here, looking
+upon the “Bankes Arms,” with its highly elaborate heraldic sign, you can
+have no manner of doubt as to what family is still paramount in Corfe,
+and I think, perhaps, that to shelter behind so gorgeous an achievement
+even reflects a halo upon the guest; while if the “Greyhound” can confer
+no such satisfaction, its unusual picturesqueness, with that charming
+feature of a porch projecting over the pavement and owning a capacious
+room poised above the comings and goings, the commerce and gossipings of
+the people, can at least give a visitor the charm of what, although an
+ancient feature of the place, is at least a novelty to him.
+
+The three cylindrical stone columns of plethoric figure which support
+this porch and its room are more generally useful than the architect who
+placed them here, some two hundred and eighty years ago, probably ever
+imagined they would be.  _He_ devised them for the support of his gazebo
+above, but more than twenty generations of Wessex folk have found them
+convenient for leaning-stocks, and the comfortable support they give has
+further lengthened many a long argument which, had all contributing
+parties stood supported only by their own two natural posts that carry
+the bodily superstructure, would have been earlier concluded.  The
+progress of an argument, discussion, narration, or negotiation under such
+unequal conditions is to be watched with interest.  Time probably will
+forbid one being followed from beginning to end; but to be a spectator of
+one of these comedies from the middle onwards is sufficient.  The length
+it has already been played may generally be pretty accurately estimated
+by the state of weariness or impatience exhibited by that party to it who
+is not supported by the pillar.  The “well, as I was saying” of the one
+enjoying the leaning-stock, discloses, like the parson’s “secondly, Dear
+brethren,” the fact that the discourse is well on the way, but the same
+thing may be gathered by those out of earshot, in the manœuvres of the
+less fortunate of the two, the one who is supporting his own bulk.  He
+stands upright, hands behind his back, while swaying his walking stick;
+then he leans his weight to one side upon it, first (if he be a stout
+man, whom it behoves to exercise caution) carefully selecting a safe
+crevice in the jointing of the pavement, as a bearing for the ferule of
+his ash-plant; then, growing weary of this attitude, he repeats the
+process on the other side, changing after a while to the expedient of a
+sideways stress, halfway up the body, by straining the walking stick
+horizontally against the wall.  Then, having exhausted all possible
+movements, he takes a bulky silver watch from his pocket, and affects to
+find time unexpectedly ahead of him; and when this resort is reached the
+spectacle generally comes to a conclusion.
+
+But it is time to follow Ethelberta into the castle:—
+
+    “Ethelberta crossed the bridge over the moat, and rode under the
+    first archway into the outer ward.  As she had expected, not a soul
+    was here.  The arrow-slits, portcullis-grooves, and staircases met
+    her eye as familiar friends, for in her childhood she had once paid a
+    visit to the spot.  Ascending the green incline and through another
+    arch into the second ward, she still pressed on, till at last the ass
+    was unable to clamber an inch further.  Here she dismounted, and
+    tying him to a stone which projected like a fang from a raw edge of
+    wall, performed the remainder of the journey on foot.  Once among the
+    towers above, she became so interested in the windy corridors,
+    mildewed dungeons, and the tribe of daws peering invidiously upon her
+    from overhead, that she forgot the flight of time.”
+
+The ruins that Ethelberta and the “Imperial Association” had come to
+inspect owe their heaped and toppling ruination to that last great armed
+convulsion in our insular history, the Civil War, whose two greatest
+personalities were Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell.  Until that time the
+proud fortress had stood unharmed, as stalwart as when built in Norman
+times.
+
+The history of Corfe before those times is very obscure, and no one has
+yet discovered whether the first recorded incident in it took place at a
+mere hunting-lodge here or at the gates of a fortress.  That incident,
+the first and most atrocious of all the atrocious deeds of blood wrought
+at Corfe, was the murder of King Edward “the Martyr,” in A.D. 978, by his
+stepmother, Queen Elfrida, anxious to secure the throne for her own son.
+The boy—he was only in his nineteenth year—had drawn rein here, on his
+return alone from hunting, and was drinking at the door from a goblet
+handed him by Elfrida herself when she stabbed him to the heart.  His
+horse, startled at the attack, darted away, dragging the body by the
+stirrups, and thus, battered and lifeless, it was found.
+
+Built, or rebuilt, in the time of the Conqueror, Corfe Castle was early
+besieged, and in that passage gave a good account of itself and justified
+its existence, for King Stephen failed to take it by force or to starve
+the garrison out.  How long he may have been pleased to sit down before
+it we do not know, for the approach of a relieving force caused him to
+pack his baggage and be off.  Strong, however, as it was even then, it
+was continually under enlargement in the reigns of Henry II., Henry III.,
+and Edward I., and had a better right to the oft-used boast of being
+impregnable than most other fortresses.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+                               CORFE CASTLE
+
+LIKE some cruel ogre of folk-lore the Castle of Corfe has drunk deep of
+blood.  Its strength kept prisoners safely guarded, as well as foes at
+arm’s length, and many a despairing wretch has been hurried through the
+now ruined gatehouse, to the muttered “God help him!” of some
+compassionate warder.  Through the great open Outer Ward and steeply
+uphill between the two gloomy circular drum-towers across the second
+ward, and thence to the Dungeon Tower at the further left-hand corner of
+the stronghold, they were taken and thrust into some vile place of little
+ease, to be imprisoned for a lifetime, to be starved to death, or more
+mercifully ended by the assassin’s dagger.  Twenty-four knights captured
+in Brittany, in arms against King John, in aid of his nephew, Arthur,
+were imprisoned here, in 1202, and twenty-two of them met death by
+starvation in some foul underground hold.  Prince Arthur, as every one
+knows, was blinded by orders of the ruthless king, and Arthur’s sister,
+Eleanor, was thrown into captivity, first here and then at Bristol,
+where, after forty years, she died.  Thus did monarchs dispose of rivals,
+and those who aided them, in the “good old days,” and other monarchs, not
+so ferocious, or not so well able to take care of themselves, stood in
+danger of tasting the same fare, as in the case of Edward II. imprisoned
+here and murdered in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle.  Sympathies go out
+to the unhappy captives and victims, but a knowledge of these things
+tells us that they would have done the same, had opportunity offered and
+the positions been reversed.
+
+This stronghold held many a humbler prisoner, among them those who had
+offended in one or other of the easy ways of offence in this, the King’s
+deer-forest of Purbeck; and many others immured for mere caprice.  The
+place must have reeked with blood and been strewn with bones like a
+hyæna’s lair.
+
+                         [Picture: Corfe Castle]
+
+So much for the domestic history of Corfe Castle.  Its last great
+appearance in the history of the nation was during the civil wars of King
+and Parliament, when it justified the design of its builders, and proved
+the excellence of its defences by successfully withstanding two sieges;
+falling in the second solely by treachery.  It had by that time passed
+through many hands, and had come at last to the Bankes family, by whom it
+is still owned.  It was only eight years before the first siege in this
+war that the property had been acquired by the Lord Chief Justice of the
+Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes, who purchased it from the widow of that
+celebrated lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, the Coke of “Coke upon Littleton.”
+
+                         [Picture: Corfe Castle]
+
+When the civil war broke out, Sir John Bankes, called to the King’s side
+at York, left his wife and children at their home of Kingston Lacy, near
+Wimborne Minster, whence, for security from the covert sneers and petty
+annoyances offered them by the once humbly subservient townsfolk, not
+slow to note the trend of affairs, they removed in the autumn of 1642 to
+Corfe Castle, where they spent the winter unmolested.
+
+Although they thus sought shelter here, they probably had no idea of the
+heights to which the tide of rebellion would rise, and could scarce have
+anticipated being besieged; but the Parliamentary leaders in the district
+had their eyes upon a fortress which, already obsolete and the subject of
+antiquarian curiosity, could yet be made a place of strength, as the
+sequel was presently to show.
+
+The first attempt to gain possession of the castle was by a subterfuge,
+ingenious and plausible enough.  The Mayor of Corfe had from time
+immemorial held a stag hunt annually, on May Day, and it was thought
+that, if on this occasion some additional parties of horse were to
+attend, and to seize the stronghold under colour of paying a visit, the
+thing would be done with ease.  So probably it would, but for the keen
+feminine intuition of Lady Bankes, who closed the gates and mounted a
+guard upon the entrance-towers, so that when those huntsmen came and
+demanded surrender, scarcely in the manner of visitors, they were at once
+denied admission, and effectually unmasked.  The revolutionary committee
+sitting at Poole then considered it advisable to despatch a body of
+sailors, who appeared before the castle, early one morning, to demand the
+surrender of four small dismounted pieces of cannon with which it was
+armed.  “But,” says the _Mercurius Rusticus_, a contemporary news-sheet,
+“instead of delivering them, though at the time there were but five men
+in the Castle, yet these five, assisted by the maid-servants, at their
+ladies’ Command, mount these peeces on their carriages againe, and lading
+one of them they gave fire, which small Thunder so affrighted the Sea-men
+that they all quitted the place and ran away.”
+
+Operations thus opened, Lady Bankes proved herself a ready and
+resourceful general.  By beat of drum she summoned tenants and friends,
+who, responding to the number of fifty, garrisoned the fortress for about
+a week, when a scarcity of provisions, together with threatening letters,
+and the entreaties of their wives, to whom home and children were more
+than King or Parliament, or the Bankes family either, made them shamble
+home again.  We should perhaps not be too ready to censure them.  Lady
+Bankes, however, did not despair.  A born strategist, she perceived how
+vitally necessary it was, above all else, to lay in a stock of
+provisions; and to secure them, and time for her preparations she offered
+in the meekest way to give up those cannon which, after all, although
+they made the maximum of noise effected a minimum of harm.
+
+The enemy, pacified by this offer, removed the guns and left the castle
+alone for a while; thinking its defences weak enough.  But it was soon
+thoroughly provisioned, supplied with ammunition, and garrisoned under
+the command of one Captain Lawrence, and when the Roundheads of Poole
+next turned their attention to Corfe, behold! it was bristling like a
+porcupine with pikes and musquetoons and all those ancient
+seventeenth-century engines of war, with which men were quaintly done to
+death—when by some exceptional chance the marksmen earned their name and
+hit anybody.
+
+The middle of June had gone before the Parliamentary forces from Poole
+made their appearance.  They numbered between two and three hundred horse
+and foot, and brought two cannon, with which they played upon the castle
+from the neighbouring hills, with little effect.  Then came an interlude,
+ended by the appearance, on June 23rd, of Sir Walter Erle with between
+five and six hundred men, to reinforce the besiegers.  They brought with
+them a “Demy-Canon, a Culverin, and two Sacres,” and with these fired a
+hail of small shot down into the castle upon those heights on either
+hand.  The results were poor to insignificance, and it was then
+determined to attempt a storming of the castle.  This grand advance, made
+on June 26th, was begun by intimidating shouts that no quarter would be
+granted, but the garrison were so little terrified by this fighting with
+the mouth that, tired of waiting the enemy from the walls, they even
+sallied out and slaughtered some of the foremost, who were approaching
+cautiously under cover of strange engines named the “Sow” and the “Boar.”
+The besiegers then mounted a cannon on the top of the church-tower,
+“which,” we are told, “they, without fears of prophanation used,” and
+breaking the organ, used the pipes of it for shot-cases.  The ammunition
+included, among other strange missiles, lumps of lead torn off the roof
+and rolled up.
+
+All these things proving useless, a band of a hundred and fifty sailors
+was sent by the Earl of Warwick, with large supplies of petards and
+grenadoes, and a number of scaling ladders, and then all thought the
+enterprise in a fair way of being ended.  The sailors, nothing loth, were
+made drunk, the ladders were placed against the walls, and a sum of
+twenty pounds was offered to the first man up.  With preparations so
+generous as these a riotous scaling-party, carrying pikes and
+hand-grenades, strove to mount the ladders, but were met by an avalanche
+of hot cinders, stones, and things still more objectionable, hoarded up
+by the garrison from those primitive sanitary contrivances called by
+antiquaries “garderobes,” against such a contingency as this.  One sailor
+has his clothes almost burnt off his back, another’s courage is dowsed
+with a pail of slops, others are knocked over, bruised and battered, into
+the dry moat, by a hundredweight of stone heaved over the battlements,
+and long ladders full of escaladers, swarming up, on one another’s heels,
+are flung backward with tremendous crashes by prokers from arrow-slits in
+the bastioned walls.  Soldiers under the machicolated entrance towers
+have had their steel morions crushed down upon their heads by heavy
+weights dropped upon them, and are left gasping for breath and slowly
+suffocating in that meat-tin kind of imprisonment; and a more than
+ordinarily active besieger, who has made himself exceptionally prominent,
+is suddenly flattened out by a heavy lump of lead.  “The knocks are too
+hot,” as Shakespeare says, and the assailants are forced to retire, to
+bury their dead, to tend one another’s hurts, and those most fortunate to
+cleanse themselves.  That same night of August 4th, Sir Walter Erle,
+hearing a rumour of the King’s forces approaching, hurriedly raised the
+siege and retreated upon Poole, and not until February 1646 was Corfe
+Castle again molested.
+
+This time it was beset to more purpose.  Lady Bankes, now a widow, for
+her husband had died in 1644, parted from his family, was at Corfe,
+vigilant, keen-eyed, loyal, and more or less strictly blockaded between
+Roundhead garrisons.  Wareham was in their possession, Poole, as ever, a
+hotbed of disaffection, and Swanage watched by land and sea.  A gallant
+deed performed at the opening of 1646 by one Cromwell, a youthful officer
+strangely enough, considering his name, on the Royalist side, was of no
+avail.  He with his troops burst through the enemy’s lines at Wareham and
+on the way encountered the Parliamentary governor of that place, whom he
+captured and brought to Corfe.  This was undertaken to afford Lady Bankes
+an opportunity of escaping, if she wished, but she fortunately refused,
+for on the way back the little party were captured.
+
+The castle was then besieged by Colonel Bingham, and endured for
+forty-eight days the rigours of a strict investment.  In the meanwhile,
+Lawrence, the governor, deserted and at the same time released the
+imprisoned governor of Wareham.  Every one knew the King’s cause here and
+in the whole of the kingdom to be in desperate straits, and the knowledge
+of fighting for a losing side unnerved all.  Seeing the inevitable course
+of events, Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman, one of the defenders’ officers,
+secretly opened negotiations with the enemy for the surrender, and,
+succeeding in persuading the new governor, who had taken the post
+deserted by Lawrence, that a reinforcement from Somersetshire was
+expected, under that guise at dead of night admitted fifty Parliamentary
+troops into the keep.  When morning dawned the garrison found themselves
+betrayed; but, commanding as they did the lives of some thirty prisoners,
+they were able to exact favourable terms of surrender.  And then, when
+all the defenders marched out, kegs of gunpowder were laid in keep and
+curtain-towers, down in dungeons and under roofs, and the match applied.
+When the roar and smoke of the explosion had died away, the stern walls
+that for five hundred years had frowned down upon the streets of Corfe
+had gone up in ruin.
+
+Not altogether destroyed, in the Biblical completeness of the fulfilled
+prophecies of “not one stone upon another,” concerning Nineveh, and the
+Cities of the Plain; for tall spires of cliff-like masonry still
+represent the keep and gateway, and curtain-towers remain in recognisable
+shapes, connected by riven jaws of masonry, so hard and so formless that
+they are not easily to be distinguished from the rock in which their
+foundations are set.  Here a tower may be seen, lifted up bodily by the
+agency of gunpowder, and set down again at a distance, gently and as
+fairly plumb as it was it its original position: there another has been
+torn asunder, as one tears a sheet of paper, and a few steps away is
+another, leaning at a much more acute angle than the Leaning Tower of
+Pisa.  Everywhere, light is let into dungeons and battlements abased;
+floors abolished and great empty stone fireplaces on what were second,
+third and fourth floors turned to mouthpieces for the winds.  And yet,
+although such havoc has been wrought, and although it is almost
+impossible to identify the greater part of its chambers, Corfe Castle is
+still a fine and an impressive ruin.  It is grand when seen from afar,
+and not less grand when viewed near at hand, from the ravine in which
+runs the road to Wareham.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+                                 WAREHAM
+
+THAT is a straight and easy road which in four miles leads from Corfe to
+Wareham, and a breezy and bracing road too, across heaths quite as
+unspoilt as those of “Egdon,” but of a more cheerful and hopeful aspect.
+_The Return of the Native_, whose scene is laid on the heaths to the
+north-west, could not, with the same justness of description, have been
+staged upon these, and from another circumstance, quite apart from this
+heart-lifting breeziness, these heaths have little in common with their
+brooding neighbours.  They are enlivened with the signs of a very ancient
+and long-continued industry, for where the Romans discovered and dug in
+the great deposits of china-clay found here the Dorsetshire labourer
+still digs, and runs his truckloads on crazy tramways down to the quays
+upon Poole Harbour at Goathorn.  Fragments of Roman pottery, made from
+this clay, are still occasionally found here, but since that time the
+clay has not been turned to extensive use on the spot where it is found,
+but is shipped for Staffordshire and abroad.  Much of Poole’s prosperity
+is due to the china-clay trade, carried on by the vessels of that port,
+which receive it from barges crossing the harbour.  It was early used for
+tobacco-pipes, and probably those of Sir Walter Raleigh’s first
+experiments were made from the clay found here.  So far back as 1760 the
+export of Purbeck china-clay had reached ten thousand tons annually.  It
+has now risen to about sixty thousand.
+
+This northern portion of the Isle of Purbeck is indeed of altogether
+different character from the rugged stony southern half, beyond Corfe.
+It is low-lying and heathy, and the roads are a complete change from the
+blinding whiteness characterising those of Purbeck _Petræa_, as it may be
+named.  Here, mended with ironstone, they are of a ruddy colour.
+
+Leaving the clay-cutters and their terraced diggings behind, we come,
+past the paltry hamlet of Stoborough, within sight of Wareham, entered
+across a long causeway over the Frome marshes and over an ancient Gothic
+bridge spanning the Frome itself.  Ahead is seen the tower of St. Mary’s,
+one of the only two churches remaining of the original eight.  Five of
+the others have been swept away, and the sixth is converted into a
+school.  Wareham, it will be guessed, is not a mushroom place of
+yesterday, but has a past and has seen many changes.
+
+Wareham, “the oldest arnshuntest place in Do’set, where ye turn up housen
+underneath yer ’tater-patch,” as described to the present historian by a
+rustic, who might have been the original of Haymoss, in _Two on a Tower_,
+is indeed of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that
+attractive fact.  Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of
+the compass, do not perhaps afford the best evidences of that age, for
+they are broad and straight and lined with houses which, if not all
+Georgian, are so largely in that style that they influence the general
+character of the thoroughfares and give them an air of the eighteenth
+century.  For this there is an excellent reason, found in the almost
+complete destruction by fire of Wareham, on July 25th, 1762.
+
+To the ordinary traveller—and certainly to the commercial
+traveller—without a bias for history and antiquities, it is the dullest
+town in Wessex.  Not decayed, like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void
+and still, and how it, under this constant solitude and somnolence,
+manages to retain its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle.
+
+Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks; but while
+Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has shrunk within
+them, and one who, climbing those stupendous fortifications, looks down
+upon the little town, sees gardens and orchards, pigsties and cowsheds
+plentifully intermingled with the streets, on the spot where other and
+vanished streets once stood.  That “once,” however, was so long ago that
+the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and the mind
+dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident in such things,
+as upon the luxuriance of the gardens themselves and the prettiness of
+the picture they produce, intermingled with the houses.
+
+Wareham—“Anglebury” Mr. Hardy calls it—is, or was when the latest census
+returns were published, a town of two thousand and three inhabitants.
+
+                      [Picture: Approach to Wareham]
+
+Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has lost more
+than those odd three, thus coming within the fatal definition given
+somewhere, by some one, of a village.
+
+                     [Picture: The Walls of Wareham]
+
+Things are in this way come to a parlous state, for this is the latest of
+a good many modern strokes.  One, which hurt its pride not a little, was
+when, in the redistribution of Parliamentary seats, it lost its
+representation and became merged in a county division.  Another—but why
+enumerate these undeserved whips and scorns?  In one respect Wareham
+keeps an urban character.  It has two inns—the “Black Bear” and the “Red
+Lion”—that call themselves hotels, and a score or so of minor houses
+where, if you cannot obtain a desirable “cup of genuine,” why, “’tis a
+sad thing and an oncivilised?”
+
+It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to style
+Wareham “Anglebury,” for that story is greatly concerned with the
+settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the Kingdom
+of Wessex.  Conveniently near the sea, within the innermost recesses of
+Poole Harbour, and yet removed from the rage and havoc of the outer
+elements, it lies on the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the
+two rivers Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from
+where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour.  In a nook such as this
+you might think a town would have been secure, and that was the hope of
+those who founded it here.  But, to render assurance doubly sure, those
+original town-builders—who were probably much earlier than the invading
+Saxons and are thought to have been some British tribe—heaped up and dug
+out those famous “walls of Wareham,” which surround the town to this day,
+and are not walls in the common acceptation of the term, but ditches so
+deeply delved, and mounds so steeply piled that they are in some places
+little more scalable than a forthright, plumb up and down, wall of brick
+or masonry would be, and with an “angle of repose” sufficiently acute to
+astonish any modern railway engineer.
+
+Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earthworks, was a place of
+strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the bloody
+tangle of its long history.  Strong defences require determined attacks.
+That history only opens with some clearness at the time of the Saxon
+occupation, when the piratical Danes were beginning to harry the coast,
+but it continues with accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays,
+repeated until the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by
+only a few dispirited defenders.  In A.D. 876 these Northmen captured the
+place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them out.  Some
+Saxon confidence then returned, but the old miseries were repeated when
+Canute, not yet the pious Canute of his last years, sailed up the Frome
+and not only destroyed this already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the
+greater part of Wessex.
+
+Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated place when
+the Conqueror came; but it was made to hold up its head once more, and
+the two mints it had owned in the time of Saxon Athelstan were
+re-established.  The castle, whose name alone survives, in that of Castle
+Hill, was then built, and, in the added strength it gave, was the source
+of many troubles soon to come.  It was surprised and seized for the
+Empress Maud in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four years later,
+in the absence of its governor, the Earl of Gloucester, who returning,
+recaptured the town after a three-weeks’ siege.  At length the treaty of
+peace and tolerance between Stephen and Maud gave the townsfolk—those few
+of them who had been courageous enough to remain, and fortunate enough to
+survive—an opportunity of creeping out of the cellars, and of looking
+around and reviewing their position.  “Hope springs eternal,” and these
+remnants of the Wareham folk were in some measure justified of their
+faith, for it was not until another half-century had passed that the town
+was again besieged and taken.  That event was an incident in the
+contention between King John and his Barons, and a feature of it was the
+destruction of the castle, never afterwards rebuilt.
+
+                            [Picture: Wareham]
+
+That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could possibly
+have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and personal warfares, for
+it rendered Wareham a place of little account in the calculations of
+mediæval partisans; and then it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the
+Civil War of Crown and Parliament, when old times came again, in the
+bewildering circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament
+against the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined
+and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the property of
+their friends before they could recover it, and then stormed and
+surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse of History herself
+ceases to keep tally.  Few people looked on: most took an active part,
+and the rector himself, “a stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good
+things,” was wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times.  The
+obvious criticism here is that they must have been short sentences.  The
+Parliamentary commander, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was for punishing the
+“dreadful malignancy shown towards the cause of righteousness” by the
+Wareham people, and advised that the place be “plucked down and made no
+town”; but this course was not adopted.
+
+Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many horrid deeds.
+In that castle whose site alone remains, Robert de Belesme was starved to
+death in 1114, and on those walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit
+and prophet, one Peter of Pomfret, who had prophesied that the King
+should lose his crown, was hanged and quartered in 1213, after having
+been fed, in the manner of the prophet Micaiah, with the bread of
+affliction, and the water of affliction, in the gruesome dungeons of
+Corfe.  For King John, the Ahab of our history, had a way of his own with
+seers of visions and prophesiers of disaster; and his way, it will be
+allowed, very effectually discouraged prying into futurity.
+
+Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called “Bloody
+Bank,” three poor fellows who had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion
+were hanged, portions of their bodies being afterwards exposed, with
+ghastly barbarity, in different parts of the town.
+
+Following the long broad street from where the town is entered across the
+Frome, the “Black Bear” is passed, prominent with its porch and the great
+chained effigy of the black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the
+roof of it.  Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a
+terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered tablet,
+handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we now come to the
+northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to the banks of the Piddle,
+may, looking backwards, see those old defences, the so-styled “walls,”
+heaped up with magnificent emphasis.
+
+They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and although it is
+a drama long since played, and the curtain rung down upon the last act,
+two hundred and fifty years ago, this scenery of it can still eloquently
+recall its dragonadoes and blood-boltered episodes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS
+
+LEAVING Wareham by West Street, where there is a “Pure Drop” inn, perhaps
+suggesting the sign of the public where John Durbeyfield boozed, at
+far-away Marlott, a valley road leads by East Stoke to the remains of
+Bindon Abbey.
+
+The ruins of Bindon Abbey are few and formless, standing in tree-grown
+and unkempt grounds, where a black and green stagnant moat surrounds a
+curious circular mound.  Those who demolished Bindon Abbey did their work
+thoroughly, for little is left of it save the bases of columns and the
+foundations of walls, in which archæological societies see darkly the
+ground plan of the old Cistercian monastery.  A few stone slabs and
+coffins remain, among them a stone with the indent of a vanished
+life-sized brass to an abbot.  The inscription survives, in bold
+Lombardic characters—
+
+                    ABBAS RICARDUS DE MANERS HIC TUMULATUR
+                       APPŒNAS TARDUS DEUS HUNC SALVANS
+                                   TUEATUR.
+
+Close by is the stone sarcophagus in which Angel Clare, sleep-walking
+from Woolbridge House (which is represented in the story as being much
+nearer to this spot than it really is), laid Tess.  Near the ruin, beside
+the Frome, is Bindon Abbey Mill, where Angel Clare proposed to learn
+milling.
+
+[Picture: The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon Abbey] Here that thing not greatly
+in accord with monastic remains and hallowed vestiges of the olden
+times—a railway station—comes within sight and hearing at the end of Wool
+village.  Old and new, quiet repose and the bustling conduct of business,
+mingle strangely here, for within sight of Wool railway station, and
+within hearing of the clashing of the heavy consignments of milk-churns,
+driven up to it, to be placed on the rail and sent to qualify the tea of
+London’s great populations, stands the great, mellowed, Elizabethan, red
+brick grange or mansion known as Woolbridge House, romantically placed on
+the borders of the rushy river Frome.  The property at one time belonged
+to the neighbouring Abbey of Bindon, from which it came to Sir Thomas
+Poynings, and then to John Turberville.  Garrisoned as a strategic point
+during the Civil Wars, its history since that period is an obscure and
+stagnant one.  Long since passed from Turberville hands, it now belongs
+to the Erle-Drax family of Charborough Park and Holnest.  The air of
+bodeful tragedy that naturally enwraps the place and has made many a
+passenger in the passing trains exclaim at sight of it, “what a fitting
+home for a story!” has at last been justified in its selection by the
+novelist as the scene of Tess’s confession to her husband.  It was here
+the newly married pair were to have spent their honeymoon.  “They drove
+by the level road along the valley, to a distance of a few miles, and,
+reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the left, and over
+the great Elizabethan bridge, which gives the place half its name.
+Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged lodgings,
+whose external features are so well known to all travellers through the
+Frome Valley; once portion of a fine manorial residence, and the property
+and seat of a D’Urberville, but since its partial demolition, a
+farm-house.”
+
+It is not altogether remarkable that Clare found the “mouldy old
+habitation” somewhat depressing to his dear one; and she was altogether
+startled and frightened at “those horrid women,” whose portraits are
+actually, as in the pages of the novel they are said to be, on the walls
+of the staircase: “two life-size portraits on panels built into the
+masonry.  As all visitors are aware, these paintings represent women of
+middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once
+seen can never be forgotten.  The long pointed features, narrow eye, and
+smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook
+nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the
+point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.”  They
+are indeed unprepossessing dames.  One is growing indistinguishable, but
+the other still wickedly leers at you, glancing from the tail of her eye,
+as though challenging admiration.  A painted round or oval decorative
+frame surrounds these Turberville portraits, for such they are, and so
+they were explained to be to Clare, who uneasily recognised their
+likeness in an exaggerated form, to his own darling.  All the old
+D’Urberville vices of lawless cunning, mediæval ferocity, and callous
+heartlessness are reflected in those sinister portraits, which seemed to
+him to hold up a distorting mirror to the woman he had married, and
+certainly proved themselves of her kin.
+
+                       [Picture: Woolbridge House]
+
+A farm-house the place remains, the ground-floor rooms stone-flagged and
+chilly to modern notions, the fireplaces vast and cavernous as they are
+wont to be in such old houses.  It is perhaps more romantic seen in the
+middle distance than when made the subject of closer study.  But it is of
+course the home of a ghost story, and a very fine and aristocratic
+ghost-story too, made the subject of an allusion in _Tess of the
+D’Urbervilles_.  It seems that in that very long ago, generally referred
+to in fairy stories as “once upon a time,” there was a Turberville whose
+unholy passions so broke all bounds of restraint that he murdered a guest
+while the two of them were riding in the Turberville family coach.  But
+as the guest was himself one of the family, it were a more judicial
+thing, perhaps, to divide the blame.  This incident in the annals of a
+race who very improperly often figured as sheriffs and such-like
+guardians of law and order, took place on the road between Wool and Bere,
+and we are asked to believe that there are those who have heard the
+wheels of the blood-stained family coach traversing this route.  One or
+two are said to have seen it, but _they_ are persons proved to own some
+mixture of that blood, for to none other is this pleasing spectacle of a
+black midnight coach and demon horses vouchsafed.  But stay!  Not so
+pleasing after all, this proof of ancestry, for to them it is a warning
+of impending disaster and dissolution.
+
+               [Picture: Woolbridge House: Entrance Front]
+
+That is a terribly dusty road which, in six miles, leads from Woolbridge
+to Bere Regis, across the heaths: in some summers—_experto crede_—so
+astonishingly deep in dust that it is not only impossible to ride a
+bicycle over it, but scarce possible to walk.  But this heath road is as
+variable as the moods of a woman.  It will be of this complexion at one
+time, and at another entirely different.  It is perhaps only when this
+desirable difference rules that one appreciates the scenery it passes
+through; scenery wholly of buff sand, purple heather, furze, and bracken,
+whose colours are by distance blended into that rich purple brown termed,
+in _The Return of the Native_, “swart.”  For this is the district of that
+gloomy tale, perhaps at once the most powerful and painful in its tragic
+intensity of all the Wessex novels, and one in which the element of
+scenery adds most strikingly to the unfolding of futilities and
+disasters.  “Bere Heath” it is, according to the chartographers of the
+Ordnance Survey, but to ourselves who are on literary pilgrimage bent, it
+is Egdon Heath whose “swart abrupt slopes” are here seen on every side,
+now rising into natural hillocks masquerading solemnly as sepulchral
+tumuli, now dipping into hollows where the rainwater collects in marshy
+pools and keeps green the croziers and fully-opened fronds of the bracken
+much longer than the parched growths, at the crests of these rises; and
+again spreading out into little scrubby plains.
+
+Mr. Hardy, who has translated the reticent solemnity of Egdon Heath into
+such poignant romance, has said how pleasant it is to think or dream that
+some spot in these extensive wilds may be the heath of Lear, that
+traditionary King of Wessex whose sorrows Shakespeare has made the
+subject of tragedy; and he has himself, in _The Return of the Native_,
+made these heaths the stage whereon a tragedy is enacted that itself bids
+fair to become a classic little less classical than the works of
+Shakespeare.  True it is that his tragedy is in the rustic kind, and none
+of the characters in it far above the homespun sort, but the stricken
+worm feels as great a pang as when a giant dies, and the woes of Mrs.
+Yeobright, of Clym, and of Eustacia and Damon Wildeve are none the less
+thrilling than those of that
+
+    “. . . very foolish fond old man
+    Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,”
+
+whose wanderings are the theme of Shakespeare’s muse.
+
+                   [Picture: Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath]
+
+_The Return of the Native_ is a story of days as well as nights, of fair
+weather and foul, of sunshine and darkness, but it is in essence the
+story of a darkened stage.  The description of Egdon in the opening
+chapter is the keynote of a mournful fugue:—
+
+    “The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to
+    evening: it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon,
+    anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify
+    the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
+
+    “In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll
+    into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste
+    began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not
+    been there at such a time.  It could best be felt when it could not
+    clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this
+    and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then, and only then,
+    did it tell its true tale.  The spot was, indeed, a near relation of
+    night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate
+    together could be perceived in its shades and the scene.  The sombre
+    stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening
+    gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the
+    heavens precipitated it.”
+
+An artist who should come to Egdon, intent upon studying its
+colour-scheme, would be nonplussed by the more than usual fickleness and
+instability of its daylight hues.  Shrouded in the black repose of night,
+its tone is a thing of some permanence, but under the effects of sunshine
+he finds it now purple, now raw sienna, shading off into Prout’s Brown,
+and again rising to glints and fleeting stripes of rich golden yellow.
+It would be the despair of one who worked in the slow analytic manner of
+a Birket Foster, but the joy of an impressionist like a Whistler.
+
+                     [Picture: Chamberlain’s Bridge]
+
+The extremely rich and beautiful colouring of Wool and Bere Heaths
+deepens with the setting of the sun to a velvety blackness and gives to
+the fir-crowned hills melodramatic and tragical significances.  Such an
+one is Gallows Hill, where the road goes in a hollow formed by the
+massive shoulders of the tree-studded height.  Here, the gossips say,
+with the incertitude of rustic indifference, a man hanged himself, or was
+hanged.  When or why he committed what we have the authority of
+conventional old-time journalism for calling “the rash deed,” does not—in
+the same language—“transpire.”  But certainly he selected a romantic spot
+for ending, for from the ragged crest, underneath one of those “clumps
+and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched tops are like battlemented
+towers crowning black-fronted castles of enchantment,” the moorland,
+under the different local names of Hyde Heath, Decoy Heath, and Gore
+Heath, but all one to the eye, goes stretching away some ten miles, to
+Poole Harbour, seen from this view-point, on moonlit nights, glancing
+like a mirror in a field of black velvet.
+
+                     [Picture: Rye Hill, Bere Regis]
+
+A juicy interlude to the summer dryness of these wastes is that dip in
+the road where one comes to the river Piddle at Chamberlain’s Bridge, a
+battered old red brick pont that, by the aid of the quietly gliding
+stream and the dark, boding mass of fir-crowned Mat Hill in the
+background, makes a memorable picture.  Only when Bere Regis comes within
+sight are the solitudes of Egdon left behind.  Steeply down goes the way
+into the village, down Rye Hill, past the remarkably picturesque old
+thatched cottage illustrated here, perched on its steep roadside bank,
+and so at last on to the level where Bere Church is glimpsed, standing
+four-square and handsome in advance of the long street, backed by dense
+clumps of that tree, the fir, which has so strong an affection for these
+sandy heaths.  Here then is the introduction to the
+“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill” of the Wessex novels, the “half-dead townlet .
+. . the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered the
+D’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there for full five hundred
+years.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+                                BERE REGIS
+
+THIS “blinking little place,” and now perhaps a not even blinking, but
+fast asleep village, was at one time a market-town, and, more than that,
+as its latinised name would imply, a royal residence.  Kingsbere, said to
+mean “Kingsbury”—that is to say, “King’s place” or building—really
+obtained its name in very different fashion.  It was plain “Bere,” long
+before the Saxon monarchs came to this spot and caused the latter-day
+confusion among antiquaries of the British “bere,” meaning an underwood,
+a scrub, copse, bramble, or thorn-bed, with the Anglo-Saxon “byrig.”  We
+have but to look upon the surroundings of Bere Regis even at this day, a
+thousand years later, to see how truly descriptive that British name
+really was.  It was of old a place greatly favoured by royalty, from that
+remote age when Elfrida murdered her stepson, Edward the King and Martyr,
+at Corfe Castle, and thrashed her own son Ethelred here with a large wax
+candle, for reproaching her with the deed.  Those events happened in A.D.
+978, and it is therefore not in any way surprising that no traces of the
+ferocious Queen Elfrida’s residence have survived.  Ethelred, we are
+told, hated wax candles ever after that severe thrashing, and doubtless
+hated Bere as well; but it was more than ever a royal resort in the later
+times of King John, who visited it on several occasions in the course of
+his troubled reign.  Thenceforward, however, the favours of monarchs
+ceased, and it came to depend upon the good will of the Abbots of Tarent
+Abbey and that of the Turbervilles, who between them became owners of the
+manor.
+
+The village street of Bere is bleak and barren.  It is a street of rustic
+cottages of battered red brick, or a compost of mud, chopped straw, and
+lime, called “cob,” built on a brick base, often plastered, almost all of
+them thatched: some with new thatch, some with thatch middle-aged, others
+yet with thatch ancient and decaying, forming a rich and fertile bed for
+weeds and ox-eyed daisies and “bloody warriors,” as the local Dorsetshire
+name is for the rich red wall-flowers.  Sometimes the old thatch has been
+stripped before the new was placed: more often it has not, and the merest
+casual observer can, as he passes, easily become a critic of the
+thoroughness or otherwise with which the thatcher’s work has been
+performed, not only by sight of the different shades belonging to old and
+new, but by the varying thicknesses with which the roofs are seen to be
+covered.  Here an upstairs window looks out immediately, open-eyed, upon
+the sunlight; there another peers blinkingly forth, as behind beetling
+eyebrows, from half a yard’s depth of straw and reed, shading off from a
+coal-black substratum to a coffee-coloured layer, and thence to the amber
+top-coating of the latest addition.  Warm in winter, cool in summer, is
+the testimony of cottagers towards thatch; and earwiggy always, thinks
+the stranger under such roofs, as he observes quaint lepidoptera
+ensconced comfortably in his bed.  Picturesque it certainly is, expensive
+too, although it may not generally be thought so; but it is more enduring
+than cheap slates or tiles, and, according to many who should know, if
+indeed their prejudices do not warp their statements, cheaper in the long
+run.
+
+                          [Picture: Bere Regis]
+
+It is, in fine, not easy to come to a definitive pronouncement on the
+merits or demerits, the comparative cheapness or costliness, of rival
+roofing materials.  The cost of the materials themselves, payments for
+laying them, and the astonishing difference between the enduring
+qualities of thatch well and thatch indifferently laid forbid certitude.
+But all modern local authorities are opposed to thatch, chiefly on the
+score of its liability to fire.  All the many and extensive fires of
+Dorsetshire have been caused by ignited thatch; or else, caused in other
+ways, have been spread and magnified by it.  Yet, here again your rustic
+will stoutly defend the ancient roofing, and declare that while such a
+roof is slowly smouldering, and before it bursts into a blaze, he can
+dowse it with a pail of water.  No doubt, but that water, from a well
+perhaps two hundred feet deep, and that ladder from some neighbour
+half-a-mile away, are sometimes not to be brought to bear with the
+required celerity.
+
+This, let it be fervently said, is not an attack upon thatch: it is but
+the presentation of pros and cons, and is no argument in favour of that
+last word in utilitarian hideousness, corrugated galvanized iron, under
+whose shelter you freeze in winter and fry in summer.
+
+Meanwhile, here are ruined cottages in the long street of Bere, whose
+condition has been brought about by just such causes, and whose
+continuation in that state is due, not to a redundancy of dwellings, but
+because the Lady of the Manor at Charborough, despising the insignificant
+rents here, will not trouble about, or go to the expense of, rebuilding.
+
+Hence the gaps in the long row, like teeth missing from a jaw.
+
+Not a little hard-featured and stern at first sight, owing to the entire
+absence of the softening feature of gardens upon the road, this long
+street of Bere has yet a certain self-reliant strong-charactered aspect
+that brings respect.  It has, too, the most interesting and beautiful
+church, rich in historical, and richer in literary, associations.
+
+                          [Picture: Bere Regis]
+
+Bere Regis in its decay is a storehouse of old Dorset speech and customs.
+To its cottagers vegetables are “gearden-tackle,” sugar—at least, the
+moist variety—is “zand,” and garden-flowers all have quaint outlandish
+names.  The rustic folk have a keen, if homely philosophy.  “Ef ’twarnt
+for the belly,” said one to the present writer, in allusion to cost of
+living, “back ’ud wear gold.”  “Bere,” said another—an ‘outlandish’
+person he, who had only been settled in the village a decade or so and
+accordingly was only regarded as a stranger, and so indeed regarded
+himself—“Bere, a poor dra’lattin twankyten pleace, ten mile from
+anywheer, God help it!” which is so very nearly true that, if you consult
+the map you will find that Dorchester is ten miles distant, Corfe Castle
+twelve, Wimborne twelve, Blandford eight, and Wareham, the nearest town,
+seven miles away.
+
+“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” as Mr. Hardy elects to rechristen Bere Regis,
+owes the ultimate limb of that compound name to Woodbury Hill, a lofty
+elevation rising like an exaggerated down, but partly clothed with trees,
+on the outskirts of Bere Regis.  The novelist describes this scene of an
+ancient annual fair, now much shrunken from its olden import, rather as
+it was than as it is.  “Greenhill was the Nijni Novgorod of South Wessex;
+and the busiest, merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number was
+the day of the sheep-fair.  This yearly gathering was upon the summit of
+a hill, which retained in good preservation the remains of an ancient
+earthwork, consisting of a huge rampart and entrenchment of an oval form,
+encircling the top of the hill, though somewhat broken down here and
+there.  To each of the two openings, on opposite sides, a winding road
+ascended, and the level green space of twenty or thirty acres enclosed by
+the bank was the site of the fair.  A few permanent erections dotted the
+spot, but the majority of the visitors patronised canvas alone for
+resting and feeding under during the time of their sojourn here.”
+
+The place looks interesting, viewed from beneath whence two
+forlorn-looking houses are seen perched on the very ridge of the windy
+height.  But it is always best to remain below, and so to keep romantic
+illusions; and here is no exception.  Climbing to the summit, those two
+houses are increased to fifteen or seventeen red-brick, storm-beaten
+cottages, some thatched, others slated, mostly uninhabited; all
+commonplace.  The fair is still held in September, beginning on the 18th,
+the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Formerly it lasted a week, and,
+at the rate of a hundred pounds a day in tolls to the Lord of the Manor,
+brought that fortunate person an annual “unearned increment” as the
+Radicals would call it, of £700.  Nowadays those tolls are very much of a
+negligible quantity.
+
+Here it was, during the sheep fair, that Troy, supposed to have long
+before been drowned in Lulworth Cove, but living and masquerading as Mr.
+Francis, the Great Cosmopolitan Roughrider, enacted the part of Dick
+Turpin in the canvas-covered show, and, looking through a hole in the
+tent, unobserved himself, observed Bathsheba, who had thought him dead.
+
+The villagers of Bere look askance upon the dwellers on this eyrie.  They
+tell you “they be gipsy vo’k up yon,” and hold it to be the last resort
+of those declining in worldly estate.  Villagers going, metaphorically,
+“down the hill” in the direction of outdoor relief, move to the less
+desirable cottages in the village, and then, complete penury at last
+overtaking them, continue their moral and economic descent by the
+geographical ascent of this hill of Woodbury, whence they are at last
+removed to “The Union.”
+
+Below Woodbury Hill, on the edge of Bere Wood, the scene of an old
+Turberville attempt at illegal enclosure, is rural Bloxworth, whose
+little church contains the fine monument of Sir John Trenchard “of the
+ancient family of the Trenchards in Dorsetshire,” Sergeant-at-Law and
+Secretary of State in the reign of William and Mary.  He died in 1695,
+aged 46.  Ten years before, he had been an active sympathiser with the
+Duke of Monmouth, in that ill-fated rebellion, and it is told, how, when
+visiting one Mr. Speke at Ilchester, hearing that Jeffreys had issued a
+warrant for his arrest, he instantly took horse, rode to Poole and thence
+crossed to Holland, returning with the Prince of Orange three years
+later.
+
+Above all other interest at Bere is the beautiful church, standing a
+little distance below the long-drawn village street, and clearly from its
+character and details, a building cherished and beautified by the Abbey
+of Tarent, by the Turbervilles, and by Cardinal Archbishop Morton, native
+of the place.
+
+The three-staged pinnacled tower is very fine, the lower stage
+alternately of stone and flint, the three surmounting courses diapered:
+the second and third stages treated wholly in that chessboard fashion.
+The beautiful belfry windows, of three lights, divided into three stages
+by transoms, are filled with pierced stonework.  The exterior south wall
+of the church is of alternate red brick and flint, in courses of threes.
+There is a remarkable window in the west wall of the north aisle, and in
+the south wall the exceptionally fine and unusual Turberville window, of
+late Gothic character and five lights, filled in modern times by the
+Erle-Drax family, of Charborough, with a series of stained-glass armorial
+shields, displaying the red lion of the Turbervilles, all toe-nails and
+whiskers, and ducally crowned, ramping against an ermine field, firstly
+by himself and then conjointly with the arms of the families with which
+the Turbervilles, in the course of many centuries, allied themselves.
+The Erle-Draxes have not, in honouring the extinct Turberville, forgotten
+themselves, for some of the shields display their arms and those of the
+Sawbridges, Grosvenors, Churchills, and Eggintons they married.
+
+                [Picture: Bere Regis: Interior of Church]
+
+Entering, the building is seen to be even more beautiful than without.
+Its most striking and unusual feature—unusual in this part of the
+country—is the extraordinarily gorgeous, elaborately carved and painted
+timber roof, traditionally said to have been the gift of Cardinal Morton,
+born at Milborne Stileman, in the parish of Bere Regis.  The hammer-beams
+are boldly carved into the shapes of bishops, cardinals, and pilgrims,
+while the bosses are worked into great faces that look down with a fat
+calm satisfaction that must be infinitely reassuring to the
+congregations.
+
+The bench ends are another interesting feature.  Many are old, others are
+new, done in the old style when the church was admirably restored by
+Street.  Had Sir Gilbert Scott been let loose upon it, it may well be
+supposed that the surviving bench-ends would have been cast out, and nice
+new articles by the hands of his pet firm of ecclesiastical furnishers
+put in their stead.  One is dated, in Roman numerals, MCCCCCXLVII;
+another is inscribed “IOH. DAV. WAR. DENOF. THYS. CHARYS,” and another
+bears a merchant’s mark, with the initial of “I. T.”  The Transitional
+Norman pillars are bold and virile, with humorous carvings of that period
+strikingly projecting from their capitals.  It evidently seemed to that
+now far-away waggish fellow who sculptured them that toothache and
+headache were things worth caricaturing.  Let us hope he never suffered
+from them, but he evidently took as models some who were such martyrs.
+
+                 [Picture: Pew ends in Bere Regis Church]
+
+But the centre of interest to us in these pages is by the Turberville
+window in the south aisle, beneath whose gorgeous glass is the great
+ledger-stone, covering the last resting-place of the extinct family.  It
+is boldly lettered:
+
+                         _Ostium sepulchri antiquae_
+                            _Famillae Turberville_
+                               _24 Junij 1710_
+
+                         (_The door of the sepulchre_
+                           _of the ancient family_
+                           _of the Turbervilles_).
+
+In the wall beneath the window is a defaced Purbeck marble altar-tomb,
+and four others neighbour it.  These are the tombs described in _Tess of
+the D’Urbervilles_ as “canopied, altar-shaped, and plain; their brasses
+torn from their matrices, the rivet-holes remaining, like marten-holes in
+a sand-cliff,” and it was on one of those that Alec D’Urberville lay
+prone, in pretence of being an effigy of one of her ancestors, when Tess
+was exploring the twilight church.
+
+The great monumental _History of Dorsetshire_ tells the enquirer a good
+deal of the Turbervilles who, being themselves all dead and gone to their
+place, have, with a slight alteration in the spelling of their name
+served as a peg on which to hang the structure of one of the finest
+exercises ever made in the art of novel writing.  It seems that the
+Turbervilles descended from one Sir Pagan or Payne Turberville, or de
+Turbida Villa, who is shown in the Roll of Battle Abbey—or was shown,
+before that Roll was accidentally burnt—to have come over with the
+Conqueror.  After the Battle of Hastings he seems to have been one of
+twelve knights who helped Robert Fitz Hamon, Lord of Estremaville, in his
+unholy enterprises, and then to have returned to England when his
+over-lord was created Earl of Gloucester.  He warred in that lord’s
+service, in the Norman conquest of Glamorgan, and was rewarded with a
+tit-bit of spoil there, in the shape of the lordship of Coyty.
+
+In the reign of Henry III. a certain John de Turberville is found paying
+an annual fee or fine in respect of some land in the forest of Bere,
+which an ancestor of his had impudently endeavoured to enclose out of the
+estate of the Earl of Hereford; and in 1297 a member of the family is
+found in the neighbourhood of Bere Regis.  This Brianus de Thorberville,
+or Bryan Turberville, was lord of the manor, called from its situation on
+the river Piddle, and from himself, “Piddle Turberville,” and now
+represented by the little village called Bryan’s Piddle.
+
+              [Picture: Bere Regis: the Turberville Window]
+
+At a later period the rising fortunes of this family are attested by
+their coming into possession of half of the manor of Bere Regis, the
+other half being, as it had long been, the property of Tarent Abbey.
+Still later, when at last that Abbey was dissolved, the Turbervilles were
+in the enjoyment of good fortune, for the other half of the manor then
+came to them.  This period seems to have marked the summit of their
+advancement, for from that time they gradually but surely decayed, giving
+point to the old superstition which dates the decadence of many an old
+family from that day when it sacrilegiously was awarded the spoils of the
+Church.  This fall from position began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth,
+but D’Albigny Turberville, the oculist who was consulted by Pepys the
+diarist, and eventually died in 1696, as the tomb to him with the fulsome
+inscription in Salisbury Cathedral tells us, was a distinguished scion of
+the ancient race, as also was “George Turberville, gentleman,” and poet,
+born at Winterborne Whitchurch, and publishing books of poems and travels
+in 1570.  These, doubtless, were not forms of distinction that would have
+commended themselves to those old fighting and land-snatching
+Turbervilles; but, other times, other manners.
+
+The last Turberville of Bere Regis was that Thomas Turberville over whom
+the ancient vault of his stock finally closed in 1710.  His twin
+daughters and co-heiresses, Frances and Elizabeth, born here in 1703,
+sold the property and left for London.  They died at Purser’s Cross,
+Fulham, near London, early in 1780, and were buried together at Putney.
+Shortly afterwards their old manor-house of Bere Regis, standing near the
+church, was allowed to lapse into ruin, and thus their kin became only a
+memory where they had ruled so long.  Of the old branch of the family
+settled in Glamorganshire, a Colonel Turberville remains the
+representative, but the position of the various rustics who in Dorset and
+Wilts bear the name, corrupted variously into Tollafield and
+Troublefield, is open to the suspicion that they are the descendants of
+illegitimate offspring of that race.  There remained, indeed, until quite
+recent years a humble family of “Torevilles” in Bere Regis, one of whom
+persisted in calling himself “Sir John.”  But as Mr. Hardy says, in the
+course of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, instances of the gradual descent
+of legitimate scions of the old knightly families, down and again
+downwards until they have become mere farm-labourers, are not infrequent
+in Wilts and Dorset.  Their high-sounding names have undergone outrageous
+perversions, as in the stated instance of courtly Paridelle into rustic
+Priddle; but, although they have inherited no worldly gear they own the
+same blood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+                      THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY
+
+DORCHESTER is not only the capital of Dorset: it is also the chief town
+of the Hardy Country.  The ancient capital of Wessex was Winchester: the
+chief seat of this literary domain is here, beside the Frome.  Four miles
+distant from it the novelist was born, and at Max Gate, Fordington,
+looking down upon Dorchester’s roofs, he resides.
+
+The old country life still closely encircles the county town, and on
+market-days takes the place by storm; so that when, by midday, most of
+the carriers from a ten or fifteen miles radius have deposited their
+country folk, and the farmers have come in on horseback, or driving, or
+perhaps by train, the slighter forms, less ruddy faces, and more urban
+dress of the townsfolk are lost amid the great army of occupation that
+from farms, cottages, dairies, and sheep-pastures, has for the rest of
+the day taken possession of the streets.  The talk is all of the goodness
+or badness of the hay crop, the prospects of the harvest, how swedes are
+doing, and the condition of cows, sheep, and pigs; or, if it be on toward
+autumn, when the hiring of farm-labourers, shepherds, and rural servants
+in general for the next twelve months is the engrossing topic, then the
+scarcity of hands and their extravagant demands are the themes of much
+animated talk.
+
+Dorchester faithfully at such times reflects the image of Dorset, and
+Dorset remains to this day, and long may it so remain, a great
+sheep-breeding and grazing county, and equally great as a land of rich
+dairies.  From that suburb of Fordington, which has for so very many
+centuries been a suburb that to those who know it the name bears no
+suburban connotation, you may look down, as from a cliff-top, and see the
+river Frome winding away amid the rich grazing pastures, and with one ear
+hear the cows calling, while with the other the cries of the newspaper
+boys are heard in the streets of the town.  The scent of the hay and the
+drowsy hum of the bees break across the top of the bluff, and, just as
+one may read, in the exquisite description of these things in the pages
+of _The Mayor of Casterbridge_, the dandelion and other winged seeds
+float in at open windows.  One may sometimes from this point, when the
+foliage of its dense screen of trees grows thin, see Stinsford, the
+“Mellstock” of that idyllic tale, _Under the Greenwood Tree_; but in
+general you can see nothing of that sequestered spot until you have
+reached the by-lane out of the main road from Dorchester, and, turning
+there to the right, come to Stinsford Church, along a way made a midday
+twilight by those trees which render the title of that story so
+descriptive.
+
+                 [Picture: Stinsford Church. (Mellstock)]
+
+Blue wood-smoke, curling up from cottage chimneys against the massed
+woodlands that surround Kingston House, grey church, largely ivy-covered
+and plentifully endowed with grotesque gurgoyles—these, with school-house
+and scattered cottages, make the sum-total of Stinsford, or “Mellstock.”
+The school-house is that of the young school-mistress, Fancy Day, in the
+story; and suggests romance; but the sentimental pilgrim may be excused
+for being of opinion that it is all in the book, with perhaps nothing
+left over for real life.  At any rate, passing it, as the scholars within
+are, like bees, in Mr. Hardy’s words, “humming small,” one does not
+linger, but speculates more or less idly which was the cottage where
+Tranter Dewy lived, and which that of Geoffrey Day, the keeper of Yalbury
+Great Wood.  There are not, after all, many cottages to choose from, and
+Mr. Hardy has so largely peopled his stories from Mellstock that each one
+might well be a literary landmark.  The Fiddler of the Reels, Mop
+Ollamoor, a rustic Paganini, whose diabolical cleverness with his violin
+is the subject of a short story, lived in one of these thatched homes of
+rural content, and in another was born unhappy Jude the Obscure.  In each
+one of the rest you can imaginatively find the home of a member of that
+famous Mellstock choir, whose performances and enthusiasm sometimes rose
+so “glorious grand” that those who wrought with stringed instruments
+almost sawed through the strings of fiddle and double-bass, and those
+others whose weapons were of brass blew upon them until they split the
+seams of their coats and sent their waistcoat-buttons flying with the
+force of their fervid harmony, in the cumulative strains of Handel and
+the dithyrambics of Tate and Brady.  “Oh! for such a man in our parish,”
+was thought to be the admiratory attitude of the parson at the
+_fortissimo_ outburst of a minstrel from a neighbouring village, who had
+taken a turn with the local choir; but the parson’s pose was less one of
+admiration than of startled surprise.
+
+All the members of that harmonious, if at times too vigorous, choir are
+gone to the land where, let us hope, they are quiring in the white robes
+and golden crowns usually supposed to be the common wear “up along”; and
+their instruments are perished too:
+
+    The knight is dust, his sword is rust,
+    His soul is with the saints, we trust.
+
+Or, as Mr. Hardy, in _Friends Beyond_, says of his own creations:
+
+    William Dewy, Tranter Reuben,
+    Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
+    Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,
+    And the Squire and Lady Susan
+    Lie in Mellstock churchyard now.
+
+The clergy, who were responsible for the disappearance of the old choirs,
+did not succeed at one stroke in sweeping them away, and in many parishes
+it was not until the leader had died that they broke up the old rustic
+harmony.  “The ‘church singers,’ who played anthems, with selections
+‘from Handel, but mostly composed by themselves,’ had a position in their
+parish.  They had an admiring congregation.  Their afternoon anthem was
+the theme of conversation at the church porch before the service, and of
+enquiry and critical disquisition after.  ‘And did John,’ one would ask,
+‘keep to his time?’  ‘Samuel was crowding very fitly until his string
+broked.’  This was said after a performance difficult in all the
+categories in which difficulty—close up even to impossibility—may be
+found.  And there was, I was about to say, a finale, but it seemed
+endless; it was a concluding portion, and a long one, of the anthem.
+
+“Mary began an introductory recapitulation, in which she was ably
+followed, of the words, the subject of the composition, the masterpiece
+of one, or many, if the choir had lent a helping hand.  It happened that
+Mary had to manage three full syllables, and all the cadences, and
+trills, and quavers connected therewith, as a solo.  Then followed,
+through all the turns of the same intricate piece, Thomas, of tenor
+voice, who evolved his music, but did not advance to any elucidation of
+the subject of his concluding effort.  He only dwelt upon the same
+syllables, at which the good minister was seen to smile and become
+restless, particularly when Jonathan took on with his deep bass voice,
+accompanied by the tones he drew from his bass-viol.  He, as best suited
+a bass singer, slowly repeated the syllables that Mary and Thomas had
+produced in so many ways, and with such a series of intonations,
+‘OUR—GREAT—SAL.’  May some who tittered at this canonisation of, as it
+were, a female saint, be forgiven!’  Had they waited a few minutes, the
+grand union of all the performers in loud chorus would have enlightened
+them to the fact that the last syllable was only the first of one of
+three ending in ‘_vation_,’ which would be loudly repeated by the whole
+choir till they appeared fairly tired out.”
+
+The very last surviving vestige of the old village choirs of the West of
+England became extinct in 1893.  Until then the startled visitor from
+London, or indeed any other part of a country by that time given over to
+harmoniums in chapels, cheap and thin organs in small churches, and more
+full-toned ones in larger, would have found the village choir of
+Martinstown still bass-viol and fiddle-scraping, flute-blowing, and
+clarionet-playing, as their forefathers had been wont to do.
+“Martinstown” is the style by which Wessex folk, not quite equal to the
+constant daily repetition of the name of Winterborne St. Martin, know
+that village, a little to the west of Dorchester.  It is a considerable
+place and by no means remote, and it was therefore not the general
+inaccessibility of Martinstown to modern ideas that caused this survival,
+when every other parish had put away such things.  Martinstown then
+provided itself with an organ, as understood to-day; and so escaped a
+middle period to which many another parish fell a victim, between the
+decay of the old church music and the adoption of the new.  When, about
+the accession of Queen Victoria, village minstrelsy began to relax, there
+came in a fashion, or rather a scourge, of mechanical barrel-organs,
+fitted to play a dozen or fewer, sacred tunes, according to the local
+purse, or the local requirements.  Precisely like secular barrel organs,
+save only in the matter of the tunes they were constructed to play,
+church minstrelsy with them not only became mechanical but singularly
+unvaried, for, when your dozen tunes were played, there was nothing for
+it—if, like Oliver Twist, the congregation called for more—but to grind
+the same things over again.  The only variety—and that was one not
+covenanted for—was when portions of the melody-producing works decayed
+and broke off.  A tooth missing from a cog-wheel, or something wrong with
+the barrel, was apt to give an ungodly twist to the Old Hundredth,
+calculated to impart a novelty to that ancient stand-by of village
+churches, and would even have made the air of “Onward, Christian
+Soldiers!” stream forth in spasms, as though those soldiers were an
+awkward squad learning some ecclesiastical goose-step.  In short, the
+barrel-organs were not “things seemly and of good report,” and they
+presently died the death.
+
+Many regretted the old order of things, largely destroyed by the current
+movements in the Church.  Reforming High Churchmen had seized upon the
+signs of weakness exhibited in the old choirs, and had made away with
+them wherever possible.  The rustic music had, as we have seen, its
+humorous incidents, but it was enthusiastic and was understood and
+sympathised with by the people.  Surpliced choirs, and others, formed as
+they now commonly are, from classes superior to those of which the old
+instrumental and vocal choirs were composed, have not that hold upon
+congregations, who do not sing, as the Prayer-book and the Psalm enjoin,
+but listen while others do the singing for them.
+
+“Why, daze my old eyes,” said a Wessex rustic, reviewing the trend of
+modern life, “everything’s upsey-down.  ’Tis, if ye want this and if ye
+want that, put yer hand in yer pocket and goo an’ git some’un to do’t for
+ye, or goo to the Stowers (he meant the Stores) up to Do’chester, and buy
+yer ’taters and have’m sint home for ’ee, cheaper’n ye can grow’m, let be
+the back-breakin’ work of a hoein’ of ’em, and a diggin’ of ’em and a
+clanin’ of ’em.  An’ talking of church, why bless ’ee, tidden no manner
+of good yer liftin’ up yer v’ice glad-like, an’ makkin’ a cheerful noise
+onto the Lord, as we’m bidden to do.  Not a bit.  Ef ye do’t passon looks
+all of a pelt, and they boys in their nightshirts sets off a-sniggerin’
+and they tells yer ye bissen much of a songster, they ses.”
+
+It has already been said that the instruments, as well as the old village
+players of them, have perished, but at least one specimen of that oddly
+named instrument, the “serpent,” frequently mentioned by Mr. Hardy, has
+survived.  This example is in the possession of Messrs. H. Potter & Co.,
+of West Street, Charing Cross Road.  The serpent belongs to such a past
+order of things that, like the rebecs, dulcimers, and shawms of
+Scriptural references, it requires explanation.
+
+The “serpent,” then, it may be learned, although invented by one
+Guillaume so far back as the close of the sixteenth century, first came
+into general use in the early part of the eighteenth.  It was a wind
+instrument, the precursor of the bass horn, or ophicleide, which in its
+turn has been superseded by the valved bass brasses of the present day.
+The serpent of course owed its name to its contorted shape.  It was
+generally made of wood, covered with leather, and stained black, and
+ranged in length from about twenty-nine to thirty-three inches.  The
+earlier form of serpent had but six holes, but these were gradually
+increased, and keyed, until this now obsolete instrument, as improved by
+Key, of London, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, finally
+became possessed of seventeen keys.  It went out of use,
+contemporaneously with the decay of the old village choirs, about 1830.
+
+The geographical area of the heart of the Hardy Country is not very
+great, but the difficulties of finding one’s way about it are not small.
+The Vale of Great Dairies opens out, and the many runnels of the Frome
+make the byways so winding that to clearly know whither one is going
+demands the use of a very large-scale Ordnance Map.  But to lose one’s
+self here is no disaster.  You will find your way out again, and in the
+meanwhile will have come into intimate touch with dairying, and perhaps,
+if it be early summer, will find the barns and the waterside busy with
+sheepshearers.  Seeing the dexterous shearing, the quick, practised
+movements of the men and the panting helplessness of the sheep, one is
+reminded of the similar scene in _Far from the Madding Crowd_.
+
+Away across the Frome is the rustic, out-of-the-way village of West
+Stafford, which has a little one-aisled church, still displaying the
+royal arms of the time of Queen Elizabeth with that semée of lilies, the
+empty boast of a sovereignty over France, which, to the contemplative and
+sentimental student of history is as pitiful a make-believe as that of
+penury apeing affluence.  “That glorious _Semper Eadem_,” motto, “our
+banner and our pride,” as Macaulay says, looks a little flatulent in
+these circumstances of a relaxed grasp.
+
+The long rhymed inscription outside an off-licence beerhouse in the
+village, displaying the Hardyean phrase of “a cup of genuine” for a glass
+of ale, is a curiosity in its way—
+
+    I trust no Wise Man will condemn
+    A Cup of Genuine now and then.
+    When you are faint, your spirits low,
+    Your string relaxed ’twill bend your Bow,
+    Brace your Drumhead and make you tight,
+    Wind up your Watch and set you right:
+    But then again the too much use
+    Of all strong liquors is the abuse.
+    ’Tis liquid makes the solid loose,
+    The Texture and whole frame Destroys,
+    But health lies in the Equipoise.
+
+Resuming the north bank of the Frome, and the road to Tincleton, a
+left-hand turning is seen leading across to Piddletown, by way of Lower
+and Upper Bockhampton—hamlets rustic to the last degree, and, by reason
+of being quite remote from any road the casual stranger is likely to
+take, unknown to the outside world.  Yet the second of these, the
+thatched and tree-embowered hamlet of Upper Bockhampton, has the keenest
+interest for the explorer of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the
+rustic, thatched cottage still occupied by members of the Hardy family,
+that Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, was born, June 2nd, 1840.  It is a
+fitting spot for the birthplace of one who has described nature as surely
+it has never before been described, has pictured the moods of earth and
+sky, and has heard and given new significances to the voices of birds and
+trees, by the stubborn and intractable method of prose-writing.
+
+                  [Picture: Birthplace of Thomas Hardy]
+
+The cottage stands—its front almost hid from sight in the dense growths
+of its old garden and by the slope of the downs—at the extreme upper end
+of Upper Bockhampton, on the edge of the wild, called, with a fine
+freedom of choice, Bockhampton or Piddletown Heath, and Thorneycombe or
+Ilsington Woods.  You enter its garden up steep, rustic steps, and find
+its low-ceiled rooms stone-flagged and criss-crossed with beams.  At the
+back, its walls, with small latticed windows, look sheer upon a lane
+leading into the heart of the woodland; where, so little are strangers
+expected or desired that the tree-trunks bear notice-boards detailing
+what shall be done to those who trespass.  Branches of these enshrining
+trees touch the thatched roof and scrape the walls, and the voices of the
+wind and of the woodlands reverberate from them; and when the sun goes
+down, the nocturnal orchestra of owls and nightingales strikes up.  It is
+an ideal spot for the birth of one whose genius and bent are largely in
+the interpretation of nature; but it must not be forgotten that the
+chances are always against the observation and appreciation of scenes
+amidst which a child has been born and reared, and that only exceptional
+receptivity can throw off the usual effect of staleness and lack of
+interest in things usual and accustomed.  It is thus in the nature of
+things that the townsman generally takes a keener interest in the country
+than those native to it, and the dweller in the mushroom cities of
+commerce finds more in a cathedral city than many of those living within
+the shadow of the Minster ever suspect.  This is to say, parabolically,
+what we all know, that the nature of the seer is an exceptional nature,
+and rises superior to the dulling effects of use and wont: unaccountable
+as the winds that blow, and not to be analysed or predicated by any
+literary meteorological department.
+
+                  [Picture: Birthplace of Thomas Hardy]
+
+Returning through Lower Bockhampton, on the way to Tincleton, a ridge is
+presently seen on the left hand, crowned with fir-trees, and a little
+questing will reveal a rush-grown pool, the original of Heedless
+William’s Pond, mentioned in _The Fiddler of the Reels_.  Beyond this
+landmark, a cottage that fills the position of “Bloom’s End” in _The
+Return of the Native_, is seen, and on the right-hand side the farmstead
+of Norris Mill Farm, where, overlooking the Vale of Great Dairies, is the
+original of Talbothays, the dairy where Angel Clare, learning the
+business from Dairyman Crick, met Tess.  Below the grassy bluff on whose
+sides the farm-buildings stand may be traced the fertilising course of
+the Frome, or as Mr. Hardy calls it, the Var:—“The Var waters were clear
+as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of
+a cloud, with pebbly shadows that prattled to the sky all day long.
+There the water-flower was the lily.”
+
+       [Picture: The “Duck” Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn]
+
+This land of fat kine and water-meads, to the south of the road, is
+neighboured to the northward by the outlying brown and purple stretches
+of Egdon Heath, into whose wilds we shall presently come.  “Bloom’s End,”
+or a house that may well stand for it, we have noticed, and now come upon
+a humble little farm on the right hand, standing with front to the road
+and facing upon a strikingly gloomy heather-covered hill.  This is the
+house, once the “Duck” inn, which figures in _The Return of the Native_
+as the “Quiet Woman” inn, kept by Damon Wildeve, who, a failure as an
+engineer, made a worse shipwreck of life here.  As described in the
+novel, a little patch of land has by dint of supreme exertions been
+reclaimed from the grudging soil:
+
+“Wildeve’s Patch, as it was called, a plot of land redeemed from the
+heath, and after long and laborious years brought into cultivation.  The
+man who had discovered that it could be tilled died of the labour: the
+man who succeeded him in possession ruined himself in fertilising it.
+Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci, and received the honours due to those
+who had gone before.”
+
+A casual talk with the small farmer who has taken the place reveals the
+fact that this soil is a hard taskmaster and yields a poor recompense.
+The heathery hill facing it is described exactly as it is in nature:
+
+“The front of the house was towards the heath and Rainbarrow, whose dark
+shape seemed to threaten it from the sky. . . .”
+
+“It was a barrow.  This bossy projection of earth above its natural level
+occupied the loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath
+contained.  Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an
+Atlantean brow, its actual bulk was great.  It formed the pole and axis
+of this heathery world.”
+
+The soil at the back of the house is better, which indeed it could well
+be without being even then particularly good.  It slopes towards the
+river, at what is described in the book as “Shadwater Weir,” where the
+drowned bodies of Wildeve and Eustacia were found:
+
+    “The garden was at the back, and behind this ran a still deep
+    stream.”
+
+                           [Picture: Tincleton]
+
+The village of Tincleton, the “Stickleford” of casual mention in some of
+the short stories, is one of about a dozen cottages, clustering round a
+little church and school; and with presumably a few dozen more dwellings
+in the neighbourhood of the wide common on which Tincleton stands, to
+account for the existence of that school and that church.  Past it and
+Pallington, whose hill and hilltop firs, known as Pallington Clump, are
+conspicuous for great distances, we turn to the left and explore a
+portion of Egdon Heath towards Bryan’s Piddle and Bere Regis.  Everywhere
+the wilds now stretch forth and seem to bid defiance to the best efforts
+of the cultivator, but down at the hamlet of Hurst, where water is
+plentiful, there is an ancient red-brick farm of superior aspect, and yet
+with a thatched roof—an effect oddly like that which might be produced by
+a gentleman wearing a harvester’s hat.  It is obviously an old
+manor-house, and besides showing evidences of former state, has two
+substantial brick entrance piers surmounted by what country folk, in
+their native satire, call “gentility balls.”
+
+Such gentility in the neighbourhood of wild, uncanny Egdon wears, as Mr.
+Hardy would say, “an anomalous look.”  The heath is more akin with Adam
+than with his descendants:
+
+    “This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday.  Its
+    condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary
+    wilderness—‘Bruaria.’  Then follows the length and breadth in
+    leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent
+    of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the
+    area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished.
+    ‘Turbaria Bruaria’—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters
+    relating to the district.  ‘Overgrown with heth and mosse,’ says
+    Leland of the same dark sweep of country.”
+
+    “Here at least were intelligible facts regarding the
+    landscape—far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction.
+    The untamable Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had
+    been.  Civilisation was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of
+    vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the
+    natural and invariable garment of the particular formation.  In its
+    venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in
+    clothes.  A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours
+    has more or less an anomalous look.  We seem to want the oldest and
+    simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so
+    primitive.”
+
+Here, if anywhere in this poor old England of ours, generally
+over-populated and sorted over, raked about, and turned inside out, there
+is quiet and solitude.  No recent manifestations of the way the world
+wags, no advertisement hoardings, no gasometers or mean suburbs intrude
+upon the inviolable heath.  No one has yet suspected coal beneath the
+shaggy frieze coat of this remote vestige of an earlier age, and its
+vitals have therefore not been probed and dragged forth.  A railway
+skirts it, ’tis true, but only on the way otherwhere, and no network of
+sidings has yet made a gridiron of its unexploited waste.  Elsewhere trim
+hedges or fences of barbed-wire restrain the explorer, but here he is
+free to roam, and may so roam until he has fairly lost himself.
+
+                      [Picture: An Egdon Farmstead]
+
+It is a land wholly antithetic from the bubbling superficial feelings of
+cities, and has the introspective, self-communing air of the solitary.  A
+town-bred man,
+
+    “Heart-halt and spirit-lame,
+          City-opprest,”
+
+and wearied with the weariful reek of the streets, the jostling of the
+pavements, and the intolerable numbers of his kind, might come to a spell
+of recluse life in a farm on Egdon, and there rid him of that
+supersaturation of humanity; returning at last to his streets with a new
+spirit, a brisker step, and a revived hope in the right ordering of the
+world.  So much Egdon can do for such an one.
+
+                        [Picture: A Farm on Egdon]
+
+I know just such a farm, in the dip of the yellow road, its thatched
+roofs and the near trees taking on a homely, comfortable look when night
+closes down upon the wild, when its windows are lit with a welcome ray as
+the sun goes down, in an angry glory in the west.  This is, to me, the
+heart of the Hardy Country, and its surroundings seem most closely to fit
+his imaginings.  The place has just that personality he gives his
+farmsteads, and the wastes near it wear sometimes just that cold
+indifference to humanity, and at others precisely that ogreish hostility,
+he in his pagan way describes.
+
+Halting here, as the sun goes down, and the landscape changes from its
+daylight browns and purples to an irradiated orange, and through the
+siennas and umbers of an etching, to the blackness of night, I feel that
+here resides the _genius loci_, the Spirit of the Heath.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+             DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND YEOVIL
+
+A GOOD many outlying literary landmarks of the Wessex novels may be
+cleared up by leaving Dorchester by Charminster, and then, at a fork in
+the road just past Wolveton, taking the left-hand turning and following
+for awhile the valley road along the course of the river Frome.  Not for
+long, however, if it is desired to keep strictly to those landmarks, do
+we pursue this easy course, for in another couple of miles, by Grimstone
+station, we shall have to bear to the right hand and make for what is
+known in Mr. Hardy’s pages as “Long Ash Lane,” along whose almost
+interminable course Farmer Darton and his friend rode, to the wooing of
+Sally Hall, at Great Hintock, in that short story, _Interlopers at the
+Knap_.
+
+Long Ash Lane—in some editions of the novels styled “Holloway Lane”—is
+the middle one of three roads past Grimstone station.  Those on either
+side lead severally to Maiden Newton—the “Chalk Newton” of _Tess of the
+D’Urbervilles_—and to Sydling St. Nicholas; but this is, as described in
+that story, “a monotonous track, without a village or hamlet for many
+miles, and with very seldom a turning.”  For its own sake, it will
+therefore be easily seen, Long Ash Lane is not an altogether desirable
+route.  It is an ancient Roman road, running eventually to Yeovil and
+Ilchester; passing near by, but not touching, and always out of sight of
+several small villages on its lengthy way.  Darton and Johns found it
+weariful as they rode, the hedgerow twigs on either side “currycombing
+their whiskers,” as Mr. Hardy delightfully says; and wayfarers on foot,
+tired out, believe at last that it will never end:
+
+“Unapprised wayfarers, who are too old, or too young, or in other
+respects too weak for the distance to be traversed, but who,
+nevertheless, have to walk it, say, as they look wistfully ahead: ‘Once
+at the top of that hill, and I must surely see the end of Long Ash Lane!’
+But they reach the hill-top, and Long Ash Lane stretches in front
+mercilessly as before.”
+
+After many miles this tiresome road at last comes in touch with modern
+life, for Evershot station and the hamlet of Holywell are placed directly
+beside it.  Here we may turn right, or turn left, or go onward, sure in
+all directions of finding many scenes to be identified with the novels.
+Turning to the right, a road not altogether dissimilar in its loneliness
+from Long Ash Lane is found, but differing from it in the one essential
+respect of ascending the ridge of lofty downs overlooking the Vale of
+Blackmoor, and thus, while to the right hand disclosing a dull expanse of
+table-land, on the left opening out a romantic view, bounded only by
+distance and the inadequacies of human eyesight.  This is the road along
+which Tess was travelling—in the reverse direction—from Dole’s Ash Farm
+at Plush, the “Flintcombe Ash” of those tragical pages, to Beaminster or
+“Emminster,” to visit the parents of Angel Clare, her husband, when she
+came to that ill-fated meeting with Alec D’Urberville at the spot we now
+approach, Cross-in-Hand:
+
+“At length the road touched the spot called ‘Cross-in-Hand.’  Of all
+spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn.  It
+was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by artists
+and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative beauty of
+tragic tone.  The place took its name from a stone pillar which stood
+there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local
+quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand.”
+
+The history and meaning of this lonely pillar on the solitary ridgeway
+road are unknown.  Thought by some to mark the old-time bounds of
+property under the sway of the Abbot of Cerne, others have considered it
+to be the relic of a wayside cross, while others yet have held it to be a
+place of meeting of the tenants and feudatories of the old abbey, and the
+hollow in the stone to have been the receptacle for their tribute.  But,
+“whatever the origin of the relic, there was and is something sinister,
+or solemn, according to mood, in the scene amid which it stands;
+something tending to impress the most phlegmatic passer-by.”
+
+Here it was that Tess, on her way to Flintcombe Ash, was surprised by the
+converted Alec D’Urberville, already shaken in his new-found grace and
+preaching mission at sight of her, and here he made her swear upon it
+never to tempt him by her charms or ways.  “This was once a Holy Cross,”
+said he.  “Relics are not in my creed, but I fear you at moments.”  It
+was not very reassuring to Tess when, leaving the spot of this singular
+rencounter and asking a rustic if the stone were not a Holy Cross, he
+replied, “Cross—no; ’twer not a cross!  ’Tis a thing of ill-omen, miss.
+It was put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor, who was
+tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung.  The
+bones lie underneath.  They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that
+he walks at times.”
+
+                         [Picture: Cross-in-Hand]
+
+This pillar, “the scene of a miracle or murder, or both,” stands some
+five feet in height, and rises from the unfenced grassy selvedge of the
+road, where the blackberry bushes and bracken grow, on the verge of the
+down that breaks precipitously away to the vale where Yetminster lies.
+The rude bowl-shaped capital of the mystic stone has the coarse semblance
+of a hand, displayed in the manner of the Bloody Hand of Ulster.
+
+                           [Picture: Batcombe]
+
+Deep down below, in midst of the narrowest lanes, lies the sequestered
+village of Batcombe, from which this down immediately above takes its
+name.  The church stands almost in the shadow of the hills.  This also is
+a place of marvellous legends, for a battered old Gothic tomb in the
+churchyard, innocent of inscription, standing near the north wall of the
+church, is, according to old tales the resting-place of one “Conjuring
+Minterne,” a devil-compeller and astrologer of sorts, who was originally
+buried half in and half out of the church, for fear his master, “the
+horny man,” as a character in one of Mr. Hardy’s romances calls Old Nick,
+should have him, if buried otherwise.  One would like to learn more about
+“Conjuring Minterne” and his strange tricks, but history is silent.
+
+Returning to Evershot, or, as it is styled in the sources of our
+pilgrimage, “Evershead,” we come to Melbury Park, the seat of the Earl of
+Ilchester, and the principal scene of that charming story, _The First
+Countess of Wessex_, in the collection of “A Group of Noble Dames.”  The
+great house of oddly diversified architecture, stands in the midst of
+this nobly wooded and strikingly varied domain, but can readily be seen,
+for the carriage-drive is a public right of way.  This is the broad
+roadway through the park described in the passage where Tupcombe, riding
+towards “King’s Hintock Court”—as Mr. Hardy disguises the identity of the
+place—from Mells, on Squire Dornell’s errand, saw it stretching ahead
+“like an unrolled deal shaving.”
+
+Like most of the stories of those noble dames, this romance of Betty
+Dornell, the First Countess of Wessex, is founded upon actual people, and
+largely upon their real doings.  Squire Dornell of Falls Park—really
+Mells Park—was in real life that Thomas Horner who in 1713 married
+Susannah Strangways, heiress of the Strangways family and owner of
+Melbury Sampford; and their only child was Elizabeth, born in 1723, who
+in 1736, in her thirteenth year, almost precisely as in the story, was
+married to Stephen Fox, afterwards Earl of Ilchester, who died in 1776.
+The Countess died in 1792.
+
+                 [Picture: Tomb of “Conjuring Minterne”]
+
+But this passage of family history is best set forth in the manner
+customary to genealogists:
+
+          [Picture: Family tree of Thomas Horner of Mells] {174}
+
+The father of the first Countess of Wessex was, it is curious to know,
+descended from Little Jack Horner, that paragon of selfishness who sat in
+a corner, eating his Christmas pie, and who, the familiar nursery rhyme
+goes on to tell us,
+
+    “Put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
+    And said, What a good boy am I!”
+
+The nursery rhyme was that, and something more.  It was, in fact a satire
+upon that John Horner who, upon the dissolution of the monasteries,
+purchased for much less than it was worth the confiscated Mells estate of
+Glastonbury Abbey.  This prize, the “plum” of the rhyme, is said to have
+been worth £10,000.  The Horners, represented by Sir John Horner,
+espoused the side of the Parliament in the war with Charles I. but they
+have kept their plum, at every hazard and in all chances, and Mells Park
+is still in the family.
+
+                         [Picture: Melbury House]
+
+Leland tells how the house of Melbury Park was built in the sixteenth
+century by Sir Giles Strangways, but portions of the great T-shaped
+building have at later times been added, notably the wing built in the
+time of Queen Anne.  The whole heterogeneous pile, dominated by a
+church-like, six-sided central tower, occupies a raised grassy site
+looking upon a lake on whose opposite shore is the little manorial church
+of Melbury Sampford, plentifully stored with monuments of Strangways and
+Fox-Strangways, and in especial notable for that to the courtly and
+equable husband of Betty Dornell.  His epitaph, by the hand of his widow,
+describes him as the most desirable of husbands.
+
+                         Near this stone is interred
+                         Stephen, Earl of Ilchester,
+                             who died at Melbury
+                    Sept. 26, A.D. MDCCLXXVI., aged LXXII.
+              He was the eighth son of Sir Stephen Fox, knight.
+            He married Elizabeth, only daughter of Thomas Horner,
+                of Mells, in the county of Somerset, esquire,
+                       heiress-general to the family of
+               Strangways of Melbury, in the county of Dorset,
+                 by whom he had Henry Thomas, his eldest son,
+                            now Earl of Ilchester
+                   (who succeeds him in honours and estate)
+                          and a numerous offspring.
+                   As a small token of her great affection
+                  to the best of husbands, fathers, friends,
+                his disconsolate widow inscribes this marble,
+
+                            Sacred to his memory.
+
+    Hush’d be the voice of bards who heroes praise,
+    And high o’er glory’s sun their pæans raise;
+    And let an artless Muse a friend review,
+    Whose tranquil Life one blameless tenour knew,
+    By Nature form’d to please, of happiest mien,
+    Just, friendly, chearful, affable, serene;
+    Engaging Manners, cultivated Mind,
+    Adorn’d by Letters and in Courts refin’d,
+    His blooming honours long approv’d he bore,
+    And added lustre to that gem he wore;
+    Grac’d with all pow’rs to shine, he left parade,
+    And unambitious lov’d the sylvan shade;
+    The choice by Heav’n applauded stood confess’d
+    And all his Days with all its blessing bless’d;
+    Living belov’d, lamented in his end,
+    Unfading Bliss his mortal change attend.
+
+At the other extremity of the park is the small and secluded village of
+Melbury Osmund, the “Little Hintock” of _The Woodlanders_, “one of those
+sequestered spots outside the gates of the world, where may usually be
+found more meditation than action, and more listlessness than
+meditation.”  It lies among vast hills and profound hollows, whose huge
+convexities and corresponding concavities render this a district to be
+more comfortably ridden by the horseman than walked, and one to be
+explored by the cyclist only with great and exhausting labour.
+
+By perspiring perseverance, however, Yeovil and Somerset, or, speaking by
+the card, “Ivell” and “Outer Wessex” may be reached at last, by way of
+the strangely-entitled village of Ryme Intrinsica, whose name, so spelled
+on the map, is, with considerable incertitude both as to spelling and
+meaning, said to be properly written “Entrenseca” or “Entrensicca.”
+Local theories, disregarding altogether the inexplicable “Ryme,” and
+expending themselves upon the preposterous Latinity of the second part of
+the name, have come to some sort of agreement that it denotes a dry place
+on a ridge placed between two watered vales; and those curious enough to
+look for it on a large-scale map will perceive readily enough that,
+whatever the comparative dryness of the ridge it does occupy, it is
+certainly so flanked by the low-lying lands in which flow two tributaries
+of the river Yeo.
+
+Hutchins, the county historian, on the other hand, gives a wholly
+different explanation of the name.  Spelling the “Intrinseca” with an
+“e,” instead of the final “i,” he says it is so called, Ryme Intrinseca,
+or “In Ryme,” in contradistinction to an outlying portion of the old
+manor, away down in the parish of Long Bredy, and styled Ryme
+Extrinsecus, or “Out Ryme.”
+
+At any rate, Ryme Intrinsica looks scarcely the place to be dolled out in
+so classical a style.  It is too Saxon, too rustic and homespun in all
+its circumstances of thatch, rickyards, dairies, and pigsties; and its
+little church is not in any way corroborative of this dignity.
+
+Yeovil, whose name has so bucolic a sound that it would seem to be, above
+all other places, the home most suitable for yeomen, is the “Ivell” of
+the Wessex novels, but finds only scattered allusions in them, and
+touches far from intimate.  Cope, the curate, who in the story _For
+Conscience’ Sake_ married the conscience-smitten Millborne’s daughter
+when at last the father effaced himself, was curate at Ivell; and it was
+at the “Castle” inn of the same town that the brothers Halborough called
+for their drunken father, in the harrowing embarrassments of _A Tragedy
+of two Ambitions_, but those are the nearest approaches to be discovered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+                                SHERBORNE
+
+MUCH remains in pleasant Sherborne to tell of that time when it was a
+cathedral city, and when, after it had lost that high dignity, it was of
+scarce less importance as the home of a powerful Abbey.  It was the
+pleasing, well-watered and sheltered situation, in the vale where the
+little Yeo or Ivel runs—the stream which, passing through Yeovil, gives
+that town its name—that first attracted the religious in A.D. 705, the
+time of that now misty and vague monarch, King Ina.  The Yeo had not yet
+obtained that name, and was merely spoken of in descriptive and
+admiratory phrase as the _Seir burne_, an Anglo-Saxon description for a
+bright and clear brook which has crystallised here and at several other
+places in the country, into a place-name.  Even in the City of London
+there is a Sherborne Lane, where no stream now flows, the successor,
+however, of a pleasant lane, where in Anglo-Saxon times a tributary of
+the Wall Brook flowed.
+
+Not every one was satisfied with this choice for a cathedral site.
+William of Malmesbury wrote of it as “pleasant neither by multitudes of
+inhabitants, nor beauty of position.”  But beauty is a matter of
+individual taste.  “Wonderful, almost shameful,” he continued, “was it,
+that a bishop’s see should have remained here for so many years.”  For
+three hundred and three years it so remained, the bishop’s seat being
+removed only in 1078, when Old Sarum, a much more inconvenient site,
+sterile, cramped and waterless—a place that to the Saxons was Searobyrig,
+the dry city—was selected, only itself to be abandoned in less than
+another hundred and fifty years.  In the meanwhile no fewer than
+twenty-seven bishops ruled in succession at Sherborne and passed into the
+Great Beyond, leaving for the most part, very little evidence of their
+existence.  Notable exceptions, however, were Adhelm, an early translator
+of the Scriptures, and Asser, whose biography of his friend and patron,
+Alfred the Great, is a monument to himself as well as to his subject.  In
+the choir-aisles of the existing Abbey-church are sundry relics of those
+prelates, in the shape of ancient tombs with battered effigies, as near a
+likeness to them as possible for the sculptors to produce; and in the
+retro-choir are pointed out the spots where Kings Ethelbald and
+Ethelbert, brothers and predecessors of King Alfred, lie.
+
+After an interval of uncertainty following the removal of the bishopric
+in 1078 to Old Sarum, the cathedral here was in 1139 made a Benedictine
+Abbey and rebuilt by Roger, Bishop of Sarum, who although he might not
+again remove the cathedral back to Sherborne, seems to have loved the
+place, and certainly lavished much care and labour upon it.
+
+Bishop Roger was a man of energy and determination.  Starting in life as
+a poor Norman monk, he owed his first important preferment to a curious
+circumstance.  None could gabble through a mass more speedily than he,
+and he raced through a service before Henry I. so quickly, while the king
+was anxious to be off a-hunting, that the gratified monarch put him on
+the broad high road to advancement, along whose course Roger travelled
+far.  But, if all had liked him as little as did the censorious William
+of Malmesbury, his journeys would have been short.  To that chronicler he
+was “unscrupulous, fierce and avaricious,” not content to keep his own,
+but eager to grab the goods of others.  “Was there anything contiguous to
+his property which might be advantageous to him, he would directly extort
+it, either by entreaty or purchase, or, if that failed, by force.”  It
+must have been well, therefore, to arrange terms with this masterful
+personage while he was in the negotiating way, lest he took what he
+wanted, without so much as a “by-your-leave.”  The great Norman structure
+he erected has largely survived, not only in its ground plan, but in the
+essential circumstances of its walling, for although it is outwardly a
+building in the Perpendicular phase of Gothic, dating from the second
+half of the fifteenth century, that magnificently-elaborated external
+show of nave and presbytery is but a later and more enriched surface,
+daringly grafted upon the stern and solemn Norman walls of over three
+hundred years’ earlier date.
+
+The history of the great Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne very clearly
+retells the old tale of Bury St. Edmunds, of Norwich, and of many another
+great monastic centre, by which you see that these rich and powerful
+settlements of the religious were not generally at peace with the outside
+worldlings.  The causes of quarrel were many.  In some places the
+monastery was a harsh and exacting landlord; in others the imposts and
+hindrances placed upon the markets, whose tolls in many instances were
+the property of the Church, aroused bitter enmity and constant strife;
+and in yet more cases the maintenance of forests and game for the sport
+of the Lords Abbots gave rise to trouble.  Poachers we have had always
+with us, and even in those times when to kill the stag in the Chases was
+a crime adjudged worthy death or mutilation, men for sport or sustenance
+illegally slew the game.  “What shall he have who killed the deer?”  Why,
+an ear cut off or a nose slit, at the very least of it.
+
+Here at Sherborne the bitterest quarrel arose from other causes.  It
+seems that the parish church was situated at the west end of the Abbey,
+separated from it only by a door which the monks, exclusives always, had
+sought gradually to narrow, with a view of eventually blocking it up
+altogether.  A question nearly allied with this was whether the children
+of the townsfolk should be baptised in the Abbey or in the parish church,
+and the disputes at last grew so raw that the Sherborne burgesses, very
+wrothy and spiteful, took to ringing their church-bells so long and so
+loudly that on account of the clamour, the monastic offices could not be
+carried on.  In 1437 the points at issue were by common consent laid
+before the Bishop of Salisbury, who, siding with his own cloth, made an
+award in favour of the Abbey.  Regarding this decision as an injustice,
+the townsfolk refused to abide by it; but there were evidently two
+parties in the town, for one faction, headed by a stalwart butcher, broke
+into the parish church with some of the monks and reduced the font to
+fragments.  Things then, naturally grew worse, until, as Leland puts it,
+“The variance grew to a plain sedition, until a priest of the town church
+of All Hallows shot a shaft with fire into the top of that part of the
+Abbey Church of St. Mary that divided the east part that the monks used
+from that the townsmen used; and this partition happening at the time to
+be thatched in, the roof was set on fire, and consequently the whole
+church, the lead and bells melted, was defaced.”
+
+The Choir was so seriously injured that it was taken down and rebuilt,
+but the rest was repaired, and still in some parts shows traces, in the
+reddened patches on the beautiful golden-yellow Ham Hill sandstone of the
+internal walls, of the conflagration.
+
+The townsfolk were made to contribute heavily to the cost of repair and
+rebuilding; works resulting in a more lovely interior, both in form and
+colour, than owned by any other considerable church in the west.  A
+commonplace person, one no connoisseur of churches, if asked to convey a
+general sense of their interiors by the medium of temperature would reply
+that they were cold, for coldness is the effect most often
+produced—irrespective of the degrees registered by the thermometer—by
+their stonework; but here, though the mercury shrink down from the tube
+into close proximity with the bulb, provocative in most places of
+shivers, even the most matter-of-fact, irresponsive to the call of
+soaring arches, painted windows and delicately poised fretted roof to
+“lift up your hearts, O Zion!” feel a grateful sensation of warmth
+pervading them, apparently radiating from these walls of richly hued
+stone, whose natural colouring seems to fully furnish the place and
+render it indifferent to the rigours of the season.  It is a colour
+compact of all the beautiful hues of this country of a rich and bountiful
+Nature: of honey, of apples and pears golden and russet, of autumn
+leaves, and of cider and October ale, with a glint of the sun through it
+all.  It gives a beautiful and cheerful tone, quick to purge melancholy
+and to make the devout happier in their hallelujahs than when in the
+cold, if chaste, companionship of Portland stone, the mild cream purity
+of the oolite of Bath, the Gregorian richness of the building stone of
+Mansfield, or the solemn satisfaction engendered by the deep red
+sandstone of Devon.
+
+The exquisite fan-vaulting of Sherborne Abbey, the finest example of that
+supremest effort of the last stage of Gothic art, has no superior
+elsewhere.  That of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster, and that in St.
+George’s Chapel at Windsor, are on a larger scale, and more daring, but,
+although generally cited as representative, are not so truly artistic.
+
+The old Pack-Monday fair, still an annual institution at Sherborne, is a
+two days’ market, originating with the completion of the repairs and the
+vaulting of the nave, under Abbot Peter de Ramsam, or Rampisham, in 1504.
+Tradition has it that, the last stone well and truly laid and the great
+church at last again in order, the masons and their kind were paid off
+and bidden depart by midnight on the Sunday after Old Michaelmas Day.
+Accordingly, Pack-Monday fair is opened every year at the stroke of
+midnight on the Sunday succeeding October 10th, to the accompaniment of a
+din of horn-blowing and the uncouth banging of tin cans.
+
+Much of the beauty of the Abbey interior is due to the loving care of the
+restoration executed by the Digbys of Sherborne Castle, between 1848 and
+1858, at a cost of over £32,000.  The church of All Hallows at the west
+end, which caused all the trouble, was demolished after the dissolution
+of the monastery, when the Abbey was sold to the town for use as a parish
+church and All Hallows itself thereby became a redundancy.  Its situation
+and its ground-plan can still be traced on the paths and lawns and on the
+ragged walls and makeshift patchwork that serve as West Front to the
+Abbey.
+
+An ancestor of the restoring Digbys is commemorated by a pretentious
+mountain of marble in the south transept, with an epitaph, written by a
+bishop, setting forth with much antithetical rhodomontade his many
+virtues of activities and renunciations:
+
+“Here Lyes John, Lord Digby, Baron Digby of Sherborne and Earl of
+Briftol.  Titles to which ye merit of his Grandfather firft gave luftre
+And which he himfelf laid down unfully’d.  He was naturally enclined to
+avoid the Hurry of a publick Life, Yet carefull to keep up the port of
+his Quality.  Was willing to be at eafe, but fcorned obfcurity.  And
+therefore never made his retirement a pretence to draw Himfelf within a
+narrower compafs, or to fhun fuch expence As Charity, Hospitality and his
+Honour call’d for.  His Religion was that which by LAW is Eftablisfhed,
+and the Conduct of his life fhew’d the power of it in his Heart.  His
+distinction from others never made him forget himfelf or them.  He was
+kind and obliging to his Neighbours, generous and condefcending to his
+inferiours, and juft to all Mankind.  Nor had the temptations of honour
+and pleafure in this world Strength enough to withdraw his Eyes from that
+great Object of his hope, which we reafonably affure ourfelves he now
+enjoys.
+
+                               MDCICVIII.”
+
+                    [Picture: Sherborne Abbey Church]
+
+The surroundings of the Abbey closely resemble cathedral precincts, and
+lead the well-informed stranger to remember that Sherborne cherishes
+hopes of some day being again erected into the head of a bishop’s see,
+when that talked-of formation of a new diocese, carved out of the great
+territorial domains of Salisbury and of Bath and Wells, shall be an
+accomplished fact.
+
+The usual and properest way of coming to the Abbey, after you have
+glimpsed the fine picture it makes looking down Long Street, is past the
+Conduit—usually called the Monks’ Conduit—standing on the pavement of
+Cheap Street, and through a time-worn archway and a narrow alley of small
+shops and old houses.  The Conduit, built about 1360, an open octangular
+building greatly resembling a market-cross, was originally in the centre
+of the cloister-garth, to the north of the Abbey, on a part of the site
+now occupied by the admirable Grammar School, founded by Edward VI. from
+the spoils of the dissolved monastery, and grown in these days to be one
+of the foremost schools of the country.
+
+Cheap Street, the principal thoroughfare of Sherborne, is, like similar
+business streets in other West Country towns, composed of houses of many
+periods and all sizes.  It is built generally of that sunny Ham Hill
+ferruginous sandstone, quarried for many years at Stoke-sub-Hamdon, six
+miles to the northwest of Yeovil.  That fine old hostelry, the “New Inn,”
+now swept away, was built of it.  This vanished house was the original of
+the “Earl of Wessex,” in _The Woodlanders_, in whose yard Giles
+Winterborne is observed by his old sweetheart from the balcony, while he
+is engaged with the business of cider-making:
+
+“The chief hotel at Sherton Abbas was the “Earl of Wessex”—a large
+stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch under which vehicles were driven by
+stooping coachmen to back premises of wonderful commodiousness.  The
+windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only
+commanded a view of the opposite houses.”
+
+The castle, some distance outside the town to east, adjoining the village
+of Castleton, was originally the combined palace and fortress of the
+Bishops of Sherborne.  The remaining fragments, on their woody knoll
+overlooking the Yeo, in what is now Sherborne Park, are those of the
+stout keep built by that ambitious, and unscrupulous Bishop Roger, of
+Henry I.’s time.  Despite the curse, called down by the equally ferocious
+and saintly Osmund, upon any who should dare to alienate the castle from
+the bishops of Sherborne, it was wrested from them on several occasions,
+perhaps sometimes in direct unbelieving challenge to that _quis
+separabit_; at others, certainly, because, in the fashion of the times,
+the bishops had taken part in the political troubles, the pitched battles
+and weary sieges of contending factions, and, having the ill-luck to side
+with the defeated party, suffered with them in body and estate.  For over
+two hundred years, from 1139 to 1355, it was thus alienated, and Osmund’s
+curse slept.  Those who owned the castle were not executed, or
+imprisoned, or made to suffer beyond the usual mediæval average, perhaps
+because it took no account of developments arising from mitred follies
+and errors of judgment.  At last, having been Crown property for many
+generations, the stronghold and its surrounding lands were granted to
+Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from whom, after a futile proposal had been
+made to fight him for it, in gage of single combat—a fourteenth-century
+example of Kingsley’s “muscular Christianity”—it was purchased by the
+bishop for 2,500 marks; a cheap lot.  Whether the earl, in Etonian
+phrase, “funked it,” imagining the bishop’s steel would be fellow to “the
+sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” and as invincible, who shall say?  At
+any rate, Bishop Wyvil, this strenuous champion, who feared neither the
+ordeal of the sword nor of the purse, entered into the gates of his
+predecessors of old time, and died here, after a residence of twenty
+years.  The brass to his memory, in the north-east transept of Salisbury
+Cathedral, displays a representation of Sherborne Castle, with a figure
+of the bishop’s champion armed with a battle axe, by which it will be
+seen that it was not scandalously, in his own proper person, that the
+bishop was prepared to fight, but by a deputy, skilled in arms, and
+supported by the ghostly terrors of that ancient curse.
+
+And so, in the possession of the bishops of Salisbury who, to all intents
+and purposes, and within the meaning of old Oswald, were successors and
+representatives of the Bishops of Sherborne, the castle remained until
+1540, when, in the dissolution of religious houses, it was seized and
+afterwards granted to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset.  Then the
+curse seems to have come into its own again, for Somerset ended, where
+many other good and true were cut off, on Tower Hill.  Although
+subsequently restored to the bishop of Salisbury, it was again alienated
+by Bishop Cotton to Sir Walter Raleigh, as payment for favours and
+promotion received when that hero and courtier was in the enjoyment of
+royal smiles.  Raleigh, as every one knows, ended tragically, after
+long-drawn misery, in 1618, on the same spot where Somerset had suffered
+sixty years earlier.  And well, the superstitious may think, was it that
+by legal quirks and quibbles James I. succeeded in chousing Raleigh’s son
+out of his inheritance, for the ill-omened possession continued to work
+disaster.  James bestowed it upon his favourite, the despicable Robert
+Carl, Earl of Somerset, who, convicted of being accessory to the murder
+of Sir Thomas Overbury, was condemned to die, but was reprieved, and
+finally released by the timid James, to die obscurely in 1645.  Something
+of a blundering curse, this, one may think, to miss scoring a “bull” on
+so admirable and easy a mark.
+
+The king then conveyed the property to Digby, Earl of Bristol, the “Earl
+of Severn” of the slight story of _Anna_, _Lady Baxby_, in _A Group of
+Noble Dames_.  When the Civil War broke out, Sherborne Castle was
+garrisoned for the king by the Marquis of Hertford, and early besieged by
+the Earl of Bedford, on behalf of the Parliament.  It happened here—as so
+often it did in their internecine strife—that there were relatives
+engaged on either side in this siege.  The Earl of Bristol’s son, George,
+Lord Digby, was married to the Lady Anne Russell, sister of the Earl of
+Bedford.  She it was, the “Anna, Lady Baxby,” of the story, who rode out
+secretly to her brother, and told him that if he were determined to
+reduce the castle, he “should find his sister’s bones buried in the
+ruins.”  But the investment continued until, finding himself weaker than
+he had supposed, the marquis offered to surrender on terms.  If they were
+not accepted he proposed, with the Lady Anne’s consent, and indeed at her
+wish, to station her on the battlements, and let the enemy’s marksmen do
+their worst.  The Earl of Bedford was not proof against this, and it is
+said, raising the siege, retired.
+
+But this plan would not always work.  Three years later, in 1645, when
+Sir Lewis Dives, the Earl of Bristol’s stepson, was in command, a greater
+than the Earl of Bedford appeared before Sherborne Castle, and summoned
+it to surrender.  This was Sir Thomas Fairfax, flushed with his
+successes, and making a clean sweep of the garrisons in the west of
+England.  For sixteen days, his forces sat down in front of the castle,
+which then surrendered, with its garrison of fifty-five gentlemen and six
+hundred soldiers.  With that surrender came the final ruin, for the
+castle was “slighted,” or destroyed by gunpowder, its contents and the
+spoils of “the lodge,” sold to the people of Sherborne.  This “Lodge” was
+the mansion which even then had been built near by, the castle already
+proving too inconvenient for the ideas of those times.  It is the
+so-called “Castle” of to-day, still the seat of Digbys, collateral and
+commoner descendants of the old owners.  Sir Walter Raleigh built the
+centre portion of it in 1594, as his arms and the sculptured figures
+show, and Digbys the later wings.  Their crest, the singular one of an
+ostrich holding a horse-shoe in its beak, is prominent over the entrance
+to the courtyard.  In the park is still shown a stone seat, said to be
+that on which Sir Walter Raleigh was resting and smoking his first pipe
+of tobacco, when his pipe was dowsed and he drenched, by the pail of
+water thrown over him by his faithful retainer, who, not unnaturally, as
+tobacco was then a thing unknown, imagined his master to be on fire, and,
+in the expressive words of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s reports, “well
+alight.”
+
+The Lodge, now the “Castle,” was a halting-place of the Prince of Orange
+on his triumphal march from Tor Bay, in 1688.  He slept here a night, and
+from a printing-press in the house was issued his address to the people
+of England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+                  SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
+
+IT is twenty-six miles from stately Sherborne, the “Sherton Abbas” of
+_The Woodlanders_, to where Weymouth sits enthroned on the margin of her
+circular Bay, and, always supposing that no strong southerly gale is
+blowing, there is for the cyclist no easier route in all the Hardy
+Country.  Bating the steep rise out of Sherborne and out of the Vale of
+Blackmore to the chalk uplands at Minterne Magna, it is a route of
+favourable gradients, with one interval of dead level.
+
+The river Yeo is a small stream, but its valley is deep and wide, as he
+who, leaving Sherborne, climbs the hills which shut in that valley, shall
+find.  But a reward comes with the easy descent to the long, scattered
+street of rustic cottages at Long Burton, whence the way lies across a
+dead level to where, six miles distant from this point, rise the bastions
+of the mid-Dorset heights, seen distinctly from here: Dogbury, with his
+convex clump of cresting trees, like a blue-black wig, High Stoy, where
+the ridge runs bare, with Nettlecomb Tout and Bulbarrow in the hazy
+distance.
+
+It is a straight, and a marshy and low-lying, as well as a flat road to
+Holnest, where, beside the road, is Holnest Lodge, belonging to the
+Erle-Drax family, and one of the seats of that eccentric person, the late
+J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, of Charborough Park, long a member of
+Parliament for Wareham, and one of the last of the squires.  The old time
+squires were laws to themselves, and like none others.  The product of
+generations of other many-acred squires of great port-drinking
+propensities and unbounded local influence, whom all the lickings
+administered at Eton did not suffice to bring to a proper sense of their
+intrinsic unimportance, apart from the accidental circumstance that they
+were the lords of their manors, “old Squire Drax,” as the rustics call
+him now that he is dead, might from his high-handed ways have formed an
+excellent model for a dramatist building up a melodrama of the old style.
+He was “the Squire” to the very _n_th degree, with so extraordinary an
+idea of his own importance that here, on the lawn fronting Holnest Lodge,
+he caused to be erected in his own lifetime a memorial to himself.  An
+inspection of the approach to that residence will convince any one not
+only that he was very rich, but very mad as well.  The sweeping drive is
+bordered at intervals with statues: Circes, Floras, Ceres, Dianas, and
+other classical deities, shining whitely and conspicuously against the
+grass, and leading the eye up to the central point where, on a tall
+imposing column, guarded by crouching lions, stands the bronze,
+frock-coated statue of Squire Drax himself.  It is all very like a kind
+of higher-class Rosherville, and exceedingly curious.
+
+                          [Picture: Long Burton]
+
+One has not progressed far along the dead-level road before another
+evidence of the Drax swelled head comes in sight.  It is a huge building
+in the Byzantine style, highly elaborated, and decorated in a costly way
+with polished stones.  Its purpose puzzling at first, it is seen on
+closer approach to stand in a churchyard and to be a mausoleum.  Away
+back from it stands in perspective the little church of Holnest, scarce
+larger than this gorgeous place prepared by the squire for his rest, and
+looking really smaller.  The rustics dot the i’s and cross the t’s of his
+eccentricity, telling how he had his coffin made in his lifetime and his
+funeral rehearsed in front of the house.  The more superstitious declare
+that the mausoleum was built so strongly and substantially in order to
+foil a certain personage whose desire is rather for the souls than for
+the bodies of his own; and, to support their dark beliefs, narrate how,
+canvassing for votes during the progress of an election the squire
+declared he had always been a Member of Parliament, would always be, and
+would rather go to the Pit with the initials of M.P. attached to his name
+than to Heaven without them.  Unfortunately, these wonder-mongers halt a
+little short of the completeness desired by dramatic requirements, and do
+not proceed to tell us how the election was secured by the agency of a
+gentlemanly stranger of persuasive manners and club-feet, who, upon the
+declaration of the poll mysteriously disappeared amid a strong smell of
+Tandstickör matches.
+
+                  [Picture: Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum]
+
+Advancing, we come at Middlemarsh into the country of _The Woodlanders_,
+where dense woodlands now begin to cover the levels.  The long ridge of
+the downs ahead now grows stern, steep, and threatening.  To the left
+hand an isolated protuberance, covered with trees, the oddly named
+Dungeon Hill, rises, disclosing from its flanks peeps into the Vale of
+Blackmore, where the explorer can, with promptitude and thorough
+efficacy, lose himself.  Believe one who has been along the sometimes
+devious and sometimes straight, but always lonely, roads of these levels.
+There, down beyond Dungeon Hill and Pulham, on a road flat as the
+alliterative flounder and empty as a City church, stands at King’s Stag
+Bridge across the river Lidden an inn with the sign of the White Hart and
+a verse alluding to the origin of the name of “Vale of White Hart” given
+to this part of the greater Vale of Blackmore—
+
+    “When Julius Cæsar Reigned here, I was but then a little Deer.
+    When Julius Cæsar Reigned King, around my Neck he put this Ring.
+    Whoever doth me overtake, Oh! spare my life, for Cæsar’s sake.”
+
+            [Picture: Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore]
+
+The classic historian of Dorsetshire tells us something of the story thus
+darkly reflected.  According to his account, corrected in details from
+other sources, it seems that King Henry III. hunting in what was then a
+forest, rounded up, among several other deer, a particularly beautiful
+white hart, whose life he spared for future hunting.  Somewhat later, Sir
+John de la Lynde, Bailiff of Blackmore Forest, a neighbouring gentleman
+of ancient descent and local importance, out hunting with a party, roused
+the same animal, and, less pitiful than the king, killed it at the end of
+a long pursuit, at the spot ever after called King’s Stag Bridge.  The
+king, highly offended, not only punished Sir John de la Lynde and his
+companions with imprisonment and heavy fines, but taxed their lands
+severely and permanently, so that for many later generations the fine of
+White Hart Silver continued to be paid into the Exchequer.  Another
+historian, the quaint and amusing Fuller, in giving his version, states
+that the whole county was laid under contribution.  “Myself,” he says
+whimsically “hath paid a share for the sauce who never tasted the meat.”
+It is stated that “White Hart Silver” was levied until the reign of Henry
+VII.
+
+The road, passing a signpost weirdly directing to “Giant’s Head,” ascends
+a steep hill, perhaps the ‘Rubdon Hill’ of _The Woodlanders_, and the
+Lyon’s Gate Hill of actual fact, down which, into the vale on that
+autumnal day went Fitzpiers, the infatuated surgeon—a Dorsetshire
+Tannhäuser, thinking of the Venus who had bewitched him, and careless of
+the beauty of the season—when “the earth was now at the supreme moment of
+her bounty.  In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and
+blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts
+lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers for
+the market.”  Steeply upward continues the hill, to the ridge of the
+mid-Dorset heights, whence Blackmore Vale, of which it is very truly said
+that “an unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather, is apt to
+engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways,” is
+seen spreading out like an unrolled map.
+
+“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are
+never brown, and the springs never dry,” is bounded on the south by the
+bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill,
+Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down.  There
+“in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more
+delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this
+height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads
+overspreading the paler green of the grass.  The atmosphere beneath is
+languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle
+distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the
+deepest ultramarine.  Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight
+exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling
+minor hills and dales within the major.  Such is the Vale of Blackmore.”
+
+The village of Minterne Magna that, with its fine trees and the seat of
+Lord Digby, has so handsome a presence, is the “Great Hintock” of _The
+Woodlanders_.  Poor loyal-hearted Giles Winterbourne, “a good man, who
+did good things,” was buried here, beside that ivy-covered church-tower
+overlooking the road, and now bearing the inscription
+
+                               “LE TEMPS PASSE
+                                L’AMITIE RESTE
+                                     1888
+                             IN MEMORIAM  H.R.D.”
+
+They laid him to rest “on the top of that hill looking down into the
+Vale,” to whose villages he had, as autumn came round, been wont to
+descend with his portable cider-mill and press; and Grace rejoined her
+husband, and the world went on as usual.  Only Marty South remembered him
+and treasured his memory.
+
+At Minterne Magna, otherwise “Great Hintock,” according to a rustic
+character, “you do see the world and life,” whereas, at Little Hintock,
+to be identified with Melbury Osmund, away down at Evershot, “’tis such a
+small place that you’d need a candle and lantern to find it, if ye don’t
+know where ’tis.”
+
+But, at the same time, outside the pages of novels Minterne Magna is not
+a place of stir and movement, and is great only in name.
+
+From just before Minterne Magna there is a left-hand turning which
+affords an alternative route to Dorchester, avoiding Cerne Abbas, and
+going exposedly over the haggard downs.  The two routes are locally known
+as the overhill and the underhill roads.  The first-named is now little
+travelled, and its old house of entertainment, the Revels inn, a thing of
+the past.  This, “the forsaken coach-road running in an almost meridional
+line from Bristol to the south shore of England,” is the route of the
+escaped prisoner and the scene of “Higher Crowstairs” in the intense
+story of _The Three Strangers_.  On that route you see better than
+anywhere else, those “calcareous downs” described by the novelist, where
+“the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give
+an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges
+low and splashed, the atmosphere colourless.”  It is, by the same token,
+of an exhausting dryness in summer, and in winter only to be undertaken
+by the most robust.
+
+By the ‘underhill’ road on the other hand, the ten miles from Minterne to
+Dorchester are chiefly on a gentle descent.  Presently, therefore, one
+reaches Cerne Abbas, the “Abbot’s Cernel” of _Tess_ and other stories,
+situated in a fine widening of the valley through which the river Cerne
+flows, with the gaunt bare shoulders of the great chalk downs receding
+far enough to lose something of their asperity, and to gain in distance
+all the atmosphere and softened outlines of an impressionistic picture.
+From the south, half a mile beyond the decayed town of Cerne, a very
+beautiful view of this nature opens out, by the roadside.  There the fine
+tower of the church stands out against the sage-green coloration of the
+hills, and with the luxuriant trees and the nestling farms of the valley,
+presents by force of contrast with the bare uplands a striking picture of
+comfort, prosperity, and hospitality, not perhaps warranted in every one
+of those respects by a closer acquaintance.  For Cerne is a place very
+hardly treated by heartless circumstance.
+
+Many centuries ago, in A.D. 987 to be exact, a Benedictine Abbey was
+founded here by Ethelmar, Earl of Devon and Cornwall, upon the site of a
+hermitage established by Ædwold, brother of that East Anglican saint,
+Edmund the King and Martyr.  It does not appear what became of the
+hermit, whether those who established the abbey bought him out, or threw
+him out; but it certainly seems to demand enquiry, the more especially
+that hermits and abbots, pious founders and holy monks were not
+altogether so unbusinesslike in their worldly affairs as the uninstructed
+might imagine.  The hermit probably received due compensation for
+disturbance and went off somewhere else.  However that may be, the abbey
+grew and flourished.  Canute certainly despoiled it, but more than made
+amends, by large gifts and endowments of other people’s property, when he
+had been brought to see the error of his ways and that
+plundering—plundering the property of the church, at least—was wrong.
+And so the business of the abbey progressed through the centuries, to the
+daily accompaniment of the monks chanting “their wonderful piff-and-paff”
+as the librettist of _The Golden Legend_ makes the devil say of it.
+
+In 1471 Henry VI.’s Queen, Margaret of Anjou, striving desperately, brave
+heart, on her son’s behalf, fled for shelter here, up the road from
+Weymouth, where she had landed from France; but, indeed, little else of
+history belongs to this sometime rich and splendid abbey in the heart of
+the hills.  It afforded shelter and protection to the townlet of Cerne
+that had sprung up outside its precincts; and great therefore was the
+dismay when ruin overtook it in the time of Henry VIII.  The abbey
+disestablished, the town of course also suffered.  How greatly we do not
+know; but it plucked up courage again and refused to die, and when
+England was still that exceedingly uncomfortable England of coaching
+times, flourished in a modest way on the needs of travellers for succour
+and shelter on the exhausting journeys that are so romantic to read of in
+Christmas numbers, but were the terror of those who could not possibly
+stop at home.
+
+                          [Picture: Cerne Abbas]
+
+And at last the coaches ceased and railways came to the country in
+general, but not to Cerne.  It is still, to-day, remote from railways and
+is thus hit several severe, separate, and distinct blows by Fate, which,
+when travellers no longer needed its shelter, took away its chief reason
+for existence, refused it the reinvigorating boon of a railway, and then,
+in the general depression of agriculture, has dealt a final and
+staggering buffet.  Cerne is dead.  There is (assuming for the moment
+positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of deadness) no deader
+townlet in England, and it has all the interest, and commands all the
+respect due to the departed.  _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_, and if there
+were hard things to be said of Cerne, they should not here be uttered.
+But there are no such things for utterance.  It has all the romance of
+the bygone that appeals to the artist, and I love to dwell upon and in
+it.  It is a place where commercialism has, or should have, no part, and
+therefore, when I pass a noble-looking farmhouse and a somewhat stately
+landlady comes out with a key, asking me—with an eye upon the perquisite
+of the fee exacted—if I would like to see the Abbey Gatehouse, I refuse;
+earning thereby the keen contempt shown on her expressive face.  Soulless
+Goth, to wander about Cerne and not see the Gatehouse!  Ah! my dear lady,
+your contempt is misplaced.  I love these things better than you imagine,
+but I hate commercialism—and in such unexpected places—the more.  The
+abbey ruins, wholly summed up in that Gatehouse, are at the extremity of
+this dead town, but there is a fine parish church in the centre of its
+streets.  A noble, highly decorated tower is that belonging to it, one of
+the finest productions of the Perpendicular period, with bold gargoyles,
+whose gaping mouths are for the most part stopped with birds’ nests.
+Decay and ruin squat next door, in the shape of one of Cerne’s wrecked
+and unroofed houses, so long in that condition as to have become a
+terrace on which wild flowers luxuriantly grow and display themselves to
+passing admiration.  It will be observed that there are shops—or things
+in the specious and illusory shape of shops—in this town of Yester-year.
+They indeed were so once, but the shopkeepers have long ceased from their
+shopkeeping.  The windows, perhaps retained over against that time when
+Cerne shall be resurrected—for Fortune’s wheel still spins, and will come
+full circle some day—are meanwhile excellent for displaying geraniums.
+
+                  [Picture: The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey]
+
+[Picture: The Cerne Giant] Prominent in most views of Cerne Abbas is that
+weird figure of a man on the hillside which gives an alternative name to
+Trendle or Giant’s Hill.  The “Giant of Cerne” is a big fellow, well
+deserving his name, for he is 180 feet high.  No one knows who cut him on
+the chalk of the hillside, but local tradition has long told how the
+figure commemorated the destruction of a giant who, feasting on the sheep
+of Blackmore, laid himself down here, in the sleep of repletion, and was
+then, like another Gulliver, pinioned where he lay by the enraged
+peasantry, who killed him and immediately traced his dimensions for the
+information of posterity.  The prominence of his ribs, however, says
+little for the result of his feeding.
+
+A more instructed opinion is that the figure represents Heil, a god of
+the pagan Saxons, and that it was cut before A.D. 600.  Fearful legends
+belong to it: tales of horror narrating how the border enclosing the
+effigy is the ground plan of a stout wicker-work cage in which the pagan
+priests imprisoned many victims, whom they offered up as burnt sacrifices
+to their god.
+
+Looked upon with awe and wonder by the peasantry of old, who cleaned him
+once every seven years, the Giant is now regarded by them with
+indifference and left alone, and it is only the stranger who finds
+himself obsessed with a strange awe as he gazes upon this mystic relic of
+a prehistoric age.  His minatory and uncouth appearance—for the relation
+of his head to his body is that of a pea to a melon—perhaps even more
+than his size, impresses the beholder.  It should be said that he is
+merely traced in outline on the turf, in lines two feet broad and one
+foot deep, and not laid bare, a huge white shape, to the sky.  The club
+he wields is 120 feet long, and from seven to twenty-four feet broad.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+                  SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
+                              (_continued_)
+
+PAST Nether Cerne and Godmanstone, the road leads, consistently straight
+and on a down gradient, to Charminster, where, in consonance with the
+place-name, a minster-like church stands.  It is rich in monuments of the
+Trenchards—bearing their motto, _Nosce Teipsum_, Know Thyself—of the
+neighbouring historic mansion of Wolveton, one of whom—a Sir Thomas—built
+the tower, in or about the year 1500, as duly attested on the building
+itself, which displays his cypher of two T’s.
+
+Wolveton, standing in the rich level water-meadows where the rivers Cerne
+and Frome come to a confluence, is, as the Man of Family narrates in the
+story of _The Lady Penelope_, in _A Group of Noble Dames_, “an ivied
+manor-house, flanked by battlemented towers, and more than usually
+distinguished by the size of its mullioned windows.  Though still of good
+capacity, the building is much reduced from its original grand
+proportions; it has, moreover, been shorn of the fair estate which once
+appertained to its lord, with the exception of a few acres of park-land
+immediately around the mansion.  This was formerly the seat of the
+ancient and knightly Drenghards, or Drenkhards, now extinct in the male
+line, whose name, according to the local chronicles, was interpreted to
+mean _Strenuus Miles_, _vel Potator_, though certain members of the
+family were averse to the latter signification, and a duel was fought by
+one of them on that account, as is well known.”
+
+                          [Picture: Cerne Abbas]
+
+The Lady Penelope, who jestingly promised to marry all three of her
+lovers in turn, and by that jest earned such misery when Fate ordained
+that her words should come true, was an actual living character.  A
+daughter of Lord Darcy, she in turn married George Trenchard, Sir John
+Gage, and Sir William Hervey.  As the story truly tells, the Drenghards,
+or rather Trenchards, are extinct in the male line.
+
+Passing by Poundbury, the “Pummery” of Dorset speech, we enter
+Dorchester, already described at considerable length, and, passing down
+South Street and by the Amphitheatre, of gloomy associations, come out
+upon the Weymouth—or, as Mr. Hardy would say the “Budmouth”—road.
+
+                        [Picture: Wolveton House]
+
+For the distance of close upon a mile this Roman road, the chief means of
+communication between their seaport station of Clavinium, near Weymouth,
+and their inland town of Durnovaria, runs on the level, bordered by the
+fine full-grown elms of one of Dorchester’s many avenues.  Then it sets
+out with a grim straightness to climb to the summit of that geological
+spine, the Ridgeway, which places so stubborn an obstacle on these nine
+miles of road that many a faint-hearted pilgrim from Dorchester fails to
+reach Weymouth, and many another from Weymouth gives up the task at less
+than half-way.
+
+Climbing here, the vast mass of Maiden Castle rises on the right,
+conferring a solemnity upon the scene, due not so much to the bulk given
+it by nature as to the amazing ditches, mounds, scarps, and counterscarps
+terraced along its mighty bosom by—ay, by whom?  Many peoples had a hand
+in the making of this great fortification.  The British Durotriges are
+said to have styled it “Mai-Dun,” the “Castle of the great Hill,” and to
+have established their capital here; and at a later date the Romans
+camped upon it and must have cursed the Imperialism which brought them
+here to wilt and wither in face of the bitter blasts of an inclement
+land.
+
+It was the Dunium of Ptolemy, and has been the wonder of many ages, not
+easily able to understand by what enormous expenditure of effort all
+these great mounds were heaped up and what enemies they feared who delved
+the ditches so deeply and ramped the ridges so steeply and so high.
+
+Maiden Castle is still occupied, although the last defender left it
+perhaps a thousand years ago; for as the curious traveller to these
+prehistoric earthworks climbs exhaustedly up the steep rises, over the
+short grass, he may see the rabbits mounting guard by thousands against
+the skyline, or fleeing panic-stricken, in admirable open order, showing
+myriads of white flags formed by their tails as they go loping away over
+the field.
+
+           [Picture: Weymouth and Portland, from the Ridgeway]
+
+As one progresses, more and more slowly with the acuter gradient, up the
+roadway, the church-tower of Winterborne Monkton, among its encircling
+barns, ricks, and cow-byres, comes into view, the observer’s eye on a
+higher level than the rooftop.  Village there is none, and the clergyman
+who on Sundays conducts services here must do so—between the peals of the
+organ, and in midst of the quieter-spoken passages of morning and evening
+prayers—to the commentatory lowing of cattle or the grunts of pigs,
+sounding like the observations of grudging critics.  There was once a
+saint who, like a broody hen that will nurse strange things, preached to
+the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field, and the spiritual
+shepherd of Winterborne Monkton not infrequently has among his
+congregation a barn owl, and a cheerful concourse of sparrows in the
+roof, much given to brawling in church.
+
+Roman directness was all very well, but later races found it much too
+trying for their horses, and thus we find, nearing the summit, that the
+straight ancient road across the ridgeway has long been abandoned, except
+by the telegraph-poles, for a cutting through the crest and an S curve
+down the southern and much steeper side.  This expedient certainly eases
+both ascent and descent, but it does not suffice to render the way less
+than extremely fatiguing to climb and nerve-shaking to descend.
+
+As a view-point it has remarkable features, for the whole expanse of
+Portland Roads, the Isle of Portland, and the site on which Weymouth and
+Melcombe Regis are built are exposed to gaze, very much as though the
+spectator looking down upon them were bending in an examination of some
+modelled map of physical geography.  White spires at Weymouth and equally
+white groups of houses at Portland gain striking effects from backgrounds
+of grey rock or the dark green of trees, massed by distance to the
+likeness of dense forests; and the mile-lengths of harbour walls and
+breakwaters, punctuated with forts, out in the roadstead are shrunken by
+distance to the likeness of a cast seine-net supported by cork floats.
+On a ridge inland a row of circular ricks with peaked roofs showing
+against the sea looks absurdly like beehives, and down there in the
+middle distance is the curving line of embankment where the railway from
+Dorchester goes, after piercing the hill on which we stand by the
+Bincombe Tunnel.
+
+                    [Picture: The Wishing Well, Upwey]
+
+Descending the hill, we come to the valley of the Wey.  The older part of
+the village of Upwey marks the source of that little stream to the right,
+and the newer part, with the village of Broadwey, are scarcely to be
+distinguished from one another, ahead.  The original Upwey, the Upwey of
+the “Wishing Well,” lies under the flanks of a great down, where, if you
+climb and climb and continue climbing, you will presently discover the
+poppy-like scarlet buildings of the Weymouth waterworks.  But there is no
+need to seek them while the Wishing Well, nearer to hand, calls.
+
+The “Wishing Well” is a pretty spot, overhung with trees and still a
+place resorted to by tourists, who either shamefacedly, with an implied
+half-belief in its virtues, drink its waters, or else with the quip and
+jest of unbelief, defer the slaking of their thirst until the nearest inn
+is reached, where liquors more palatable to the sophisticated taste—or
+what Mr. Hardy’s rustics would term “a cup of genuine”—are obtainable.
+Once the haunt of gipsies, who used the well as a convenient pitch, and,
+when you crossed their palms with silver in the approved style,
+prophesied fulfilment of the nicest things you could possibly wish
+yourself—and a good many other things that would never occur to you at
+all—it is now quite unexploited, save perhaps by a little village girl,
+who, with a glass tumbler, will save the devotee from stooping on hands
+and knees and lapping up the magic water, like a dog.  The gipsies have
+been all frightened away by the Vagrants Act, and no great loss to the
+community in general.  The inquisitive stranger, curious to know whether
+the villagers themselves resort to their famous Fount of Heart’s Desire,
+receives a rude shock when he is told by one of them that, “Bless ’ee,
+there baint a varden’s wuth o’ good in ’en, at arl.  Mebbe ’tis good ver
+a whist (a stye) but all them ’ere magicky tales be done away wi’.”  The
+Age of Faith is dead.
+
+And so into Weymouth, down a road lined with long rows of suburbs.
+Radipole is come to this complexion at last, and its spa is, like a
+service rendered and a benefit conferred, a thing clean forgot.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+                                 WEYMOUTH
+
+WELL, then, here, reaching a Modern church with a tall spire, surrounded
+by suburban villas, is the beginning of Weymouth.  The sea in these miles
+has dropped gradually down, out of sight as the road comes to the level,
+and at this point you might, to all intents and purposes, be at North
+Kensington, which the spot greatly resembles.  But turning sharply with
+the road to the right the derogatory illusion is at once dispelled, for
+the sea is out there, sparkling, to the left; and, in the perfect segment
+of a circle, the Esplanade of Weymouth goes sweeping round to the
+harbour, with the Nothe Point fort above, and, away out in the distance,
+that towering knob of limestone, the Isle of Portland.  It is a
+stimulating view, and has generally other and even more stimulating
+constituents than those of nature, for Weymouth and Portland are places
+of arms, and the ships of the Navy are usually represented by a squadron
+of cruisers well in shore, with a brace or two of battleships coming,
+going, or anchored easily in sight, and numbers of those ugly, imp-like
+craft, torpedo-boats, flying hither and thither.
+
+Weymouth styles itself—or others style it—“the Naples of England,” but no
+one has ever yet found Naples returning the compliment and calling itself
+“the Weymouth of Italy.”  There is really no reason why Weymouth, instead
+of seeking some fanciful resemblance based solely, it may be supposed on
+the configuration of its widely curving bay, should not stand or fall by
+the sufficing attractions of its own charming self.  For one thing, it
+would be impossible to persuade the public that Weymouth owns a Vesuvius
+somewhere away in its _hinterland_, and, although the country is rich in
+Roman camps, no antiquary has yet discovered a Pompeii midway between
+Melcombe Regis and Dorchester.
+
+The town is still in essentials the Weymouth of George III., the
+“Budmouth” of Thomas Hardy.  They are, it is true, the battleships of
+Edward VII. wallowing out there, like fat pigs, where of yore the wooden
+men-o’-war swam the waters like swans; but the houses at least, that face
+the Esplanade in one almost unbroken row, each one like its neighbour and
+all absolutely innocent either of taste or pretension, are
+characteristically Georgian.  Taken individually and examined, one might
+go greater lengths, and say such a house was more than insipid and
+commonplace—was, indeed, downright ugly—but in a long curving row the
+effect is a comprehensive one of dignified restraint.  At any rate, they
+are constructed of good honest dull red brick, and not plastered and made
+to look like stone.  This bluff honesty in these days of shams and of
+restless, worried-looking designs, when every new building must have its
+own ready-made picturesqueness, and this total absence of anything and
+everything that by remotest chance could be thought an ornament, is
+grateful.
+
+We speak of this as “Weymouth,” but it is rather, to speak by the card,
+Melcombe Regis, and although the interests of both this and of Weymouth
+proper, on the other side of the narrow neck of harbour, are now pooled,
+it was once a sign of ignorance and a certain offence not to carefully
+distinguish between the two.  Their rivalries and jealousies were of old
+so bitter that the river-mouth and harbour, long since bridged to make a
+continuous street, was like a stream set between two alien states.  The
+passage was then “by a bote and a rope bent over ye haven, so yt in ye
+fery bote they use no ores.”
+
+These disputes and contentions had risen almost to the condition of a
+smouldering petty local warfare in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when
+means were taken to put an end to it.  Thus in 1571 they were compelled
+to unite, and in the familiar phrase of fairy tales have “lived happily
+ever after.”  Says Camden: “These stood both some time proudlie upon
+their owne severall priviledges, and were in emulation one of the other,
+but now, tho’ (God turne it to the good of both!) many, they are, by
+authoritie of Parliament, incorporated into one bodie, conjoyned by late
+by a bridge, and growne very much greater and goodlier in buildings and
+by sea adventures than heretofore.”
+
+But things widely different from trade have in later times made the
+fortune of the conjoined towns of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis.  I suppose
+the one or the other of them was bound in the course of time to be
+“discovered” as a bathing-resort, but it is to George III. that Weymouth
+owes a deep debt of gratitude.  His son had already “discovered”
+Brighthelmstone, or rather, had placed the seal of his approval upon Dr.
+Russel’s earlier discovery of it; and likewise Weymouth was already on
+the road to recognition when George III. came here first, in 1789.
+Thirty years or so earlier, when people had begun as a strange new
+experience, to bathe, the sands of Weymouth—or to adopt an attitude of
+strict correctitude, the sands of Melcombe Regis—were on the way to
+appreciation.  Then greater folks lending their august patronage where
+that of meaner people had little weight, the place was resorted to by the
+famous Ralph Allen of Bath, for whom in 1763 the first bathing-machine
+was constructed, and by a stream of visitors gradually ascending in the
+social scale.  The place long found favour with the Duke of Gloucester,
+by whose recommendation the king was induced to make a visit and then a
+lengthy stay, placing the apex at last upon this imposing pyramid of good
+fortune.  It was no fleeting glimpse of royal favour thus accorded, for
+with the coming of summer the king for many years resided here at
+Gloucester Lodge, the mansion facing the sea built by his brother the
+Duke of Gloucester, and now the staid and grave Gloucester Hotel.
+Weymouth basked happily in the splendours of that time.  They were
+splendours of the respectable domestic sort generally associated with
+that homely monarch, who bathed from his machine in full view of his
+loyal lieges and then went home to boiled mutton and turnips.  He made
+sober holiday on the Dorset coast while his graceless son was on the
+coast of Sussex rearing a fantastical palace and playing pranks fully
+matching it in extravagance of design and purse.
+
+Weymouth’s return for all these favours is still to be seen, in the
+bronze group erected by the townsfolk in 1809, to celebrate the generally
+joyful occasion of his Jubilee, to perpetuate the especial gratitude of
+the people for favours received, and in hopes of more to come.
+
+Weymouth very closely reflects the prosperity of that great era, in the
+Georgian streets, the quaintly bowed windows of private houses and the
+now old-world shop-fronts, many of them exquisite examples of the
+restrained taste and aptitude for just proportion in design
+characteristic of that age, and only now beginning to be appreciated at
+their true worth.  It was the age of the Adams brothers, of Chippendale
+and Sheraton; an age rightly come to be regarded in our time as classic
+in all things in the domain of architecture and decoration.  In its
+unaltered purlieus Weymouth is thus singularly like the older parts of
+Brighton, but now richer in vestiges of the Georgian period than the
+larger and more changeful town.
+
+That, doubtless, was a period of inflated prices in Weymouth.  King,
+queen, and princesses, fashionables and many soldiers sent up the ideas
+of tradesfolk just as the sun expands the mercury of a thermometer.
+Uncle Benjy, in _The Trumpet Major_, found Budmouth a place where money
+flew away doubly as quick as it did when the famous Scot visited London
+and “hadna’ been there a day when bang went saxpence.”  At Budmouth in
+the time of Farmer George, it was a “shilling for this and a shilling for
+that; if you only eat one egg or even a poor windfall of an apple, you’ve
+got to pay; and a bunch o’ radishes is a halfpenny, and a quart o’ cider
+a good tuppence three-farthings at lowest reckoning.  Nothing without
+paying!”  Ay! but if prices were no higher than these, ’twas no such
+ruinous place, after all.  Poor Uncle Benjy!
+
+                       [Picture: Weymouth Harbour]
+
+The most striking differences in physical geography between the
+constituent parts of Weymouth are that Melcombe Regis, here on the shore
+is flat as a pancake, and Weymouth, there on t’other side of the harbour,
+is as hilly as a house-roof.  You could have no greater dissimilarity
+than that between the prudish formality which stands for the Melcombe
+front and the heaped-up terraces of houses of every description at
+Weymouth, which has no front at all; unless indeed the lowest tier of
+houses skirting the harbour and its quays, and looking into the back
+alleys and quays of Melcombe may so be styled.  In those old days, to
+which Weymouth dates back, no seaside town could afford so assailable a
+luxury as a “front,” and the older quarters of nearly all such are
+generally found, as here, folded away under the lee of a bluff, or thinly
+lining the shores of an estuarial harbour.  Here the Nothe Point, with
+its fort mounted with heavy guns, is the rocky bluff behind which the old
+town cowered from elemental and human foes, and that estuary, both by
+reason of its narrow entrance, and those great forts of the Nothe and
+Portland, has never been one sought by an enemy’s ship.
+
+The harbour is not uninteresting: what harbour ever is?  The comings and
+goings of ships have their own romance, and bring rumours of all kinds of
+outer worlds and strange peoples.  You look across from the quays of
+Weymouth to the quays of Melcombe, and there, beside the walls and the
+old warehouses, lie the ships from many home and foreign ports, their
+names duly to be read under their counters.  Whence they individually
+come, I do not greatly care to know.  This one may only have come from
+the Channel Islands with a consignment of early potatoes: and, on the
+other hand, it may have won home again after who knows what romantic
+doings at the Equator or within the Arctic Zone.  It may have brought
+treasure-trove, or on the other hand be merely carrying ordinary
+commercial freights, at so low a figure that the owners are dissatisfied
+and the skipper gloomy.  It is well, you see, to leave a little margin
+for fancy when the good ship has come to port once more and within sight
+and the easiest reach of those two great features of a Christian and a
+civilised land: the Church and the Public House.
+
+In these days the town is recovering at last from the undeserved neglect
+into which it fell after the illness and death of George III. and from
+later disasters and indifferences; and, what with improved railway
+travelling, and the added interest it obtains from being selected as the
+site of a new great national harbour where more than ever the ships of
+the Navy will come and go, has a great future before it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+                           THE ISLE OF PORTLAND
+
+TO the generality of untravelled folk, Portland is nothing but a quarry
+and a prison.  It is both and more.  It is, for one additional thing, a
+fortress, in these times grown to a considerable strength, and, for
+another, is a singular outlying corner of England tethered to the
+mainland only by that seemingly precarious stretch of pebbles, the Chesil
+Beach.  As Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of _The Trumpet Major_, so
+Portland, the “Isle of Slingers,” as Mr. Hardy calls it, is especially,
+though not with absolute exclusiveness, the district of _The Well
+Beloved_.
+
+There is a choice of ways to Portland.  You may go by the high road—and a
+very steep up and down road it is, too—past Wyke, or may proceed by the
+crumbling clifflets past Sandsfoot Castle, one of those blockhouse
+coastward fortresses stretching from Deal and Sandown Castles, in Kent,
+along the whole of the south coast, to this point, whose building we owe
+to the panic that possessed the nation in the time of Henry VIII.: one of
+those periodic fears of a French invasion that from time to time have
+troubled the powers that be.  Two of the long series were placed in this
+neighbourhood; the so-styled “Portland Castle” at the base of the Isle of
+Portland itself, and this craggy ruin of Sandsfoot, roofless and rough
+and more cliff-like than the cliffs themselves, at the mainland extremity
+of this sheltered inlet, wherein, in days of yore, an enemy might
+conceivably have effected a lodgment.  For the defence of this fort, when
+new-builded in the Eighth Harry’s time, there were to be provided “the
+nombre of xv hable footmen, well furneyshed for the warres, as
+appertayneth,” together with some “harchers” duly furnished, or “harmed”
+as the summons might have put it, with their “bows and harrowes.”  Alas!
+poor overworked letter H!
+
+                       [Picture: Sandsfoot Castle]
+
+It is here, in the story of _The Well Beloved_, that Jocelyn Pierston,
+the weirdly constituted hero of that fantastic romance, elects to bid
+farewell to Avice Caro, and past it Anne Garland went on her way to
+Portland Bill, “along the coast road to Portland.”  When she had reached
+the waters of the Fleet, crossed now by a bridge, she had to ferry over,
+and from thence to walk that causeway road whose mile-and-three-quarters
+of flatness, bounded sideways by the expressionless blue of the summer
+sky and the equally vacant vastnesses of the yellow pebbles of the Chesil
+Beach, seems to foot-passengers an image of eternity.  It is but a flat
+road, less than two miles long, but the Isle ahead seems to keep as far
+off as ever, and the way is so bald of incident that a sea-poppy growing
+amid the pebbles is a change for the eye, a piece of driftwood a
+landmark, and a chance boat or capstan a monument.
+
+But even the Chesil Beach has an end, and at last one reaches Portland
+and Fortune’s Well, referred to in that story of the Portlanders as “the
+Street of Wells.”  The well—a wishing well of the good, or the bad, old
+sort, where you wished for your heart’s desire, and perhaps obtained the
+boon in the course of a lifetime—by striving and labouring for it—is
+behind that substantial inn, the Portland Arms, and it is a cynical
+commentary upon this and all such legends of faëry that, while the
+Portlanders in general, and the people of Fortune’s Well in particular,
+can one and all direct you to the inn, if so be you are bat-like enough
+not to perceive it for yourself, very few of them know anything at all of
+the magic spring, of where it is, or that the place took its name from
+the existence of such a thing.
+
+One circumstance, above all other curious and interesting circumstances
+of this so-called “Isle” of Portland, is calculated to impress the
+stranger with astonishment.  Its giant forts; its great convict
+establishment, “the retreat, at their country’s expense, of geniuses from
+a distance,” the odd nexus of almost interminable pebble beach that
+tethers it to the mainland and makes the name of “Isle” a misnomer, are
+all fitting things for amazement; but no one previously uninformed on the
+point is at all likely to have any conception of its numerous villages
+and hamlets and the large populations inhabiting this grim, forbidding,
+“solid and single block of limestone four miles long.”  Eleven thousand
+souls live and move and have their being on what the uninstructed, gazing
+across the Roads from Weymouth, might be excused for thinking a
+penitential rock, reserved for forts and garrison artillery, and for
+convicts and those whose business it is to keep them in order.  The
+number of small villages or hamlets is itself in the nature of a
+surprise.  Entering upon this happily styled “Gibraltar of Wessex,” there
+is in the foreground, by the railway-station, Chesilton; succeeded by
+Fortune’s Well, Castleton to the left, Portland to the right, and, away
+ahead up to the summit of a stupendous climb on to the great elevated,
+treeless and parched stony plateau of the Isle, Reforne.  Beyond the
+prison and the prison quarries, come Easton, Wakeham, Weston, and
+Southwell; all stony and hard-featured and like nothing else but each
+other.  To-day an exploration of the Isle is easy, for a railway runs
+from Weymouth along the beach to Chesilton, and another, skirting the
+cliffs, takes you out almost to the famous Bill itself; but otherwise,
+all the circumstances of the place still fully show how the Portlanders
+came to be that oddly different race from the mainlanders they are shown
+to be in the pages of _The Well Beloved_, and in the writings of
+innumerable authors.
+
+Portland was to the ancients the Isle of Vindilis, the “Vindelia” of
+Richard of Cirencester; and Roman roads are surviving on it to this day,
+notwithstanding the blasting and quarrying activities of this vast bed of
+building-stone, whence much of the material for Sir Christopher Wren’s
+City of London churches came, and despite the business of fortification
+that has abolished many merely antiquarian interests.  You, indeed,
+cannot get away from stone, here on Portland; physically, in historic
+allusions, and in matters of present-day business.  The story of the Isle
+begins with it, with those ancient inhabitants, the _Baleares_, slingers
+of stones, who made excellent defence of their unfertile home with the
+inexhaustible natural ammunition; and quarrying is now, after the passing
+of many centuries, its one industry.  It is to be supposed, without any
+extravagance of assumption, that the Portlanders of to-day are the
+descendants of those ancient Baleares, and, certainly until quite recent
+times, they maintained the aloofness and marked individuality to be
+expected from such an ancestry.  To them the mainlanders were foreigners,
+or, as themselves would say, “kimberlins”; a flighty, mercurial and none
+too scrupulous people, calling themselves Englishmen, who lived on the
+adjacent island of Great Britain and were only to be dealt with
+cautiously, and then solely on matters of business connected with the
+selling of stone, or maybe of fish, caught in Deadman’s Bay.  For the
+true Portlanders, like their home, are grey and unsmiling, and reflect
+their surroundings, even as do those inhabitants of more sheltered and
+fertile places; and still, although things be in these later days of
+railway communication and a kind of quick-change and “general-post” all
+over the country somewhat altered, a stranger, who by force of
+circumstances—pleasure is out of the question—comes to live here, will
+find himself as uncongenial as oil is to water.
+
+The outlook of the old Portlanders upon strangers was justified to them,
+in a way, when the great prison was built and the gangs of convicts began
+to be a feature of the Isle.  _They_, who thus by force of circumstances
+over which they had no control, took up a hard-working and frugal
+existence upon the Isle, were specimens of the “kimberlins”; and the
+prejudices, if not quite the ignorance, of the islanders saw in them
+representative specimens of all “Outlanders.”
+
+When you come toilsomely uphill from Fortune’s Well, out upon the stony
+plateau that is Portland, you presently become conscious of the
+contiguity of that great convict establishment, in the appearance of
+notice-boards, warning all and sundry of the penalties awaiting those who
+aid prisoners to escape.  Such an offence, you learn, “shall be treated
+as a felony, not subject to any bail or mainprize” (whatever that may
+be).  But any “free person” finding money, letters, or clothing, or
+anything that may be supposed to have been left to facilitate the escape
+of prisoners shall be rewarded, unless such person shall be proved to
+have entered into collusion, etc., etc., and so forth.
+
+What, however, one especially desires to call attention to is the
+delicious expression, “free person.”  Obviously, to the official minds
+ruling Portland “free persons” owe their freedom, not to any virtues they
+possess, but to their luck in not being found out.  One, being a “free
+person,” has, therefore, after reading this notice, an uneasy suspicion
+that freedom is, in the eye of those authorities, a wholly undeserved
+accident, and that if every one—saving, of course, officials—had their
+deserts, they would be cutting and hauling stone out yonder, with the
+gangs in those yellow jackets and knickerbockers plentifully decorated
+with a pleasing design in broad arrows.
+
+Being merely a “free person,” without prejudice in one’s favour in the
+eyes of the armed warders who abound here, it behoves one to walk
+circumspectly on Portland.
+
+A great deal might be said of the Convict Prison and its quarries.  It is
+another “sermon in stones,” quite as effective as the sermons preached by
+those other stones referred to in the lines
+
+    . . . books in the running brooks,
+    Sermons in stones, and good in everything,
+
+and the text, I take it, is the amended and horribly sophisticated one:
+“Thou shalt not steal—or, if you must, do it outside the cognisance of
+the criminal laws!”
+
+But this only in passing.  Literary landmarks have fortunately, no points
+of contact with burglars, fraudulent trustees, and swindling promoters of
+companies.  We will make for Pennsylvania Castle, very slightly disguised
+in _The Well Beloved_ as “Sylvania Castle,” the residence of Jocelyn
+Pierston in that story.  Coming to it, past the cottage of Avice, down
+that street innocent of vegetation, the thickets of trees surrounding the
+Castle (which is not a castle, but only a castellated mansion built in
+1800 by Wyatt, in true Wyattesque fashion, for the then Governor of the
+Isle) are seen, closing in the view.  A tree is something more than a
+tree on stony, wind-swept Portland.  Any tree here is a landmark, and a
+grove of trees a feature; and thus, in the thickets and cliffside
+undergrowths of “Sylvania Castle,” that justify the name and give the lie
+to any who may in more than general terms declare Portland to be
+treeless, the boskage is therefore more than usually gracious.
+
+                     [Picture: Bow and Arrow Castle]
+
+Many incidents in the elfish career of Pierston are made to happen here.
+The first Avice was courted by him in the churchyard down below, where a
+landslip has swept away the little church that gave to Church Hope Cove
+its name, and Avice the third eloped with another—that Another who with
+that capital A lurks between the pages of every novel, and behind the
+scenes in most plays—down the steep lane that runs beneath the archways
+of “Rufus’,” or Bow and Arrow, Castle on to the rocks beside the raging
+sea.
+
+By lengthy cliff-top ways we leave this spot and make for Portland Bill,
+whence Anne Garland tearfully watched the topsails and then the
+topgallants, and at last the admiral’s flag of the _Victory_ drop down
+towards, and into, the watery distance.  Offshore is the Shambles
+lightship that gave a refuge to the fleeing Avice and Leverre.
+
+This “wild, herbless, weatherworn promontory,” called Portland Bill, with
+its two lighthouses looking down upon shoals and rapid currents of
+extraordinary danger to mariners, obtains its name from the beak-like end
+of the Isle which “stretches out like the head of a bird into the English
+Channel.”  Other, and more fanciful and wonder-loving accounts would have
+us believe that it derives from this being the site of propitiatory Baal
+fires in far-off pagan times; and, if we like to carry on the fancy, we
+may draw comparisons between the fires of the shivering superstitious
+terrors of those old heathens, and the beneficent warning gleams
+maintained here in modern times by the Trinity House, for the benefit of
+“they that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great
+waters.”
+
+Completing the circuit of Portland, the return to Fortune’s Well and
+Chesilton is made chiefly along high ground disclosing a comprehensive
+and beautiful view of the whole westward sweep of the Dorset coast, where
+the many miles of the Chesil Beach at last lose themselves in hazy
+distance, and the heights of Stonebarrow and Golden Cap, between Bridport
+and Lyme Regis, pierce the skies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+                   WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER
+
+TO leave Weymouth by this route is to obtain some initial impressions of
+a very striking character: impressions, not slight or fleeting, of
+hilliness and of Weymouth’s modern growth.  A specious and illusory flat
+quayside stretch of road, by the well-known swan-haunted Backwater, ends
+all too soon, and the road goes at a grievous inclination up through what
+was once the village, now the suburb, and a very packed and populous
+suburb, too, of East Chickerell.  To this succeeds the Chickerell of the
+West; and so, in and out and round about, and up and down—but chiefly
+up—at last to Portisham, the first place of any Hardyean interest.
+
+Portisham, under the bold hills that rise to the commanding height of
+Blackdown—locally “Black’on,” just as the name of the village is
+shortened to “Po’sham”—rising eight hundred and seventeen feet above the
+sea, is notable to us both from fiction and in facts.  It appears in _The
+Trumpet Major_ as the village to which Bob Loveday comes to seek service
+under Admiral Hardy, and although the brave but sentimentally flighty Bob
+be a character of fiction, the admiral is that very real historical
+personage, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson’s friend and
+comrade-in-arms, who was born here, in the house still pointed out, in
+1769, and to whose memory the conspicuous monument on Blackdown is
+erected.  The house is the first on the left, at the cross-roads as you
+make for the village.  In the garden belonging to it, on the opposite
+side of the road may still be seen a sundial, bearing the inscription:
+
+                             JOSEPH HARDY, ESQ.,
+                       Kingston Russell.  Lat. 50° 45′
+                                     1767
+                                 Fugio fuge.
+
+                           [Picture: Portisham]
+
+It is a lovely perspective along the road approaching Portisham,
+disclosing a long avenue of poplars and ashes, with the village church
+and some scattered farmsteads in the vale, and the tremendous sides of
+the rolling down, covered in patches with furze, filling in the
+background.  The beautiful old church has, happily, been left very much
+to itself, with the lichen-stains of age and other marks of time not yet
+scraped off.  A strange epitaph in the churchyard provokes curiosity:
+
+    “William Weare lies here in dust,
+    As thou and I and all men must.
+    Once plundered by Sabean force,
+    Some cald it war but others worse.
+    With confidence he pleads his cavse,
+    And Kings to be above those laws.
+    September’s eygth day died hee
+    When neare the date of 63
+          Anno domini 1670.”
+
+Those Sabines appear from the internal evidence of the epitaph to have
+been the Roundhead party, and “rebellion,” or perhaps “robbery,” to have
+been the worse thing than war some called it.  The allusion is probably
+to some raid in which cows and sheep were carried off by the Puritans and
+were grudged them by the loyal Weare, who seems, in the passage where he
+claims “Kings to be above those laws,” to have cheerfully borne some
+other foray on the Royalists’ behalf.
+
+                  [Picture: The road out of Abbotsbury]
+
+Two miles from Portisham is the large village of Abbotsbury, not itself
+the scene of any of the Wessex romances, but intrinsically a very
+interesting place, remarkable for a hilltop chapel of St. Catherine
+anciently serving as a seamark, and for the remains of the Abbey; few,
+and chiefly worked into farmsteads and cottages, but including a great
+stone barn of the fifteenth century, as long as a cathedral, and very
+cathedral-like in its plan.
+
+The great barn of _Far from the Madding Crowd_, scene of the
+sheep-shearing, is really a description of the monastic barn of
+Abbotsbury, which, as in the story, resembles a church with transepts.
+“It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish,
+but vied with it in antiquity. . . .  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 which it was
+still applied.”
+
+                   [Picture: Sheep-shearing in Wessex]
+
+Out of Abbotsbury, and down amid the waters of the West Fleet, is the
+famous Swannery, where, amid reedy lakes and marshes, some thousands of
+swans have from ancient times had a home.  Once belonging to the Church,
+in the persons of the old abbots of the Benedictine abbey of Abbotsbury,
+the swans are now the property of the Earl of Ilchester, descendant of
+the “First Countess of Wessex,” Betty Dornell, whose romance is set forth
+in _A Group of Noble Dames_.  Though long passed from the hands of any
+religious establishment, the ownership of the swans still points with the
+trifling alteration in the position of an apostrophe, to the fact that
+“the earth is the Lords’ and the fulness thereof.”
+
+Eight miles of cliff-top roads, with magnificent views to the left over
+sea and coast, and other views equally magnificent inland, to the right,
+lead in staggering drops and rises past Swyre and Puncknowle down to
+Burton Bradstock, and thence to the “unheard-of harbour” of West Bay.
+
+West Bay, and Bridport town itself, are scenes in _Fellow Townsmen_,
+where they are called “Port Bredy,” from the little river, the Brit or
+Bredy, which here flows into the sea.  West Bay is one of the oddest
+places on an odd and original coast.  A mile and a half away from
+Bridport town, which is content to hide, sheltering away from the
+sea-breezes, it has always been about to become great, either as a
+commercial harbour or a seaside resort, or both, but has ended in not
+achieving greatness of any kind.  No one who enjoys the sight of a quiet
+and picturesque place will sorrow at that.
+
+Picturesque it is in a wholly accidental and unstudied way.  It owns a
+little harbour, with quays and an inn or two, and shipping that, daring
+greatly, has to be warped in between the narrow timbered pier-heads,
+where a furious sea is for ever banging in from the unsheltered bay; and
+away at one side it is shut in from the outside coast by some
+saucy-looking cliffs of golden yellow sandstone, whose odd effect is due
+to their being the remaining part of a symmetrically rounded down.  The
+seaward part has been shorn off, with the odd result that the rest looks
+like the quarter of some gigantic Dutch cheese of pantomime.  It is an
+eloquent, stimulating, not unpleasing loneliness that characterises the
+shore of West Bay.  A few old thatched houses, halting midway between an
+inland and a coastwise picturesqueness, and so only succeeding in being
+broken-heartedly nondescript, start out of wastes of tiny shingle, and
+are backed at a discreet distance by a long row of modern houses, whose
+architect is so often on their account professionally spoken of as a
+genius, that it becomes a duty to state, however convenient to the
+residents in them their plan may be, that their appearance in the view is
+the one pictorial drawback to West Bay.
+
+The microscopic shingle—for shingle it is—of West Bay has for centuries
+been the enemy of the place and has practically strangled it.  There are
+heaped up wastes of it everywhere, and every visitor involuntarily
+carries some of it away, as a sample, about his person, in his shoes or
+his hair, or in his pockets.  The more of it removed in this, or indeed
+in any other manner, the better pleased will West Bay be, for it comes,
+unasked, into the houses; you have it for breakfast, lunch, tea, and
+supper, as an unsolicited garnish to the viands, and when at last you
+seek repose between the sheets, there it is again.  These wastes are part
+of that natural phenomenon of the Dorset coast, the Chesil Beach, which
+runs eighteen miles from this point along the perfectly unbroken shores
+of the Bay to Chesilton and Portland.  The “Chesil” is just the “Pebble”
+beach: that old word for pebbles being found elsewhere in Dorsetshire,
+and at Chislehurst, among other places.  A pecularity of it is that by
+insensible degrees it grows coarser as it proceeds in a south-easterly
+direction, ending as very large pebbles at Portland.  The fishermen of
+this lonely coast, landing on dark nights, with nothing else to guide
+them as to their whereabouts, can always readily settle the point by
+handling this shingle, and by use can tell within a mile of the
+particular spot.
+
+                      [Picture: West Bay, Bridport]
+
+The story of West Bay’s struggle against this insidious enemy is an old
+one.  In 1722 the Bridport authorities procured an Act of Parliament
+empowering them to restore and rebuild the haven and port, the piers and
+landing-places, in order to bring the town to that ancient and
+flourishing state whence it had declined.  The preamble stated that by
+reason of a great sickness and other accidents, the wealthy inhabitants
+had been swept away and the haven choked.  But although the Legislature
+had given authority for the work to be done, it did not indicate whence
+the funds were to be obtained, and so it was not until 1742 that the
+pier, authorised twenty years before, was built, nor was it until another
+fourteen years had waned that the pier and harbour were enlarged.  Mr.
+Hardy in _Fellow Townsmen_ thus describes West Bay: “A gap appeared in
+the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of the
+opening rose a vertical cliff, coloured a burning orange by the sunlight,
+the companion cliff on the right side being livid in shade.  Between
+these cliffs, like the Libyan Bay which sheltered the shipwrecked
+Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly a beginning made by Nature herself
+of a perfect harbour, which appealed to the passer-by as only requiring a
+little human industry to finish it and make it famous, the ground on each
+side, as far back as the daisied slopes that bounded the interior valley,
+being a mere layer of blown sand.  But the Port-Bredy burgesses a mile
+inland had, in the course of ten centuries, responded many times to that
+mute appeal, with the result that the tides had invariably choked up
+their works with sand and shingle as soon as completed.  There were but
+few houses here: a rough pier, a few boats, some stores, an inn, a
+residence or two, a ketch unloading in the harbour, were the chief
+features of the settlement.”
+
+The harbour road, along whose mile and a half, the domestically unhappy
+Barnet went to see his Lucy at various intervals of time, leads into the
+corporate town of Bridport, which, after long remaining, as far as the
+casual eye of the stranger may perceive, little affected by the
+circumstance of being on a railway, is now developing a something in the
+nature of a suburb, greatly to the dismay of neighbouring residents who,
+residing here because of its isolation on a branch railway that brings
+few passengers, and to landward of a harbour that has no commerce, now
+can glimpse at the end of a vista of years some prospect of the ancient
+peace of Bridport being genteelly disturbed.
+
+Bridport was, in those days when it remained a busy place, a town keenly
+interested in the flax, hemp, twine, and rope industries; and rope and
+twine walks, where the old methods are even yet in use, are still
+features of its less prominent lanes and alleys, but the unobservant and
+the incurious, who to be sure form the majority of travellers, might
+pass, and do pass, through Bridport, without thinking it any other than a
+quiet market town, dependent solely upon surrounding agricultural needs
+and weekly village shopping.
+
+When hemp was grown in the neighbourhood of Bridport, in those bustling
+days when the manufacturers of the town supplied the King’s Navy with
+ropes, and criminals were suspended by this staple article of the town,
+the expression “stabbed with a Bridport dagger,” was a pretty, or at
+least a symbolical, way of saying that a man had been hanged.  It was a
+figure of speech that quite escaped that matter-of-fact antiquary,
+Leland, when in the time of Henry VIII. he came to Bridport and stolidly
+noted down: “At Bridport be made good daggers.”
+
+One is disposed to sympathise with Leland in that egregious error of his,
+for which he and his memory have been laughed at for more than three
+hundred and fifty years.  How his shade must writhe at the shame of it!
+He was, doubtless, tired and bored, for some reason or another, when he
+reached Bridport, and to his undoing, took things on trust.  And
+nowadays, every one who writes the very leastest scrap on Bridport has
+his fling at the poor old fellow; and I—conscience tells me—insincerely
+do the same, under a miserably inadequate cloak of pretended sympathy!
+
+              [Picture: High Street and Town Hall, Bridport]
+
+Barnet, whose baulked love is the theme of _Fellow Townsmen_, was
+descended from the hemp and rope-merchants of Bridport, as the story, in
+several allusions, tells us.
+
+South Street, leading from the Harbour Road into the right and left
+course of the main street, contains most of the very few buildings of any
+great age.  Among them is the little Gothic, gabled building now a
+workmen’s club, but once the “Castle” inn.  Here, too, is the church,
+ancient enough, but restored in 1860, when the two bays were added to the
+nave; probably the incident referred to by Mr. Hardy: “The church had had
+such a tremendous practical joke played upon it by some facetious
+restorer or other as to be scarce recognisable by its dearest old
+friends.”
+
+There is, in this otherwise rather bald interior of Bridport church, a
+curious mural tablet to the “Memory of Edward Coker, Gent.  Second son of
+Capt. Robert Coker of Mapowder, Slayne at the Bull Inn, in Bridpurt.
+June the 14th Añ. Dõ. 1685, by one Venner, who was a Officer under the
+late Dvke of Mvnmovth in that Rebellion.”
+
+The Bull inn stands yet in the main street, but modernised.  It is the
+original of the “Black Bull” in _Fellow Townsmen_.
+
+Six miles due north of Bridport lies the little town of Beaminster, the
+“hill-surrounded little town” of which Angel Clare’s father was vicar.
+“Sweet Be’mi’ster” says Barnes:
+
+    “Sweet Be’mi’ster, that bist abound
+    By green and woody hills all round,”
+
+and in truth those hills that surround it are set about this quiet
+agricultural town in a manner that fairly astounds the traveller.  No
+railway reaches “Emminster,” as it is named in _Tess of the
+D’Urbervilles_, and, looking upon those mighty natural turrets and domes
+that beset it, the traveller is of opinion that no railway ever will.
+Nearing Beaminster at cockshut time, when the birds have all gone to bed,
+when the sky is hot in the west with the burnished copper of the
+after-glow, and a cold blue and green, with pale stars appearing, fills
+the eastern firmament, the scenery is something awesome and approaching
+an Alpine sublimity.  Then the twilight streets of this quiet place in
+the basin-like hollow begin to take an hospitable look, and the tall red
+stone tower of the church, that looks so nobly aloof in day, assumes a
+welcoming paternal benignancy.  It is a toilsome winning to Beaminster,
+but, when won, worth the trouble of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+                        WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE
+
+YOU cannot go far from Weymouth without a good deal of hill-climbing, but
+the longest stretch of level in this district, where levels are the
+exception and hills the rule, is by this route.  It is not so very long,
+even then, for when you have passed the curving Esplanade and Lodmoor
+Marsh, and come to the foot of Jordan Hill, thought to have been the site
+of the Roman “Clavinium,” it is only two and a half miles.  Preston
+stands on the top of a further hill, and is a place of great resort for
+brake-parties not greatly interested in literature.  Turning to the left
+out of its street, opposite the Ship inn, we come to the pretty
+village—or hamlet, for no church is visible—of Sutton Poyntz, the
+“Overcombe” of _The Trumpet Major_.  Its thatched stone cottages,
+charming tree-shaded stream and mill-pond, and old barns, all under the
+looming shadow of the downs, vividly recall the old-fashioned ways and
+talk, and the pleasant romance of Mr. Hardy’s only semi-historical novel;
+and you need not see, if you do not wish, the flagrant Vandalism of the
+Weymouth waterworks, hard by, and can if you will, turn your back upon
+the inn that will be interesting and picturesque some day, but now, rawly
+new, is an outrage upon, and a thing altogether out of key with, these
+old rustic surroundings.
+
+     [Picture: Sutton Poyntz: The “Overcombe” of “The Trumpet Major”]
+
+Squawking ducks, hurrying across the dusty road and flouncing noisily
+into the clearly running stream, rooks cawing contentedly from their
+windy see-saw in the topmost branches of tall trees; and tired horses
+coming stolidly home from plough are the chief features of this
+“Overcombe,” where John Loveday had his mill, and his sons John and Bob,
+and Anne Garland and Matilda, and all the lovable, the hateful, or the
+merely contemptible characters in that sympathetic tale came and went.
+The mill—I am afraid it is not _the_ mill, but one of somewhat later
+date—still grinds corn, and you can see it, bulking very largely between
+the trees, “the smooth millpond, over-full, and intruding into the hedge
+and into the road,” as mill-ponds will do, even in these later days of
+strict local government.  But the days of European wars are gone.  It is
+a hundred years since the last call of brave, tender, loyal John Loveday,
+the Trumpet Major, was silenced on a bloody battlefield in Spain, and
+well on toward the same tale of years since the press gangs, fellows to
+that which searched Overcombe Mill for Bob Loveday, impressed likely
+fellows for service on His Majesty’s ships:—the characters of _The
+Trumpet Major_ belong wholly to a bygone age.
+
+To the same age belonged the characters in _The Melancholy Hussar of the
+German Legion_, a short story associated with Bincombe, a tiny village it
+requires no little exertion to reach; but you may win this way to it as
+easily—or at any rate, not more laboriously—than by any other route.  It
+stands up among the downs, and in what Dorset folk would call an
+“outspan”—that is to say a remote hollow, recess or shelf amid them,
+where their sides are so steep that they give the appearance of some
+theatrical “back-cloth” to a romantic scene.
+
+“Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged
+since those eventful days.  A plough has never disturbed the turf, and
+the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now.  Here stood the camp;
+here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the
+cavalry, and spots where the midden heaps lay are still to be observed.
+At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid
+hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and
+thistles, the old trumpet and bugle-calls, the rattle of the halters; to
+help seeing rows of spectral tents and the _impedimenta_ of the soldiery.
+From within the canvases come guttural syllables of foreign tongues, and
+broken songs of the fatherland; for they were mainly regiments of the
+King’s German Legion that slept round the tent-poles hereabout at that
+time.”
+
+                           [Picture: Bincombe]
+
+The story associated with this out-of-the-way place is one in its chief
+lines true to facts, for in an unmarked grave within the little
+churchyard, lie two young German soldiers, shot for desertion from the
+York Hussars, as quoted at the end of the story from the register:
+
+“Matth: Tina (Corpl.) in His Majesty’s Regiment of York Hussars, and shot
+for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years.  Born in the
+town of Sarrbruk, Germany.”
+
+“Christop Bless, belonging to His Majesty’s Regiment of York Hussars, who
+was shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years.  Born
+at Lothaargen, Alsatia.”
+
+Returning from Bincombe and down again through Sutton Poyntz to Preston,
+we come to Osmington, with views down along on the right to Ringstead
+Bay; but, avoiding for the present the coast, strike inland, to Poxwell,
+the “Oxwell Hall” of _The Trumpet Major_.  It is really three miles from
+“Overcombe,” and therefore not the close neighbour to the Lovedays it is
+made to be, for the purposes of the novel.  The church stands beside of
+the road, the old manor-house, now a farmstead, the home of “Uncle
+Benjy,” miserly Squire Derriman, close by.  In old days, back in 1634,
+when it was built, this curiously walled-in residence with its outer
+porter’s lodge, the physical and visible sign of an ever-present distrust
+of strangers, was a seat of the Henning family.  That lodge still stands,
+obsolete as an _avant-garde_ and gazebo for the timely spying out of
+unwelcome visitors, but very admirable for a summer-house, if the farmer
+had leisure for such things.  But as he has not, but must continually
+“plough and sow, and reap and mow,” or see that others do so, the lodge
+is in every way a derelict.  The farmer could perhaps add some testimony
+of his own respecting all those “romantic excellencies and practical
+drawbacks,” mentioned in the story, and existing in fact; but, farmers
+having a bent towards practicality, although they discuss, rather than
+practise it, it is to be supposed that he would place a stress upon the
+drawbacks, to the neglect of the romance.
+
+                         [Picture: Poxwell Manor]
+
+Pursuing the road onwards from Poxwell, we come, in a mile and a half, to
+the cross-roads at “Warm’ell Cross,” leading on the left to Dorchester,
+on the right to Wareham, and straight ahead across the remotenesses of
+“Egdon Heath,” to Moreton station.  Here we turn to the right, and so
+miss the village of Warmwell, whence the cross roads take their name.  It
+is not by any means, to the ordinary traveller, a remarkable crossing of
+the roads, but it has associations for the pilgrim stored with the
+literary lore of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the story of _The
+Distracted Preacher_, that Mr. Stockdale, the Wesleyan minister of Nether
+Mynton, by the aid of their voices, crying “Hoi—hoi—hoi!  Help, help!”
+discovered Will Latimer and the exciseman tied to the trees by the
+smuggler friends of his Lizzie.  Turning here to the right, Owermoigne
+itself—the “Nether Mynton” of that tale of smuggled spirits and religious
+scruples—is reached in another mile; the church and its tiny village of
+thatched rusticity standing shyly, as such a smuggler’s haunt should do,
+off the broad high road and down a little stumbly and rutty lane.  The
+body of the church has been rebuilt since Lizzie Newberry and her friends
+stored “the stuff” in the tower and the churchyard, but that churchyard
+remains the same, as also does the tower from whose battlements the “free
+traders” spied upon the excisemen, searching for those hidden tubs.
+
+From this road there is a better distant view of the great equestrian
+effigy of George III., cut in the chalky southern slopes of the downs,
+than from any other point.  He looks impressive, in the ghostly sort,
+seen across the bare slopes, where perhaps an occasional farmstead or
+barton, or a row of wheat-ricks, accentuates the solitude and at the same
+time gives scale to the chalky effigies of His Majesty and that very
+elegant horse of his, showing how very large this horse and rider really
+are.  The gallant Trumpet Major told about the making of this memorial,
+as he and Anne Garland walked among the flowering peas, and described
+what this “huge picture of the king on horseback in the earth of the
+hill” was to be like: “The King’s head is to be as big as our mill-pond,
+and his body as big as this garden; he and the horse will cover more than
+an acre.”
+
+And here he is to this day, very spirited and martial, with his cocked
+hat and marshal’s baton.
+
+ [Picture: Owermoigne: The Smugglers’ Haunt in “The Distracted Preacher”]
+
+It is, however, a weariful business to arrive in the neighbourhood of
+him, for those chalk downs are just as inhospitable in the sun as they
+are in the storms of winter, the only difference lying between being
+fried on their shelterless sides when the thermometer registers ninety
+degrees, or frozen when the mercury sinks towards zero.
+
+Some two miles of highway along the verge of Egdon Heath bring us to a
+right-hand turning, leading past Winfrith Newburgh by a somewhat more
+shaded route up over the crest of these chalky ranges, and then with
+several turnings, steeply down, and at length, “by and large”—as sailors
+say—to the village of West Lulworth, which lies at the inland end of a
+coombe, the better part of a mile from Lulworth Cove.
+
+                         [Picture: Lulworth Cove]
+
+To Lulworth—or as he terms it, Lullstead—Cove, Mr. Hardy returns again
+and again.  It is the “small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs” where
+Troy bathed and was supposed to have been drowned; it is one of the spots
+where _The Distracted Preacher’s_ parishioners landed their smuggled
+spirit-tubs, and upon its milk-white shores of limestone pebbles the
+lifeless bodies of Stephen Hardcombe and his companion were found.  It
+was the first meeting-place of Cytherea Graye and Edward Springrove; and
+was, again, that “three-quarter round Cove” where, “screened from every
+mortal eye,” save his own, Solomon Selby observed Bonaparte questing
+along the darkling shore for a suitable place where his flotilla might
+land in his projected invasion of England.
+
+             [Picture: Lulworth Cove.  The coastgard station]
+
+Lulworth Cove is an almost perfect circle, eaten out of the limestone in
+the long ago by the sea, in an unusually geometrical manner.  Bindon Hill
+frowns down upon it, and in summer the circle of light-blue water laughs
+saucily back, in little sparkling ripples, just as though there were no
+storms in nature and no cruel rock-bound coast outside.  The Cove is, if
+you be classically minded, a Bath of the Naiads; and, if less
+imaginative, is at any rate a delightful spot that even in these
+tidied-up and ordered days, when every little seaside cove has its hair
+brushed and face scrubbed, and is made always to look its Sunday best,
+persists in being littered with a longshore fishing and boating medley of
+anchors and lobster-pots, ropes, chains and windlasses, infinitely more
+pleasing to right-thinking persons—by whom I indicate those who think
+with myself—than the neatest of promenades and seats.  True, they have
+rebuilt or enlarged the Cove Hotel and red-brick manifestations of a
+growing favour with visitors are springing up beside the old thatched
+cottages; but Lulworth—Cove or village—is not spoiled yet.  The
+Coastguard Station, perched on what looks like a hazardous pinnacle of
+cliff, with the wild chasm of Stair Hole to one side of it and the sheer
+drop into the Cove on the other, is the most striking feature, looking
+down from landward, of this curious place, which has not its fellow
+anywhere else, and is the sunniest, the ruggedest, and certainly the most
+treeless place along the Dorset coast.
+
+To those who have persevered along the roads into Lulworth, the prospect
+of again climbing those hills is perhaps a little grim, and they should
+so contrive to time their arrival and departure that they comfortably fit
+in with the return to Weymouth of the excursion steamer plying in the
+tourist season between the two places.
+
+                        [Picture: Lytchett Heath]
+
+              [Picture: The Equestrian Effigy of George III]
+
+                 [Picture: Entrance to Charborough Park]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+                           BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE
+
+BOURNEMOUTH, the “Sandbourne” of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ and of minor
+incidents and passing allusions in others of Mr. Hardy’s novels, is one
+of the principal gates of entrance to his Wessex.  Just within the
+western borders of Hampshire, or what he would call “Upper Wessex,” the
+heart of his literary country is within the easiest reach of its pleasant
+districts of villa residences, by road or rail, or indeed by sea; for
+Swanage, the “Swanwich” of a Hardy gazetteer, and Lulworth Cove, his
+“Lullstead,” that azure pool within “the two projecting spurs of rock
+which form the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean,” are
+the destinations in summer of many steamboat voyages.
+
+“Sandbourne has become a large place, they say.”  Thus Angel Clare,
+seeking his wife somewhere within its bounds.  Large indeed, and growing
+yet.  Census officials and other statisticians toil after its increase in
+vain.  I find a guide-book of 1887 speaking of its population as “nearly
+18,000.”  I find another, of 1896, putting it at “about 40,000,” and then
+referring to the last census returns, discover it to have further risen
+to forty-seven thousand souls, and a few over.  By now it doubtless
+numbers full fifty thousand, and has further rubricated and underscored
+its description in the last pages of Tess: “This fashionable
+watering-place with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its
+groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was to Angel
+Clare like a fairy place, suddenly created by the stroke of a wand, and
+allowed to get a little dusty.  An outlying eastern tract of the enormous
+Egdon waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece
+of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen
+to spring up.  Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every
+irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed
+British trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of
+the Cæsars.  Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s
+gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.”
+
+“By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding ways of this new
+world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against the
+stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous
+fanciful residences of which the place was composed.  It was a city of
+detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel;
+and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it was.
+
+“The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he thought
+it was the pines, the pines murmured in precisely the same tones, and he
+thought they were the sea.”
+
+                [Picture: Bournemouth: The Invalid’s Walk]
+
+This rich and populous seaside home of wealthy valetudinarians was until
+well on into the nineteenth century a lonely waste, whose only
+frequenters were smugglers, fishermen, rabbits, and seagulls.  In the
+midst of its pine-woods, sands, and heather a little stream, the Bourne,
+which now gives this great concourse of villa paradises, palatial hotels,
+and fashionable shops its name, flowed into the sea, just where, in these
+days, tricked out with cascades, and fountains, and made to wander
+circuitously at the will of landscape-gardeners amid the neatest of lawns
+and the gayest of flower-beds, it at last trickles exhaustedly into the
+sea, under the pier.  Its natural course from the neighbourhood of
+Kinson, down Bourne Bottom, to that smallest of “mouths,” is some six
+miles, but in these days it is made to work hard in the last stretch,
+through the public gardens, and where it once covered one mile, is now
+looped here and turned back there upon itself, and exploited generally,
+until it has become as sophisticated a stream as anywhere to be found.
+The Bourne is, indeed, like the humble parent of some overwhelming social
+success, made to alter its ways and put aside its rustic manners, to do
+credit to its offspring.
+
+The country folk who live in the background of this oft-styled “City of
+Pines,” still call it merely “Bourne,” as it was when, many years ago,
+Dr. Granville made the fortunes of the hamlet, frequented by a few
+invalids and others rejoicing in the spicy odours of the pine-woods, that
+had grown in a scattered and chance fashion upon the heath.  “No
+situation,” said that authority upon spas and watering-places, “possesses
+so many capabilities of being made the very first sea watering-place in
+England; and not only a watering-place, but what is still more important,
+a winter residence for the most delicate constitutions requiring a warm
+and sheltered locality at this season of the year.”  Then follow
+comparisons favourable to the site of Bournemouth, and derogatory to
+other seaside resorts.
+
+Every circumstance insured attention being drawn to this weighty
+pronouncement, and advantage being taken of it.  Consumptives came and
+found the air beneficial, and Bournemouth grew suddenly and astonishingly
+upon a lonely coastline; arising in that residential
+all-round-the-calendar character it has kept to this day, in spite of
+those holiday-folk, the excursionists and trippers whom its “residential”
+stratum discourages as much as possible.  But when even so thoroughly
+exclusive a residential health-resort has been so successful, and has
+grown so greatly in that character as Bournemouth has grown, there comes
+inevitably a time when the workers and tradesfolk, ministrants to the
+wants of those residents, themselves become an important section of the
+community.  It is a time when suburbs and quarters, invidiously
+distinguished from one another in the social scale, have established
+themselves; when, in short, from being just the resort of a class, a
+place becomes a microcosm of life, in which all classes and degrees are
+represented.  The seal was set upon the arrival of that time for
+Bournemouth with its admission to the dignity of a municipal borough,
+fully equipped with Mayor and Town Council, in the summer of 1890, and
+again, later, with the opening of electric tramways.  Railway-companies
+urge the attractions of Bournemouth upon holiday-makers, with great
+success, and nowadays one only perceives the place in anything like its
+former characteristic air at such time when the summer has gone and the
+holiday-maker has returned to his own fireside.
+
+Bournemouth has already gathered together some odds and ends of
+sentimental associations.  Mary Wollstonecraft, widow of Shelley, died
+here in 1853, and lies in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, beside Godwin
+and his wife, whose bodies were brought from the London churchyard of St.
+Pancras.  Keble died here in 1866, and the present St. Peter’s is his
+memorial.  Robert Louis Stevenson, Bournemouth’s most distinguished
+consumptive, resided at “Skerryvore,” in Alum Chine Road, before he took
+flight to the South Seas.
+
+But—singular and ungrateful omission—one looks in vain for a statue to
+Dr. Granville, who, by his powerful advocacy, made Bournemouth, just as
+Dr. Russel made Brighton a century earlier.  In this it is not difficult
+to find another instance of “benefits forgot.”
+
+The juxtaposition of a place so new as Bournemouth with one so ancient as
+Poole is a piquant circumstance.  When Bournemouth rose, not like
+Britannia, from the azure main, but from beside it, there was a
+considerable interval of open country between the hoary seaport and the
+mint-new pleasure-town.  That interval has now shrunk to vanishing-point;
+for, what with Bournemouth’s expansion, growing Parkstone’s position
+midway, and Poole’s own attempt to sprout in an eastwardly direction, to
+meet those manifestations, the green country has been abolished beneath
+an irruption of bricks and mortar.
+
+The piquancy of Poole’s ancient repose being neighboured by Bournemouth’s
+wide-awake life is italicised when that port—the “Havenpool” of _To
+Please his Wife_—is entered.  It would not be correct to say that the
+days of Poole as a port are over, but with the growth in size of modern
+ships, the shallowness of Poole Harbour in whose recesses it is tucked
+rather obscurely away, prevents any but vessels of slight draught coming
+up to its quays.  For that reason, large ocean-going steamers are
+strangers to Poole, more familiar with wooden barques and brigantines and
+their maze of masts and spars, than with the capacious steamships that,
+although of much greater speed and tonnage, carry very slight and
+insignificant sticks; and were it not for the china-clay shipments and
+for that coasting trade which seems almost indestructible, Poole would
+assuredly die.
+
+But Poole, besides being ancient, has been a place to reckon with.
+Already, in 1220, when by a proclamation of Henry III. the ships of many
+ports were sealed up, Poole appeared among the number.  In 1347 its
+contribution towards the siege of Calais was four ships and ninety-four
+men, and it was the base from which the English army in France was
+provisioned.  Then in 1349 came that fourteenth century scourge, the
+Black Death, and Poole, among other towns, was almost depopulated, and
+lost the Parliamentary representation it had long enjoyed.  But it made a
+good recovery, and in the time of Henry VI. regained its Parliamentary
+representation.  Leland, writing of the place describes it, two hundred
+years later, as “a poore fisshar village, much encreasid with fair
+building and use of marchaundise of old tyme.”  Poole, after that
+description was penned, continued to recover itself, and fully regained
+its lost prosperity.  Fifty years later it is found carrying on a
+thriving trade with Spain, and how truly it was said that its merchants
+were men of wealth and consideration may be judged from their large, and
+architecturally and decoratively fine, mansions still remaining, although
+nowadays put to all kinds of mean uses and often occupied as tenements.
+
+Poole, however, long enjoyed a very bad reputation, and the wealth of
+which these were some of the evidences, was not often come by in very
+reputable ways.  When it is said that Poole “enjoyed” a bad reputation,
+it is said advisedly, for Poole was so lost to shame that it really _did_
+enjoy what should have been a source of some searchings of heart.  It was
+a veritable nest of pirates and smugglers, and the home of strange and
+original sinfulnesses; so that at last an injurious rhyme that still
+survives was circulated about it:
+
+    “If Poole were a fish-pool, and the men of Poole fish,
+    There’d be a pool for the devil, and fish for his dish.”
+
+So early as the close of the fourteenth century, the buccaneers of Poole
+were infamous, and at their head was the notorious Harry Page, known to
+the French and the Spaniards as Arripay, the nearest they could frame to
+pronounce his name.  Arripay was a very full-blooded, enterprising, and
+unscrupulous fellow; if without irreverence we may call him a “fellow,”
+who was the admiral of his rascally profession.  There can be little
+doubt but that tradition has added not a little to the tales of his
+exploits, and it is hardly credible that he and his fellow-pirates
+should, on one occasion, have brought home a hundred and twenty prizes
+from the coast of Brittany.  His forays were made upon the shipping of
+the foreigner, and with such system that no ship, it was said, could
+successfully run the gauntlet of his lawless flotilla.  His success and
+power were so great that they necessitated the sending of an expedition
+to sweep the seas of him.  This was an allied French and Spanish force,
+commissioned in 1406, and sailing under the command of Perdo Nino, Count
+of Buelna.  Adopting the tactics of raiders, they burnt and ravaged the
+coasts of Cornwall and Devon, and, coming to Dorset, swept into Arripay’s
+hornets’ nest of Poole Harbour, and landing at Poole itself, defeated the
+townsmen in a pitched battle.  The brother of the redoubtable Arripay was
+among the slain.
+
+A worthy successor of this bold spirit in the pike and cutlass
+way—although he was no pirate, but just an honest stalwart sailor—was
+that bonny fighter, Peter Jolliffe, of the hoy _Sea Adventurer_.  Off
+Swanage in 1694, he fell in with a French privateer having a poor little
+captured Weymouth fishing-smack in tow, and attacked the Frenchman
+repeatedly, and at last with such success, that he not only released the
+smack, but drove the privateer ashore near Lulworth, its crew being made
+prisoners of war.  For so signal an instance of bravery Jolliffe received
+a gold chain and medal from the hands of the king himself.
+
+Jolliffe’s example fired enthusiasm, and the following year, William
+Thompson, skipper of a fishing-smack, aided only by his scanty crew of
+one man and a boy, attacked a Cherbourg privateer that had attempted to
+capture him, and actually succeeded in capturing it and its complement of
+sixteen hands, instead.  He brought his prize into Poole, and he too,
+fully deserved that gold chain and medal awarded him.
+
+In St. James’s church itself—disclosing an interior not unlike that of a
+stern cabin of an old man-o’-war, writ large—is a monument to the
+intrepid Jolliffe.  From a reminiscence of it, no doubt, Mr. Hardy chose
+to name Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, that shipmaster engaged in the
+Newfoundland trade who is the ill-fated hero of _To Please his Wife_.
+
+For the rest, Poole figures so largely in the Civil War, as a town
+ardently in favour of the Parliament, that it has a long and stirring
+story of its own, in the varying fortunes of Roundheads and Stuarts.  It
+is too lengthy a story to be told with advantage here.
+
+The High Street of Poole, a mile long, is busy enough to quite dispel any
+idea that Poole is not prospering; but, on the other hand, the many
+puzzling narrow streets that lead out of it are so rich in what have been
+noble residences, that they tell in unmistakable tones of a greater
+period than this of to-day.
+
+These byways lead at last past the church of St. Paul, the fellow to St.
+James’s, with its dolphin vane, to Poole Quay, where the most prominent
+feature is an ancient Gothic building, looking very like some desecrated
+place of worship, or a monastic tithe-barn.  It is, as a matter of fact,
+neither, but the “Town Cellar,” a relic of a past age when Poole was part
+of the manor of Canford.  The lords of Canford, away back to that
+ubiquitous John o’ Gaunt, “time-honoured Lancaster,” who seems to have
+owned quite half of the most desirable properties in the England of his
+time, took toll in money, when they could, and in kind when silver marks
+and golden angels were scarce; and in the “Town Cellar” were stored those
+bales of wool, those spices from Ind, and those miscellaneous goods,
+which were made in this manner to render unto the Cæsars of Canford, in
+times when such things were.  It is a picturesque old building, its walls
+oddly composed of flint intermingled with large squared pieces of stone
+that, by the look of them, would seem to have been plundered from some
+older structure.
+
+Opposite stands the Harbour Office, not altogether unpicturesquely
+provided with a loggia supported by columns, and still retaining the
+sundial erected when clocks were scarce.  The Mayor of Poole, who in 1727
+presided over the fortunes of the port, is handed down to posterity by
+the quaint tablet let into the gable wall, showing us the quarter-length
+relief portrait of a stout personage in voluminous wig and mayoral chain
+and robes, lackadaisically glancing skyward, as though longing to be gone
+to those ethereal regions where double chins and “too, too solid flesh”
+are not.
+
+Poole Quay—its old buildings, waterside picturesqueness, and the shipping
+lying off the walls—is an interesting place for the artist, who has it
+very much to himself; for the holiday-maker does not often discover it.
+But waterside characters are not lacking: sailors, who have got berths
+and are only waiting for the tide to serve; other sailors, who are in
+want of berths; town boys, who would dearly like to go to sea; and
+nondescript characters, who would not take a job if offered to them, and
+want nothing but a quayside bollard to sit upon, sunshine, a pipe of
+tobacco, and the price of half a pint: these form the natural history of
+Poole Quay, which though it may have been—and was—one of the gateways
+into the great outer world, in the brave old days of Arripay and his
+merry men, is now something of a straitened gate, and Poole itself for
+the land voyager very much in the nature of one of those stop-blocks at
+the end of a railway siding: what a railway man would call a “dead end.”
+
+                          [Picture: Poole Quay]
+
+For Poole is not a main road to anywhere, and when you have turned down
+into it, on those three and a half miles from Bournemouth, you are either
+compelled to return the way you came, or else cross a creek by the
+toll-bridge to Hamworthy, where there is nothing but a church built in
+1826—and precisely of the nature one might expect from that date—and, a
+little way onward, a lonely railway junction in midst of sandy heaths and
+whispering pines, which, even at night, “tell the tale of their species,”
+as phrenologists say, “without help from outline or colour,” in “those
+melancholy moans and sobs which give to their sound a solemn sadness
+surpassing even that of the sea.”  It is the district of _The Hand of
+Ethelberta_, and if we pursue it, we shall, as Sol says, in that novel,
+“come to no place for two or three miles, and then only to Flychett,”
+which, in everyday life, is Lytchett Minster, a place which, despite that
+grand name, can show nothing in the nature of a cathedral, and is, as Sol
+said, “a trumpery small bit of a village,” where possibly that
+wheelwright mentioned in the story still “keeps a beer-house and owns two
+horses.”  That house is the inn oddly named the “Peter’s Finger,” with a
+picture-sign standing on a post by the wayside, and showing St. Peter
+holding up a hand with two extended fingers in benedictory fashion, as
+though blessing the wayfarer.  The origin of this sign is said to be the
+custom, once usual in Roman Catholic times, of holding manorial courts on
+Lammas Day, the 1st of August, the day of St. Peter ad Vincula—that St.
+Peter-in-the-Fetters to whom the church on Tower Green, in the Tower of
+London, is so appropriately dedicated.  On that day suit and service had
+to be performed by tenants for their lands, which thus obtained, in
+course of time, the corrupted title of “Peter’s Finger” property.
+
+Around the village so slightingly characterised in _The Hand of
+Ethelberta_ there is little save “the everlasting heath,” mentioned in
+that story, “the black hills bulging against the sky, the barrows upon
+their round summits like warts on a swarthy skin.”  It is true the road
+leads at last to Bere Regis, but it has little individuality and no
+further Hardyesque significance, and so may be disregarded in these
+pages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+                             WIMBORNE MINSTER
+
+WIMBORNE MINSTER or “Warborne” in _Two on a Tower_—is, or was, for the
+Romans and their works are altogether vanished from the town, the
+_Vindogladia_ of the Antonine Itinerary.  If you speak of it in the curt
+irreverent way of railways and their time-tables, or in the equally curt,
+but only familiar, manner of its inhabitants, it is merely “Wimborne.”
+In their mouths, elision of the “Minster” merely connotes affection and
+use, as one drops the titles or the “Mister” of a friend, in speaking of
+him; but in the case of railway usage it is the offensive familiarity of
+the ill-bred, or, at the least, a derogatory saving of space and type.
+
+This common practice is all the more historically an outrage, for had
+there been no Minster, there would have been no town of Wimborne.  It
+derives from an early religious settlement, founded in A.D. 700 near the
+site of the forgotten Roman station, by Cuthburga, one of those
+unsatisfactory princess spouses of the pietistic period of Saxon
+dominion, who, married to the King of Northumbria, refused him conjugal
+rights and finally established herself here, living a life of “continual
+watchings and fastings,” and finally dying of them.  We are not concerned
+to follow the mazes of the early history of town and church.  It suffered
+the usual plunderings and burnings, the nuns were occasionally carried
+off, sometimes against their will, at other times with their consent, and
+at last, somewhere about A.D. 902, monks replaced them.  The whole
+foundation was re-established by Edward the Confessor, and remained as a
+Collegiate church until 1547, when it was disestablished, its revenues
+seized, and the building wholly converted to the purposes of a parish
+church.
+
+                     [Picture: Sturminster Marshall]
+
+           [Picture: Anthony Etricke’s Tomb, Wimborne Minster]
+
+Wimborne Minster might be made the subject of a lengthy architectural
+disquisition.  Its two towers, western and central, are themselves
+pointers to its history; for they show, not in the different periods at
+which they were built, but in the richness of the one and the comparative
+plainness of the other, the combined uses of the building in days of old.
+The central tower, of transitional Norman design, and remarkably like the
+towers of Exeter cathedral, was originally surmounted by a stone spire,
+which fell in 1600.  Its elaboration is explained by its having been a
+part of the monastic church, while the western tower erected about 1460,
+belonged to the parochial building.
+
+The church, endowed with two—and two dissimilar—towers, is a splendid
+feature in the streets of the old town.  It and the town gain dignity and
+interest in an amazing degree, and here in Wimborne the pinnacled
+battlemented outlines “make” both town and Minster, in the pictorial
+sense.  They bulk darkly and largely across the yellow sandiness of the
+broad market-place, and sort themselves into endless and changeful
+combinations down the narrower streets.  Apart, too, from these important
+considerations, the Minster is exceptionally rich in curious features,
+outside its architectural details.
+
+Our ancestors possessed a quaint mixture of serious devotion and
+light-hearted childishness, and we are the richer for it.  Thus, high up
+on the external wall of the western tower, the observant will notice the
+odd little effigy, carved, painted and gilt, resembling a grenadier of a
+century ago, or a French gendarme of a past _régime_: it is difficult to
+assign it with certainty, and assuredly it does not look so old as 1600,
+the date when it is stated to have been placed here.  His business is
+that of a quarter-jack, and he strikes the quarters upon a bell on either
+side of him.  The clock within, an astronomical contrivance made in 1320
+by that same ingenious Glastonbury monk, Peter Lightfoot, who was the
+author of the famous clock of Wells Cathedral, represents the courses of
+the sun, moon, and stars.
+
+The Minster, in short, is a museum of antiquities, found particularly
+interesting by the half-day excursionists from Bournemouth who are its
+chief visitors and carry away a fine confused recollection of their
+scamper round it.  Here, in a room above the vestry, is the Chained
+Library, a collection of over two hundred and forty volumes, mostly
+chained to iron rods.  Some of the books are very early, but the
+collection was formed in 1686.  Perhaps, for the sake of its story, the
+copy of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World” is even more
+interesting than “The Whole Duty of Man” and the “Breeches Bible,” for it
+still displays the carefully mended hundred leaves burnt through when the
+boy, afterwards poet, Prior fell asleep over his reading of it and upset
+the candle, with this result.  Each damaged page was neatly mended by him
+and the missing letters so carefully restored that it is difficult, until
+attention is drawn to the repair, to detect anything exceptional.  Prior
+was born at Wimborne in 1664, as a brass tablet in the western tower to
+his “perennial and fragrant” memory tells us.
+
+[Picture: The Wimborne Clock-Jack] But of paramount interest to
+sightseers, far transcending the ironbound deed-chests, some hollowed
+from a single trunk, and the tombs of the noble and knightly, is the last
+resting-place of Anthony Etricke, in the south wall of the choir aisle.
+Anthony Etricke was a personage of some local distinction in his day, for
+besides being a man of wealth, he was first Recorder of Poole.  He has
+also won a little niche in the history of England by no effort of his
+own: a distinction thrust upon him by circumstance, and one which might
+have fallen upon any other local magistrate.  Sentimentally speaking, it
+is also a wholly invidious and undesirable fame or notoriety, and was so
+regarded by the good folk of the town.  Etricke, residing at Holt, near
+the spot where the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth was captured, was the
+magistrate before whom the wretched fugitive was brought.  Another might
+possibly, greatly daring, have secured the escape of that romantic
+figure, and by so doing at the same time have altered the course of
+English history and earned the admiration of those who admire chivalric
+deeds.  But Etricke was not of this stamp, and was, moreover, of that old
+faith which the bigoted James was striving to reintroduce: while Monmouth
+was the Protestant champion.  Alas! poor champion.  Etricke at once
+performed his bounden duty as a magistrate, and also satisfied his own
+private feelings; and Monmouth ended miserably.
+
+Etricke never regained popularity in his district, and lived for eighteen
+years longer, a shunned and soured man.  The story tells how he took what
+may surely be regarded as the odd and altogether insufficient revenge of
+declaring that he would be buried neither in the church of Wimborne nor
+out of it, and accordingly in his lifetime had a niche prepared here, in
+the wall, where the polished black slate sarcophagus, still seen above
+ground, was placed.  He was eccentric beyond this, for he had conceived
+the date of his death and caused it to be boldly carved on the side,
+between two of the seven shields of arms that in braggart fashion are
+made to redound to the glory of the Etricke family.  That year he had
+imagined would be 1691, but he actually survived until 1703, and the date
+was accordingly altered (as seen to this day) when at last, to the
+satisfaction of Wimborne, he did demise.  For the keeping of his tomb in
+good repair he left twenty shillings annually, a sum still administered
+by the Charity Commissioners; and it certainly cannot be said that he
+does not receive value for his money, because his eccentric lair is
+maintained, heraldic cognisances and all, in the most perfect condition.
+Any ill-will this solemn personage may have felt towards Wimborne is
+altogether robbed of satisfaction nowadays, and his gloomy ghost may, for
+all we know, be enraged at the thought of the attraction his eccentricity
+has for visitors and the trade in photographs it has provoked, much to
+the material well-being of the town.
+
+     [Picture: Wimborne Minster; The Minster and the Grammar School]
+
+The pilgrim of the Hardy country, come to Wimborne—I should have said
+“Warborne”—to see that Grammar School where, to quote Haymoss Fry, “they
+draw up young gam’sters’ brains like rhubarb under a ninepenny pan, my
+lady, excusing my common way,” is like to be disappointed, for the place
+where “they hit so much larning into en that ’a could talk like the day
+of Pentecost” is no longer an ancient building.  ’Tis true, the
+foundation is what the country folk might call an “old arnshunt” thing
+enough, being the work indeed of that very great founder of schools and
+colleges, the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII.
+It was refounded by Queen Elizabeth, who stripped all the credit of this
+good deed in a naughty world from the memory of the pious countess, and
+willed that it should be styled “The Grammar School of the Foundation of
+Queen Elizabeth in Wimborne Minster in the County of Dorset.”  That was
+pretty bad, but worse came with the whirling years.  James I., like the
+shabby fellow he was, raised a question respecting the validity of its
+charter, and was only bought off with £600; and Charles I., unlike the
+noble, magnanimous sovereign he is commonly thought to be, bled the
+institution to the tune of another £1,000, by a similar dodge.  The
+wonder is that it has survived at all, and not only survived, but
+flourished and was able, so long ago as 1851, to build itself that new
+and substantial home which is so scholastically useful, but at the same
+time disappointing to the literary pilgrim who, at the place where
+Swithin St. Cleeve was educated, hoped to find a picturesque building of
+mediæval age.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+                     WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY
+
+WIMBORNE shall here be the starting-point of a twenty-eight miles route,
+that in its south-easterly to north-westerly direction, is as easy as the
+one north to south of the road between Sherborne and Weymouth.  It
+follows the valley of the Stour the whole way, and only at its conclusion
+brings up butt against the hill on which Shaftesbury is built.
+
+There is at the outset from Wimborne a choice between the easeful and the
+toilsome.  You may elect to go directly up-along, to the height frowned
+down upon by the greater height of Badbury Rings, or may go more
+circuitously but by more level ways, through Corfe Mullen and Sturminster
+Marshall.  On the first route, beautifully overhung by elms, lies
+Kingston Lacy, the old seat of the Bankes family, rebuilt by Sir Ralph
+Bankes in 1663, and now a very treasure-house of art and historic relics.
+Here one may, greatly favoured, see and touch those keys of Corfe Castle,
+held so stoutly by the valorous Lady Bankes in the two sieges she
+withstood.
+
+A younger avenue of beeches lines the exposed road across the shoulders
+of what has been identified as _Mons Badonicus_—Badbury Rings—the scene
+of the overwhelming victory gained in A.D. 520, over Cerdic and his
+Saxons by King Arthur and his Britons.  In later years, when at last
+Saxon dominion had spread, and this had become Wessex, Saxons themselves
+encamped where of old they had been defeated, and after them the Danes
+occupied this inhospitable height.  It is now tufted with a clump of
+fir-trees, and, solemn and darkly looming against a lowering sky, looks a
+fitting scene for any national portent of evil.
+
+They are less impressive roads that lead by the Stour to Corfe Mullen and
+Sturminster Marshall.  There the farmer reaps his heavy crops of hay and
+cereals, and ploughs and sows and reaps again, and history is only a
+matter of comparison between this year of a poor harvest, when prices are
+high and marketable produce little, and last year of a bumper, when the
+horn of Ceres was full and prices low.  No matter what the yield, there
+is ever a something to dash the farmer’s cup from his expectant lips.
+
+At Bailey Corner, three miles from Wimborne, a broad main road branches
+off from our route, going to Bere Regis and Dorchester.  This is the road
+made at the suggestion of Mr. Erle-Drax of Charborough Park, whose
+property, it may be supposed, gained in some way from it.  Charborough
+Park is one of the originals whence Welland House and the tower of _Two
+on a Tower_ were drawn, and therefore demands a deviation of two miles
+from our route.
+
+It is a straight road and a lonely that leads to the main entrance-lodge
+of this seat of the Erle-Drax family, past a long-continued brick
+boundary-wall that must have cost a small fortune, and decorated at
+intervals with arches surmounted by effigies of stags and lions.  Time
+has dealt very severely with some of the squire’s stags, shorn here and
+there of a limb, and in one instance presenting a headless awfulness to
+the gaze of the pilgrim, who can scarce repress a shudder at sight of it,
+even though the destruction provides a little comedy of its own, in the
+revelation that these imposing “stone” decorations are really of plaster,
+and hollow.
+
+The principal entrance to Charborough Park, the one feature that breaks
+the long, straight perspective of this undeviating road, seems to have
+been erected by the squire as a species of permanent self-advertising
+hoarding, for it is boldly inscribed: “This road from Wimborne to
+Dorchester was projected and completed through the instrumentality of J.
+S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, Esq., M.P., in the years 1841 and 1842.”
+Cæsar himself could have done no more than was performed by this magnate
+of the many names, and could not with greater magnificence have
+suppressed the fact that what his Parliamentary influence procured, the
+public purse paid for.
+
+There is this essential difference between Charborough Park and “Welland
+House.”  Charborough is very closely guarded from intrusion, and none who
+cannot show a real reason for entering is allowed through the jealously
+closed and locked gates of the lodges.
+
+The residence of Lady Constantine was, however, very readily accessible,
+and, “as is occasionally the case with old-fashioned manors, possessed
+none of the exclusiveness found in some aristocratic settlements.  The
+parishioners looked upon the park avenue as their natural thoroughfare,
+particularly for christenings, weddings, and funerals, which passed the
+squire’s mansion, with due considerations as to the scenic effect of the
+same from the manor windows.”  So much to show the composite nature of
+the scene drawn in _Two on a Tower_.
+
+The tower—the “Rings Hill Speer” of the story—stands in the park, at a
+considerable distance from the house on the other side of a gentle dip,
+but well within sight of the drawing-room windows.  In between, across
+the turf and disappearing into the woodlands to right and left, roam the
+deer that so plentifully inhabit this beautiful domain.  The tower is
+approached by roomy stone staircases, now overgrown with grass, moss, and
+fungi, and so far from it or its approaches being in “the Tuscan order of
+architecture,” they are designed in a most distinctive and aggressive
+Strawberry Hill Gothic manner.  Built originally by Major Drax in 1796,
+and struck by lightning, it was rebuilt in 1839.
+
+Returning now from this interlude and regaining Bailey Corner, we come to
+Sturminster Marshall, a place that now, for all the dignity of its name,
+is just a rustic village, with only that name and an ancient church that
+was the “Stour Minster” of the Earls of Pembroke, the Earls Marshal of
+England, to affirm its vanished importance.  Its village green, bordered
+with scattered cottages, has a maypole, painted, like a barber’s pole,
+with vivid bands of red, white, and blue.
+
+An expedition from this point, across the Stour to Shapwick, although a
+roundabout pilgrimage, is not likely to be an unrewarded exertion, for
+that is a village which, although unknown to the greater world, has a
+local fame that, so long as rustic satire lives, will assuredly not be
+allowed to die.
+
+[Picture: The Tower, Charborough Park] Shapwick is not remote from the
+sea, but it might be a midland village (and exceptionally ignorant at
+that) if we are to believe the legend which accounts for the local name
+of “Shapwick Wheel-offs,” by which its villagers are known.  According to
+this injurious tale, a shepherd, watching his sheep on Shapwick Down at
+some period unspecified—let us call it, as the children do, “once upon a
+time,” or “ever so long ago”—found a live crab, or lobster, that had
+fallen out of an itinerant fishmonger’s cart.  He was so alarmed at the
+sight of the strange thing that he hurried into the village with the news
+of it, and brought all the people out to see.  With them was the oldest
+inhabitant, a “tar’ble wold man,” incapable of locomotion, brought in a
+wheelbarrow to pronounce, out of the wisdom his accumulated years gave
+him, what this unknown monster might be.  When his ancient eyes lighted
+upon it, or rather, in the Do’set speech: “When a sin ’en, a carled out,
+tar’ble feared on ’en, ‘wheel I off, my sonnies, wheel I off.’”  So they
+wheeled him off, accordingly, well pleased to leave that mysterious thing
+to itself.
+
+As may well be supposed, the Shapwick folk are by no means proud of their
+nickname, and it is therefore a little surprising to find an old and very
+elaborate weathervane in the village, surmounting the roof of a barn, and
+giving, in a quaintly silhouetted group, a pictorial representation of
+the scene.  It seems that there were originally three more figures,
+behind the barrow, but they have disappeared.  Perhaps this is evidence
+of attempts on the part of Shapwick folk to destroy the record of their
+shame.
+
+A succession of pretty villages—Spetisbury, Charlton Marshall, Blandford
+St. Mary—enlivens the five miles of road between Sturminster Marshall and
+Blandford; and then Blandford itself, already described, is entered.
+Passing through it, and skirting the grounds of Bryanstone, the Stour,
+more beautiful than earlier on the route, is crossed, and the twin
+villages of Durweston and Stourpaine, one on either bank, are glimpsed.
+Then comes the large village of Shillingstone, still steadfastly rural,
+despite its size, and keeping to the ancient ways more markedly than
+Sturminster Marshall, for it not only shares with that village the
+peculiarity of owning a maypole, but a maypole of exceptional height, and
+one still dressed and decorated with every spring.  This tall pole,
+tapering like the mast of a ship, is a hundred and ten feet in height,
+and most carefully guarded with wire stays against destruction by the
+stormy winds that in winter sweep down the valley of the Stour.
+
+       [Picture: Weather-Vane at Shapwick: The “Shapwick Monster”]
+
+If we were to name the Shillingstone maypole in accordance with the date
+of its annual garlanding, it would rather be a “Junepole,” for it is on
+the 9th of that month that the pretty old ceremony and its attendant
+merrymakings are held.  This apparently arbitrary selection of a date is
+explained by the old May Day games and rejoicings having been held on May
+29th, in the years after the Restoration of Charles II. in 1660; and by
+the change from Old Style to New, more than a hundred and fifty years
+later.  That change, taking away eleven days, converted what would have
+been May 29th into June 9th; and thus by gradual change this survival of
+the ancient pagan festival of Floralia is held when May Day has itself
+passed and become a memory.
+
+The pole has several times been restored.  Its present appearance is due
+to the restoration of October 1868, but the arrow vane with which it was
+then surmounted appears to have been blown down, and its improving
+mottoes—“Tanquam sagitta” (Like as an arrow), and “Sic et nos” (So even
+we)—lost.  Another Latin inscription is Englished thus:
+
+“Their maypole, decayed by age, the rector and inhabitants of
+Shillingstone, keeping their yearly May Games with all due observance,
+have carefully restored it on the ninth day of June 1850:
+
+    “The fading garland mourns how short life’s day,
+    The towering maypole heavenward points the way.
+    Read thou the lesson—seek to gather now
+    Undying wreaths to twine a deathless brow.”
+
+All very pious and proper, no doubt, but wofully lacking in the May Day
+spirit of the joy of life, and more fitting to the “Memento mori” fashion
+of the neighbouring churchyard.
+
+In this old church of Shillingstone—or “Shilling-Okeford,” as from the
+old manorial lords it was once named—the pilgrim may see by the evidence
+of an old tablet how a certain William Keen, a merchant of London,
+fleeing terror-struck from the Great Plague, was overtaken by it and died
+here in 1666.
+
+The reader, versed in the oddities of place-names, will perhaps not
+require the assurance that the name of Shillingstone has nothing whatever
+to do with shillings; but if he doubts, let it at once be said that it
+was so called long before that coin was known.  It was originally
+“Oakford” and became “Schelin’s Oakford,” or “Schelin’s Town,” when the
+manor was in Norman times given to an ancestor of those who for centuries
+later continued to hold it and in more elaborate fashion styled
+themselves Eschellings.
+
+                  [Picture: The Maypole, Shillingstone]
+
+Down over intervening hills the road, for a little space forsaking its
+character of a valley route, comes beside the stream again at
+Piddleford—or, as the Post Office authorities prefer to call it
+“Fiddleford”—on the way to Sturminster Newton, the “Stourcastle” of
+_Tess_.  This is the place mentioned at the opening of the story, to
+which Tess was driving the load of beehives from Marnhull at night, when
+the lantern went out and the mailcart dashing into the trap, killed the
+horse, Prince; thus starting the tragical chain of events that led at
+last to Winchester gaol.
+
+            [Picture: Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn]
+
+Of Sturminster Newton, impressively styled on ordnance maps “Sturminster
+Newton Castle,” Leland says: “The townlette is no greate thing, and the
+building of it is mene,” and, although it would not occur to a modern
+writer to adopt that term, certainly there is little that is notable
+about it.  There is no “minster,” no “castle,” and no “new town,” and
+little to say, save that an ancient six-arched bridge crosses the weedy
+Stour and that the battered stump of the market cross in the main street
+seems in its decay to typify the history of the market itself.  As the
+church has been rebuilt, and as the castle on the outskirts is now little
+more than a memory, the only resort is to turn for some point of interest
+to that quaintly thatched old inn, the White Hart, very much older than
+the tablet, “W. M. P. 1708,” on its front would lead many to suppose.  It
+was probably restored at that date, after those troublous times had
+passed in which the cross, just opposite, lost its shaft, and when, in
+the fighting in the streets between the Parliamentary dragoons and the
+associated clubmen of the west, this house and others were fired and
+Sturminster Newton very generally given over to the horrors of a brutal
+conflict between troops trained to arms and a peasantry unskilled in the
+use of the weapons with which they had hastily equipped themselves.  But,
+unprofessional soldiers though they were, the clubmen at Sturminster gave
+an excellent account of themselves, killing and wounding a number of the
+dragoons, and taking sixteen others prisoners.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+                     WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY
+                              (_continued_)
+
+ONWARDS from Sturminster Newton the road comes into the rich Vale of
+Blackmore and traverses levels watered by the Lidden, in addition to the
+Stour.  Turning here to the right-hand and avoiding the way to
+Stalbridge, we follow the steps of Tess to her home at “Marlott,” a
+village to be identified with Marnhull.
+
+Could we associate any cottage here with the birthplace of Tess, how
+interesting a landmark that would be!  But it is not to be done.
+“Rolliver’s,” the “Pure Drop” inn, may be the “Crown,” but you who call
+there to wet a particularly dry whistle on a scorching day will not find
+the name of Rolliver over the door, either of this house or of another,
+with the picture-sign of a dashing hussar outside.  As to whether either
+or both of them keep “a pretty brew,” as we are told Rolliver’s did, I
+cannot tell you, for when dry, I drink ginger-beer if it is to be got,
+and, if it isn’t, go thirsty, refusing alike malt-liquors and the
+abominable gaseous compounds made cheaply of harmful materials, sold
+expensively, and rather thirst-provoking than quenching.
+
+Marnhull is not precisely the type of village the readers of _Tess_ would
+picture as the home of a heroine whose adventures have so constant a
+background of dairying.  It is, or was, a quarry-village, and the shallow
+pits that supplied for stone the church and the cottages are still
+prominent in a field to the left of the road to Shaftesbury.  Thus
+Marnhull is somewhat formal and prim, and instead of the abundant thatch
+noticeable in the typical villages of dairy farms, its houses are roofed
+with slates and tiles.
+
+                           [Picture: Marnhull]
+
+The church of Marnhull has a singularly fine tower, which, although the
+details of its Perpendicular design are largely intermingled with
+Renaissance ornament, is in general outline a beautiful and imposing
+specimen of Gothic, built in that period—the early eighteenth
+century—generally thought impossible for Gothic art.  It was in 1718 that
+this fine work arose out of the heap of ruins into which the old tower
+had suddenly fallen, but it has almost every appearance of being three
+hundred years older, and it seems likely that, as it now stands, it was a
+free copy of its predecessor.
+
+The body of the church is of much earlier date, and well supplied with
+mediæval effigies and finely carved capitals to its pillars.  But it is
+not without amusement that one reads the flamboyant epitaph to the
+Reverend Mr. Conyers Place, M.A.,
+
+    “the youngeft son of an ancient and reputable family in the County of
+    York, who, after he had been liberally educated at Trinity College,
+    in Cambridge, was invited to the Mafter-fhip of the Grammar School in
+    Dorchester, which he governed many years with great succefs and
+    applaufe till, weary of the fatigue of it, he chofe to refign it.  He
+    was endowed with many excellent talents, both natural and acquired: a
+    lively wit, a sound judgement, with solid and extenfive learning: he
+    was eminently Studious, yet remarkably facetious: attached to no
+    party, nor addicted to any caufe but that of Truth and Religion, in
+    the defence of whofe Doctrines he wrote many learned and ingenious
+    Treatifes; while he was efteemed by all worthy of the greateft
+    Preferments, he lived content with the praife of deferving without
+    enjoying any but the small Rectory of Poxwell, in this County, which
+    he held two years, and in the Pofsefsion of which he died.”
+
+Shaftesbury, six miles onward from Marnhull, is soon seen, standing as it
+does majestically upon a commanding hill.  It looks perhaps best from the
+point where the old farmstead of Blynfield stands, at the foot of the
+long and winding ascent, whence you see the hillside common stretching up
+to the very edge of the town.  From distant points such as this,
+“Shaston,” as Mr. Hardy, the milestones, and old chroniclers agree to
+call it, wears the look of another Jerusalem the Golden, and any who,
+thus looking upon this town of old romance, should chance to come no
+nearer, might well carry away an impression of a fairy city whose
+architecture was equal to both its half-legendary history and its natural
+surroundings.  If such a traveller there be, let him rest assured that
+nothing in Shaftesbury, saving only the view over limitless miles of
+Vale, stretching away into the distance, is worth the climbing up to it,
+and that to make its near and intimate acquaintance is only to dispel
+that distant dream of an unearthly beauty which afar off seems to belong
+to it.
+
+Shaftesbury’s streets are in fact more than ordinarily commonplace, and
+its houses grossly tasteless.  It is as though, despairing of ever
+bringing Shaftesbury back to a shadow of the magnificence of history and
+architecture it once enjoyed, the builders of the modern town built
+houses as plastiferously ugly as they could.  “Shaston” is described with
+a wonderful sympathy and lightness of touch by Mr. Hardy:—“The ancient
+British Palladour was, and is, in itself the city of a dream.  Vague
+imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey,
+the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines,
+chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now ruthlessly
+swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive
+melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape
+around him can scarcely dispel.  The spot was the burial-place of a king
+and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and
+squires.  The bones of King Edward ‘the Martyr,’ carefully removed
+thither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which made it the
+resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled it to maintain
+a reputation extending far beyond English shores.  To this fair creation
+of the great Middle Ages the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the
+death-knell.  With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place
+collapsed in a general ruin; the martyr’s bones met with the fate of the
+sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where
+they lie.”
+
+“The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain;
+but, strange to say, these qualities, which were noted by many writers in
+ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed
+over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England
+stands virtually unvisited to-day.  It has a unique position on the
+summit of an almost perpendicular scarp, rising on the north, south and
+west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the
+view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture—South,
+Mid, and Nether Wessex—being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant
+traveller’s eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs.  Impossible by a
+railway, it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and
+it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the
+north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that side.
+Such is, and such was, the now-forgotten Shaston or Palladour.”
+
+That finely inaccurate chronicler, or rather romancer, Geoffrey of
+Monmouth, who never lacked “historical” details while his imagination
+remained in good preservation, has some picturesque “facts” to narrate of
+Shaftesbury.  It was founded, says he, by Hudibras, grandfather of King
+Lear, a trifle of 950 years before the Christian era.  Between that
+shamelessly absurd origin and the earliest known mention of the place, in
+A.D. 880, when Alfred the Great founded a nunnery here, there is thus a
+gulf—a very yawning gulf, too—of one thousand, eight hundred and thirty
+years.
+
+“Caer Palladour,” as it had been in early British times, became
+“Edwardstow” when, in the year 979, the body of the young king “martyred”
+at Corfe Castle was translated from its resting-place at Wareham, but
+although his shrine was the scene of many miracles and greatly resorted
+to, we do not find that change of name so greatly favoured as was the
+like change made in East Anglia, when, early in the eleventh century, the
+town that had been Beodric’s Weorth became, with the miracle-mongering of
+St. Edmund’s shrine, that town of St. Edmundsbury which we know as Bury
+St. Edmunds.  No: as the expressive modern slang would phrase it, the
+name of “Edwardstow” never really “caught on,” and Caer Palladour, which
+had in the beginning of Saxon rule become “Shaftesbyrig,” has so
+remained.
+
+Nowadays the only vestiges of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury are the
+fragments of encaustic tiles and carved stones, rarely and with
+difficulty brought to light by antiquarian societies, painfully digging
+on the spot once occupied by it; and the great abbey estates, the booty
+at the Dissolution seized by, or granted to, Wriothesley, Earl of
+Southampton, now belong to the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor crest
+of a wheatsheaf is prominent in the town.
+
+There are three parish churches at Shaftesbury; St. James’s, as you climb
+upwards towards the town, and Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s in the town
+itself.  It is St. Peter’s which is seen in the illustration of Gold
+Hill, by whose incredibly steep ascent the pilgrim takes his way up from
+the deep recesses of the Vale.  This is the most difficult approach,
+paved with granite setts divided off into broad steps, so that in wet
+weather the hillside shall not slip away into those depths; and with the
+craggy sides shored up by ancient stone buttresses of prodigious bulk.
+The building that closes in the view next the church tower, leaving but a
+narrow entrance alley into the town, is the Town Hall and Market House.
+
+There are, of course, wider and less steep entrances to Shaftesbury, but
+this shows it on its most characteristic side.
+
+Shaftesbury is chiefly associated in the pages of the Wessex novels with
+_Jude the Obscure_, for here it was that the long-suffering and
+inoffensive Phillotson—who (why?) always reminds me of
+Wordsworth—obtained the school, which he and the distracting Sue were to
+jointly keep.  Their house, “Old Grove’s Place,” is easily recognisable.
+You come to it past Bimport, near the fork of the roads that run
+severally to Motcombe and to East Stower, on the edge of the plateau.  It
+is an old house with projecting porch and mullioned windows through which
+it would be quite easy, as in the story, to see the movements of any one
+inside; and the upper room over the entrance is not too high above the
+pavement for any one who, like Sue, leaped from the window, to alight
+without injury.  Those people are probably few who feel an oppressiveness
+in old houses such as that which worried the highly strung and neurotic
+Sue Bridehead: “We don’t live in the school, you know,” said she, “but in
+that ancient dwelling across the way called Old Grove’s Place.  It is so
+antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully.  Such houses are very
+well to visit, but not to live in.  I feel crushed into the earth by the
+weight of so many previous lives there spent.  In a new place like these
+schools, there is only your own life to support.”
+
+                    [Picture: Gold Hill, Shaftesbury]
+
+Close by are the schools.  Looking upon them the more than usually
+sentimental pilgrim, with, it may be, some ancient tender passages of his
+own, stored up in the inviolate strong-box of his memory, to be unlocked
+and drawn forth at odd times, may think he identifies that window whence
+Sue, safely out of reach, spoke with Jude, standing down on the footpath,
+and said, “Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+               WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH
+
+IT is by the direct road to Cranborne, and past the Gate Inn at Clapgate,
+that one reaches Horton, where, at the intersection of the two broad main
+roads from Wimborne to Cranborne, and from Shaftesbury to Ringwood,
+stands Horton Inn, a fine, substantial old house, once depending upon a
+great coaching and posting traffic, and even now that only an occasional
+cyclist stays the night, dispensing good, old-fashioned, solid comforts
+in its cosy and comfortable rooms.  When Horton Inn was built, let us say
+somewhere about the time of Queen Anne (who, poor soul! is dead), those
+who designed it, disregarding any temptations to be picturesque, devoted
+their energies to good, honest workmanship, with the result that nowadays
+one sees a building certainly lacking in imagination, with windows
+equidistant and each the counterpart of its fellow, but disclosing in
+every quoin and keystone, and in each well and truly laid course of
+brickwork, the justness and thoroughness of its design and execution.
+Within doors it is the same: unobtrusive but excellent workmanship
+characterises panelling and window-sashes, doors and handrails, with the
+result that in its old age Horton Inn has an air of distinction and
+dignity strongly marked to those who take an interest in technical
+details, and attracting the notice of even the least observant, who from
+its superior air generally conceive it to be an old mansion converted to
+its present use.  It is the subject of an allusion in the tale of
+_Barbara of the House of Grebe_: the “Lornton Inn” whence Barbara eloped
+with the handsome Willowes, and where she was to meet her disfigured
+husband, posting along the road from Southampton, on his return from
+foreign parts.
+
+The village of Horton, down the road, at some little distance from the
+inn, has an oddly German-looking tower to its church, containing the
+monument of “Squire Hastings” of Woodlands, who died, aged 99 years, in
+1650.
+
+On an eerie hillside near by, in what of old was Horton Park, but sold by
+the Sturts in 1793 to the Earl of Shaftesbury, and disparked, stands the
+many-storied tower of what was once an observatory built by Humphry
+Sturt.  It is now an empty shell, through whose ruined windows the wind
+sighs mournfully at night, and the moonlight gleams ghostlike.  It is an
+ugly enough place in daylight, but should you particularly desire to know
+what the creepy, uncanny feeling of being haunted is like, why then, walk
+up on a windy night to “The Folly,” as the villagers call it, and stand
+in it, listening to the wind howling, grumbling or whispering in and out
+of the long, shaft-like building, and nocturnal birds fluttering and
+squeaking on the upper ledges.  It is not a little gruesome.
+
+This is one of the originals whence Mr. Hardy drew his idea of the tower
+in _Two on a Tower_, and is certainly the most impressive of them.  Very
+many years have passed since the old tower was used, and since the park
+in which it stands was converted into a farm.
+
+                    [Picture: The Observatory, Horton]
+
+The Woodlands estate, on the broad acres belonging to the Earl of
+Shaftesbury, is a sandy, heathy district of furze and pine-trees, with a
+conspicuous ridge in the midst, shaped in a semicircle and crested with
+those sombre trees.  Here is Shag Heath and the cultivated oasis called
+“The Island” where on July 8th, 1685, the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth
+was captured, hiding amid the bracken and undergrowth, beneath an
+ash-tree.  He might possibly have succeeded in stealing away to the coast
+and so escaping, despite the thoroughness of the search made by the
+Sussex Militia, spurred to it by the reward of £5,000, offered for the
+capture of the fugitive, had it not been for the information given by an
+old woman who lived in a cottage near at hand.  She had seen him,
+disguised as a shepherd, threading his way cautiously through the heath,
+and he was accordingly discovered near the spot she had indicated by a
+militiaman named Parkin.  The Duke, half-starved and unkempt from his
+hunted wanderings since the fatal Sedgemoor fight of three days earlier,
+was found in possession of his badge of the George, a pocket-book and
+several guineas.  In his pockets were a number of peas, the remains of a
+quantity he had plucked, to stave off his hunger.
+
+   [Picture: Horton Inn: the “Lornton Inn” of “Barbara of the House of
+                                 Grebe”]
+
+                         [Picture: Monmouth Ash]
+
+A total of £5,500 was divided among Lord Lumley, the officers,
+militiamen, and others concerned in the capture.  Among these was Amy
+Farant, whose information had directly led to it, and she received a sum
+of fifty pounds.
+
+Local tradition points out the spot on the hillside where this woman’s
+cottage formerly stood, overlooking the field called “Monmouth Close” and
+the horror always felt by the rustics at the taking of what they still
+call the “blood-money” is seen in the story told of her after-years.  The
+price of blood brought a curse with it.  She fell upon evil times, and at
+last lived and died in a state of rags and dirt, shunned by all.  After
+her death, the cottage itself speedily earned a sinister reputation, and
+was at length either pulled down, or allowed to decay.  The spot is still
+called locally Louse, or more genteelly Slough, Lane.
+
+The “Monmouth Ash”—or “Aish,” in the country speech—still survives, with
+a difference.  Those who, looking upon the present tree and thinking,
+despite its decrepit and propped-up condition, that it cannot be over two
+hundred years old—and therefore that this cannot be the precise spot—may,
+with the reservation already made, be reassured of its absolute
+genuineness.  The original trunk grew decayed in the long ago, and was
+blown down, but the present tree is a growth from the “stool,” or root,
+of that under which the unhappy Protestant Champion was discovered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+                    OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW
+
+BEYOND the rainbow is Fairyland, but no one has ever penetrated to that
+country, save in dreams, to which nothing is impossible.  There is also a
+Rainbow-land in Dorsetshire, certainly not impossible of achievement, but
+still a district of which no one knows anything, saving only those who
+live in it, and those sturdy fellows, the carriers, the Marco Polos and
+Livingstones of this age and country, who every week or so travel from it
+to the nearest market-town, and back again.  The carriers are men of
+strange speech and dress.  Although sturdy, they move slowly both in body
+and mind; and their tilt-carts are as slow as themselves, and as dusty
+and travel-worn as the caravans of any African expedition.  The Rainbow
+country of Dorset is, in fact, a country innocent of railways.  It is
+comprised within a rough circle made by tracing a course from Bere Regis
+to Piddletrenthide, Cerne Abbas, Minterne Magna, Holnest, Sherborne,
+Milborne Port, Stalbridge, Sturminster Newton, and Blandford, and is not
+only in parts extremely hilly, but includes Bulbarrow, one of the highest
+hills in Dorsetshire, 927 feet above sea-level, and Nettlecombe Tout;
+among a fine diversified array of lesser eminences.  There is thus some
+considerable difficulty in travelling out of it, and a very widespread
+disinclination to penetrate into what may, not without considerable
+warranty, be termed its “wilds.”
+
+                      [Picture: Bingham’s Melcombe]
+
+Wise men, who study maps, and from the tracks of watercourses deduce
+easier, or at any rate, rather less arduous, routes, may find a means of
+winning to this Rainbow country by turning off the Piddletown and Bere
+Regis road at Burlestone, and thence making along the slight valley of
+the Chesil Bourne or Divelish stream.  The small village of Dewlish on
+the map points to the amazing colonial energy of the Roman, for here, in
+a district that even we moderns are accustomed to think remote, was found
+a fine Roman pavement, many years ago.  In another two miles and a half
+the valley closes in, and the neighbourhood of those big brothers,
+Bulbarrow and Nettlecombe Tout, is evident from their smaller kindred, on
+either hand.
+
+Here, under the shelter of the everlasting hills, and in a “lew” warm
+hollow surrounded by benignant trees that lovingly shut it in, is
+Bingham’s Melcombe.  A little pebbly brook, the Chesil Bourne, prattles
+down the combe, sheep-bells sound from the hillsides, cattle low in the
+meadows, and rooks scold and gibber, or lazily caw, in over-arching elms;
+otherwise, all is still, for much more than even the rustic scenes of Mr.
+Hardy’s especially farming story, Bingham’s Melcombe is “far from the
+madding crowd,” and there is nothing of it but a farmstead, the tiny
+church, and the little gem of an ancient manor-house.  For all that
+Bingham’s Melcombe is so insignificant, it has sent out at least one
+distinguished man.  Fluellen boasted that there were “good men porn at
+Monmouth,” and here was born that Sir Richard Bingham who earns the
+praise of Fuller, as being “a brave soldier and _fortis et felix_ in all
+his undertakings.”  He lies, as a brave soldier should, but all brave
+soldiers cannot, in Westminster Abbey.  The Binghams of Bingham’s
+Melcombe came from a younger son of the Binghams of Sutton Bingham in
+Somersetshire, and early allied themselves with prominent families.  The
+ducally crowned lion rampant of the Turbervilles quartered on their
+ancestral shield owes its place there to the marriage of Robert Bingham,
+about the reign of Henry III., or Edward I., with the daughter and
+heiress of Robert Turberville.
+
+These long-descended Binghams maintained their hold upon this lovely old
+home of theirs from the middle of the thirteenth century until recently.
+Now it has passed into other hands.  A member of the family, Canon
+Bingham, was the original of the “Parson Tringham,” the learned
+antiquary, who, in the opening pages of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, so
+indiscreetly informs old John Durbeyfield, the haggler, of his
+distinguished ancestry.
+
+The manor-house of Bingham’s Melcombe, within its courtyard, is a perfect
+example of a sixteenth-century country residence.  The courtyard, entered
+by a gatehouse, discloses stone-gabled buildings at the sides, with the
+highly carved and decorated projecting gable of the hall in front;
+displaying with a wealth of mantling the Bingham coat of arms, the whole
+overgrown with trailing roses.
+
+A wild, chalky country, very knobbly and with constant hills and dales,
+leads away to westward, past Melcombe Horsey, to the hamlet and starved
+hillside farms of Plush, where flints abound, water is scarce, and
+farmers are obliged to depend largely upon the “dew-ponds” made on the
+arid downs.  Here is Dole’s Ash farm, the original of “Flintcomb Ash,”
+the “starve-acre place” where Tess toiled among the other weariful hands
+in the great swede-fields, “a hundred odd acres in one patch,” with not a
+tree in sight: Rainbow-land is not all fertile and roseate.  The farm, as
+Mr. Hardy describes it, is situated “above stony lanchets—the outcrop of
+siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose
+white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes,” and is at the other
+extreme from the fertility and sheltered beauty of the Valley of the
+Frome, the “Vale of Great Dairies.”
+
+Very different from the forbidding westerly range from Bingham’s Melcombe
+is the country immediately to the east.  There the village of Milton
+Abbas lies enfolded between the richly wooded hills, where the little
+Mill Bourne rises, at the foot of an alarming but wonderfully picturesque
+descent; and the woodland shade comes to the back door of every cottage.
+
+Milton Abbas is a remarkable place, and owes its long lines of regularly
+spaced cottages, all of the same design, to the autocratic whim of Joseph
+Damer, Baron Milton and first Earl of Dorchester, who (then a commoner)
+purchased the large and beautiful estate in 1752, and, demolishing the
+old village, which rose humbly on the outskirts of the magnificent abbey,
+rebuilt it, a mile away, in 1786.  Milton Abbas is, indeed, the precursor
+of many recent “model” villages, and typical of the highhanded ways of
+the eighteenth-century landed gentry, who could not endure the sight of a
+cottage from the windows of their mansions; and so forthwith, in the
+manner of Eastern potentates, whisked whole villages and populations away
+from between the wind and their gentility.  Each cottage is built
+four-square, with thatched roof and equidistant doors and windows, all in
+the Doll’s House or Noah’s Ark order of architecture, and there is scarce
+a pin to choose between any of them.  Half-way down the street is the
+almshouse, and opposite is the church, and from their presence it will be
+seen that Lord Dorchester’s village-transplanting was complete and highly
+methodical.  Now that time has weathered his model village, and the
+chestnut trees planted between the cottages have grown up, Milton Abbas
+is a not unpleasing curiosity.
+
+                         [Picture: Milton Abbas]
+
+But Milton Park, beyond the village, contains the greatest surprise, in
+the almost perfect condition of the surviving abbey church, rising in all
+the stately bulk and beautiful elaboration of a cathedral; beside the
+great mansion built for Lord Dorchester in 1771 by Sir William Chambers,
+familiar to Londoners as the architect of Somerset House.
+
+            [Picture: Milton Abbas, an early “Model” Village]
+
+That explorer of this Wessex unknown country, this Land Beyond the
+Rainbow, who, setting forth uninstructed in what he shall find, comes all
+unwittingly upon this generally unheard-of abbey, is greatly to be
+envied, for it is to him as much of a surprise as though its existence
+had never been breathed beyond the rim of the hills down in whose hollows
+it lies hid; and to him falls the exquisite pleasure of what is nothing
+less than a discovery.  Coming into the park, all unsuspectingly, the
+abbey church is disclosed against a wooded background of hills,
+strikingly like the first glimpse of Wells Cathedral, underneath the
+Mendips.
+
+Milton Abbey, the “Middleton Abbey” of _The Woodlanders_, was founded so
+early as A.D. 933, by Athelstan, and in thirty years from that date
+became a Benedictine monastery.  Nothing, however, of that early time has
+survived, and the great building we now see belongs to the period between
+1322 and 1492, when it was gradually rebuilt, after having been struck by
+lightning and wholly destroyed in 1309.  But the noble building rising so
+beautifully from the gravel drives and trim lawns of this park is but a
+completed portion of an intended design.  It consists of choir, tower,
+and north and south transepts, and extends a total length of 132 feet.
+Had not the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 put an end to this
+lovely retreat of the Benedictine fraternity, a nave would have been
+added.  To Sir John Tregonwell, King’s Proctor in the divorce of Henry
+VIII. and Katherine of Aragon, fell what may reasonably be called this
+fine piece of “spoil”; for the price of one thousand pounds at which he
+bought the monkish estates of Milton Abbas can scarce be regarded as
+adequate purchase money.  Coming at last into the hands of Joseph Damer,
+the domestic offices of the monastery, which had until then survived in
+almost perfect condition, were with one exception utterly destroyed, and
+the existing mansion built in a bastard “Gothic” style, as understood by
+Chambers.  The sole exception is the grand Abbot’s Hall, enshrined within
+that eighteenth-century building, and entered from the farther side of
+the great quadrangle.  Now in use as a drawing-room, there is probably no
+more stately room of that description in existence.  It has the combined
+interest and beauty of size, loftiness and exquisite workmanship in stone
+and carved wood, with antiquity.
+
+[Picture: Abbot Milton’s Rebus, Milton Abbey] The abbey church stands
+immediately to the south of the mansion, separated from it only by lawns
+and a drive, and is used as a chapel by the present owner of the estate,
+a nephew of the late Baron Hambro, who restored it at great cost under
+the professional advice of that arch-restorer, Sir Gilbert Scott.  The
+solitude, the size and beauty of the interior, are very impressive.  Here
+is a place of worship like a cathedral, used for the prayers of a private
+household, and if you can by any means manage to forget the grotesque
+disproportion of ancient size and magnificence to modern use, you will
+feel very reverent indeed.
+
+                         [Picture: Milton Abbey]
+
+There is a monument here to that fortunate and successful time-server,
+Sir John Tregonwell, who so neatly trimmed the sails of his public
+conduct in those times of quick-change, between the reigns of Henry VIII.
+and Elizabeth, that, although a Roman Catholic, he managed to enrich
+himself at the expense of the old religion’s misfortunes, and to die at
+peace with all men, although in the possession of property belonging to
+others.  There is also a most exquisitely sculptured marble monument by
+Carlini to Lady Milton, who died in 1775.  It represents her in the
+costume of that period, with her husband bending anxiously over her.  A
+quaint little piece of Gothic fancy will be seen on one of the walls, in
+the shape of the sculptured rebus of one Abbot William Middleton, with
+the Arabic date, 1514, and the device of a mill on a tun, or barrel.
+Thus did the strenuous minds of the Middle Ages unbend to childish
+fancies and puns in stone.
+
+                        [Picture: Turnworth House]
+
+A sign of the times may be noted, in the restoration and re-dedication of
+the long-desecrated Chapel of St. Catherine, on the hilltop to the east
+of the abbey.  When the monastery was dissolved, the chapel of course
+fell out of use, and so remained until recently.  It had in turn been
+used as a pigeon-house, a labourer’s cottage, a carpenter’s shop, and a
+lumber-room, and was falling into complete decay when Mr. Everard Hambro
+in 1903 decided to restore it.  The varied Saxon, Norman, and
+Perpendicular architecture was accordingly repaired, and the building
+reconsecrated on St. Catherine’s night of the same year.
+
+Through Winterborne Houghton, and Winterborne Stickland, two of the
+eleven Dorsetshire Winterbornes, named from a chalk stream that flows
+into the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, we come to another _Woodlanders_
+landmark, Turnworth House, the “Great Hintock House,” where Mrs.
+Charmond, fascinator of the surgeon Fitzpiers, lived.  It is situated
+just as in the tale, in a deep and lonely dell:
+
+    “To describe it as standing in a hollow would not express the
+    situation of the manor-house; it stood in a hole.  But the hole was
+    full of beauty.  From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could
+    easily have been thrown over or into the birds’-nested chimneys of
+    the mansion.  Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet;
+    but the grey lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their
+    gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights. . . .  The front of the house
+    was an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows,
+    mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-coloured freestone from
+    local quarries. . . .  Above the house was a dense plantation, the
+    roots of whose trees were above the level of the chimneys.”
+
+From Turnworth the way out of Rainbow-land by way of Durweston,
+Stourpaine, and Blandford is easy: a _facilis descensus_, as well in
+spirit as in the matter of gradients, for thus you come out of the
+untravelled and the unknown into the well-worn tracks and intimate life
+of every day.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+ABBOT’S ANN, 23
+
+“Abbot’s Cernel,” Cerne Abbas, 31–38, 116, 170, 199–203, 206, 302
+
+Abbotsbury, 84, 235, 236
+
+“Aldbrickham,” Reading, 2
+
+Aldershot, “Quartershot,” 2
+
+“Alfredston,” Wantage, 2
+
+Andover, 23
+
+“Anglebury,” Wareham, 10, 38, 86, 111, 113–122, 138, 192
+
+_Anna_, _Lady Baxby_, 189
+
+Anton, River, 23, 24
+
+Athelhampton, 54
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+BANKES FAMILY, 37, 106, 108, 111
+
+_Barbara of the House of Grebe_, 43, 298, 299
+
+Barnes, Reverend William, 65
+
+Basingstoke, “Stoke-Barehills,” 2, 3
+
+Batcombe, 171, 172
+
+Bathsheba’s Farm, 57–59
+
+Beaminster, “Emminster,” 38, 170, 244, 245
+
+Bere Heath, 50, 128, 130
+
+Bere Regis, “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” 54, 126, 127, 132–146, 163, 302
+
+Berkshire, “North Wessex,” 2
+
+Bincombe, 211, 248–250
+
+Bindon Abbey, 122
+
+Bindon Abbey Mill, 123
+
+Bingham’s Melcombe, 303–306
+
+Blackmore, or Blackmoor, Vale of, 36, 38, 39, 65, 169, 191, 195, 197,
+198, 288, 291, 292
+
+Blandford Forum, “Shottsford Forum,” 39, 42–47, 138, 282, 302
+
+Bloody Assize, 83
+
+Bloxworth, 140
+
+Bockhampton, Lower, 157, 160
+
+Bockhampton, Upper, 157–160
+
+Boscastle, “Castle Boterel,” 6, 7
+
+Bourne, River, 259
+
+Bournemouth, “Sandborne,” 31, 88, 257–262
+
+Bow and Arrow Castle, 229
+
+Bredy, River, 237
+
+Bridport, “Port Bredy,” 82, 231, 237, 240–244
+
+Brit, River, 237
+
+Broadwey, 212
+
+Browning, Robert, 37,
+
+Bryan’s Piddle, 145, 163
+
+Bryanstone, 46
+
+“Budmouth,” Weymouth, 71, 200, 207, 209, 210, 212–221, 225, 226, 232, 246
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“CASTERBRIDGE,” Dorchester, 26, 35, 38, 47, 58, 61–83, 116, 138, 148,
+149, 153, 168, 199, 206, 207, 215
+
+“Castle Boterel,” Boscastle, 6, 7
+
+“Castle Royal,” Windsor, 2
+
+Castleton, 186
+
+Cerne Abbas, “Abbot’s Cernel,” 31, 38, 116, 170, 199–203, 206, 302
+
+Cerne, River, 205
+
+“Chalk Newton,” Maiden Newton, 168
+
+Chamberlain’s Bridge, 130, 132
+
+Charborough Park, 50, 123, 136, 192, 278, 279
+
+Charminster, 79, 168, 205
+
+Chesil Beach, 224, 231, 240
+
+Chesil Bourn, 304
+
+“Christminster,” Oxford, 3, 5, 6
+
+_Clavinium_, 207, 246
+
+“Cliff without a Name,” 8
+
+Colyton House, 78
+
+“Conjuring Minterne,” 172
+
+Coombe Bissett, 35, 40
+
+Corfe Castle, “Corvsgate Castle,” 87, 92, 93, 97–113, 121, 133, 138, 277
+
+Corfe Mullen, 277, 278
+
+Cornwall, “Nether Wessex,” 6, 292
+
+“Corvsgate Castle,” 87, 92, 93, 97–113, 121, 133, 138, 277
+
+Cranborne Chase, 35
+
+Cross-in-Hand, 170
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Desperate Remedies_, 60
+
+Devonshire, “Lower Wessex,” 2, 6
+
+_Distracted Preacher_, _The_, 252, 254
+
+Dogbury, 191, 197
+
+Dole’s Ash Farm, “Flintcomb Ash,” 170, 305
+
+Dorchester, “Casterbridge,” 26, 35, 38, 47, 58, 61–83, 116, 138, 148,
+149, 153, 168, 199, 206, 207, 215
+
+Dorsetshire, “South Wessex,” 2, 38, 39, 44, 134, 135, 138, 149, 291, 292
+
+Drax family, 193, 194
+
+Dungeon Hill, 195
+
+D’Urbervilles, the, 37, 124, 126 132, 170
+
+_Durnovaria_, 62, 80, 207
+
+“Durnover,” Fordington, 61–63, 148, 149
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+EAST STOKE, 122
+
+Eastbury Park, 40
+
+“Egdon Heath,” 128–130, 132, 161–167, 254, 258
+
+“Emminster,” Beaminster, 38, 170, 244, 245
+
+Encombe, “Enkworth Court,” 94–96
+
+“Endelstow,” 8
+
+“Enkworth Court,” 94–96
+
+Erle-Drax, J. S. W. Sawbridge, Esq., M.P. 192, 278, 279
+
+Evershot, “Evershead,” 169, 172, 198
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“FALLS PARK,” MELLS PARK, 172–175
+
+_Far from the Madding Crowd_, 43, 48, 53, 56–59, 156, 236, 254
+
+Fawley Magna, “Marygreen,” 2, 4, 94
+
+_Fellow Townsmen_, 237, 241, 243, 244
+
+_Fiddler of the Reels_, _The_, 150, 161
+
+_First Countess of Wessex_, _The_, 31, 172–175, 237
+
+“Flintcomb Ash,” Dole’s Ash Farm, 170, 305
+
+“Flychett,” Lytchett Minster, 268
+
+_For Conscience’ Sake_, 177
+
+Fordington, “Durnover,” 61–63, 148, 149
+
+Fortune’s Well, “Street of Wells,” 224, 225, 227, 231
+
+Frome, River, 38, 62, 115, 117, 118, 121, 123, 124, 156, 157, 161, 163,
+205, 306
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“GAYMEAD,” Theale, 2
+
+“Giant of Cerne,” 203
+
+Glydepath Lane, 76, 78
+
+Goathorn, 114
+
+Godmanstone, 205
+
+“Gray’s Bridge,” 70
+
+“Great Hintock,” Minterne Magna, 39, 168, 191, 198, 302
+
+“Great Hintock House,” Turnworth House, 311, 312
+
+_Group of Noble Dames_, _A_, 14, 31, 43, 172–176, 189, 205, 237, 297–299
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+HAMPSHIRE, “Upper Wessex,” 2, 257
+
+Hamworthy, 268
+
+_Hand of Ethelberta_, _The_, 86, 90, 93, 94, 98, 268, 269
+
+Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester, 76, 77
+
+Hardy, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman, 66, 232, 233
+
+Hardy, Thomas, birthplace of, 158–160
+
+Hardy, Thomas, residence of, 148
+
+“Havenpool,” Poole, 88, 107–109, 111, 140, 261–268
+
+_Hearts Insurgent_, 4
+
+Heedless William’s Pond, 160
+
+“High Place Hall,” 78
+
+High Stoy, 39, 191, 197
+
+“Higher Crowstairs,” 75, 199
+
+Holnest, 123, 191–194, 302
+
+Horner family, 173–175
+
+Horton, 50, 298
+
+Horton Inn, “Lornton Inn,” 297–299
+
+Hurst, 163
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+ILCHESTER, Earls of, 172–175
+
+Ilsington Woods, 159
+
+_Interlopers at the Knap_, 168
+
+“Ivell,” Yeovil, 169, 176–178
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+JORDAN HILL, 246
+
+_Jude the Obscure_, 4, 5, 29, 30, 31, 151, 294, 295
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“KENNETBRIDGE,” NEWBURY, 2
+
+“King’s Hintock Court,” Melbury Park, 172–176
+
+King’s Stag Bridge, 195
+
+“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” Bere Regis, 54, 126, 127, 132–146, 163, 302
+
+Kingston, 92, 93, 94, 97
+
+Kingston House, “Knapwater House,” 60, 150
+
+Kingston Lacy, 106
+
+“Knapwater House,” Kingston House, 60, 150
+
+“Knollsea,” Swanage, 84–92, 97, 111, 257, 264
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Lady Mottisfont_, 14
+
+_Lady Penelope_, _The_, 205
+
+Lainston, 19, 20
+
+Langton Matravers, 92
+
+Launceston, “St. Launce’s,” 8
+
+Lidden, River, 195
+
+Little Ann, 23
+
+“Little Hintock,” Melbury Osmund, 176, 198
+
+“Little Jack Horner,” 174
+
+Lobcombe Corner, 26
+
+Lodmoor Marsh, 246
+
+“Long Ash Lane,” 168, 169
+
+Long Burton, 191, 192
+
+“Long Piddle,” Piddletrenthide, 57
+
+“Lornton Inn,” Horton Inn, 297–299
+
+Lower Walterstone Farm, 57–59
+
+“Lucetta’s house,” 78
+
+Lulworth Cove, “Lullstead,” 139, 254, 255–257
+
+Lulworth West, 254
+
+Lytchett Minster, “Flychett,” 268
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+MAIDEN CASTLE, 208
+
+Maiden Newton, “Chalk Newton,” 168
+
+Marnhull, “Marlott,” 36, 285, 288, 290
+
+Martinstown, or Winterborne St. Martin, 153
+
+“Marygreen,” Fawley Magna, 2, 4, 94
+
+Maumbury, 71, 72
+
+Max Gate, 63, 148
+
+_Mayor of Casterbridge_, _The_, 23, 25, 26, 63–80, 149
+
+_Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion_, _The_, 248–250,
+
+Melbury Osmund, “Little Hintock,” 176, 198
+
+Melbury Park, “King’s Hintock Court,” 172–176
+
+Melbury Sampford, 172–176
+
+“Melchester,” Salisbury, 16, 26–28, 31, 35, 36, 187
+
+Melcombe Regis, 66, 210, 215–217, 220, 221
+
+Mells Park, “Falls Park,” 172–175
+
+“Mellstock,” Stinsford, 61, 149–151
+
+Middlemarsh, 194
+
+“Middleton Abbey,” Milton Abbas, 38, 306–311
+
+Milborne Port, 302
+
+Milborne St. Andrew, “Millpond St. Jude’s,” 48–50
+
+Milton Abbas, “Middleton Abbey,” 38, 306–311
+
+Minterne Magna, “Great Hintock,” 39, 168, 191, 198, 302
+
+“Monmouth Ash,” 299–301
+
+Monmouth, Duke of, 83, 121, 140, 299–301
+
+_Mottisfont_, _Lady_, 14
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+NETHER CERNE, 205
+
+“Nether Mynton,” Owermoigne, 252, 253
+
+Newbury, “Kennetbridge,” 2
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+OBSERVATORY, The, Horton, 298
+
+Old Sarum, 21, 28, 179
+
+_On the Western Circuit_, 29
+
+Osmington, 250
+
+“Overcombe,” Sutton Poyntz, 246, 247, 250
+
+Owermoigne, “Nether Mynton,” 252, 253
+
+Oxford, “Christminster,” 3, 5, 6
+
+“Oxwell Hall,” Poxwell Manor, 250, 251
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Pair of Blue Eyes_, _A_, 6, 7, 8
+
+_Penelope_, _The Lady_, 205
+
+Pennsylvania Castle, “Sylvania Castle,” 229
+
+Pentridge, “Trantridge,” 36, 37
+
+Piddle, River, 54, 57, 117, 121, 132, 144
+
+Piddleford, or Fiddleford, 285
+
+Piddletown, “Weatherbury,” 53–58, 157
+
+Piddletrenthide, “Long Piddle,” 57, 302
+
+Plush, 170
+
+Poole, “Havenpool,” 88, 107, 108, 109, 111, 140, 261–268
+
+Poole Harbour, 39, 114, 117, 131
+
+“Port Bredy,” Bridport, 82, 231, 237, 240–244
+
+Portisham, 232–234
+
+Portland Bill, 224
+
+Portland, Isle of, “Isle of Slingers,” 209, 210, 214, 222–231, 240
+
+Poundbury, 79, 206
+
+Poxwell, 250, 290
+
+Poxwell Manor, “Oxwell Hall,” 250, 251
+
+Preston, 246, 250
+
+Pulham, 195
+
+“Pummery,” 206
+
+Purbeck, Isle of, 85, 87–89, 97, 115
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“QUARTERSHOT,” Aldershot, 2
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+RADIPOLE, 213
+
+Reading, “Aldbrickham,” 2
+
+_Return of the Native_, _The_, 114, 128, 129, 161
+
+Revels Inn, 199
+
+Rye Hill, Bere Regis, 131, 132
+
+Ryme Intrinseca, 176, 177
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+ST. JULIOT’S, “ENDELSTOW,” 8
+
+“St. Launce’s,” Launceston, 8
+
+Salisbury, “Melchester,” 16, 26–28, 31, 35, 36, 187
+
+Salisbury Plain, 31
+
+“Sandbourne,” Bournemouth, 31, 88, 257–262
+
+Sandsfoot Castle, 222, 223
+
+“Serpent,” The, 155
+
+Shaftesbury, “Shaston,” 39, 277, 290, 291–296
+
+Shapwick, 280, 281, 282, 283
+
+“Shapwick Wheeloffs,” 281
+
+“Shaston,” Shaftesbury, 39, 277, 290, 291–296
+
+Sherborne, “Sherton Abbas,” 38, 39, 178–191
+
+Sherborne Castle, 184, 186–190
+
+“Sherton Abbas,” 38, 39, 178–191
+
+Shillingstone, 282–285
+
+“Shottsford Forum,” Blandford Forum, 39, 42–47, 75, 138, 282, 302
+
+“Slingers, Isle of,” Isle of Portland, 209, 210, 214, 221–231, 240
+
+_Some Crusted Characters_, 70
+
+Somersetshire, “Outer Wessex,” 2, 176
+
+Sparsholt, 20
+
+Stalbridge, 302
+
+“Stickleford,” Tincleton, 157, 160, 163
+
+Stinsford, “Mellstock,” 61, 149–151
+
+Stoborough, 115
+
+Stockbridge, 16, 21–23, 26
+
+“Stoke-Barehills,” Basingstoke, 2, 3
+
+Stonehenge, 31–34
+
+Stour, River, 38, 277, 278, 280, 282, 283, 288
+
+“Stourcastle,” Sturminster Newton, 39, 286–288
+
+Strangways family, 173–175
+
+“Street of Wells,” 224, 225, 227, 231
+
+Sturminster Marshall, 38, 277, 278, 280
+
+Sturminster Newton, “Stourcastle,” 39, 286–288
+
+Sutton Poyntz, “Overcombe,” 246, 247, 250
+
+Swanage, “Knollsea,” 84–92, 97, 111, 257, 264
+
+“Sylvania Castle,” Pennsylvania Castle, 229
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+TARENT ABBEY, 134, 145
+
+Tarrant Hinton, 40
+
+Templecombe, 38, 39
+
+Ten Hatches, 70
+
+Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 12, 17, 31, 32, 36, 38, 122–126, 143, 147,
+161, 168, 170, 199, 244, 257, 258, 285, 288, 289, 305
+
+Theale, “Gaymead,” 2
+
+_Three Strangers_, _The_, 75, 199
+
+Tincleton, “Stickleford,” 157, 160, 163
+
+_To Please his Wife_, 262, 265
+
+_Tragedy of Two Ambitions_, 177
+
+“Trantridge,” Pentridge, 36, 37
+
+Trebarrow Sands, “Trebarwith Strand,” 7
+
+“Troy Town,” 59
+
+_Trumpet Major_, _The_, 70, 218, 222, 230, 232, 246–248, 250, 253
+
+Turberville, Dr. D’Albigny, 30, 146
+
+Turberville, George, 48, 146
+
+Turberville, John, 123
+
+Turberville, Thomas, 146
+
+Turberville, family, The, 126, 134, 140–144, 146, 304
+
+Turnworth House, “Great Hintock House,” 311, 312
+
+_Two on a Tower_, 49, 53, 115, 270, 275, 278, 280, 298, 299
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Under the Greenwood Tree_, 59, 149, 150
+
+Upper Bockhampton, 63
+
+Upwey, 211, 212
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“VALE OF GREAT DAIRIES,” 38, 156, 161, 306
+
+Vale of Little Dairies, 38, 39
+
+“Vale of White Hart,” 196
+
+Village Choirs, 151–155
+
+_Vindogladia_, 270
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+WALLOP, LITTLE (OR MIDDLE), 26
+
+Wantage, “Alfredston,” 2
+
+“Warborne,” 270
+
+Wareham, “Anglebury,” 10, 38, 86, 111, 113–122, 138, 192
+
+“Warm’ell Cross,” 252
+
+“Weatherbury,” Piddletown, 53–58, 157
+
+Weatherbury Castle, 50, 51, 80
+
+Weeke, 18
+
+_Well Beloved_, _The_, 224, 226, 229, 230
+
+Welland House, 50, 278, 279
+
+“Wellbridge,” Woolbridge, 124, 127
+
+“Wells, the Street of,” Fortune’s Well, 224, 225, 227, 231
+
+Wessex, 1, 9, 14, 21, 148, 253
+
+Wessex, Lower, Devonshire, 2, 6
+
+Wessex, Mid, Wiltshire, 2, 292
+
+Wessex, Nether, Cornwall, 292
+
+Wessex, North, Berkshire, 2
+
+Wessex, Outer, Somersetshire, 2, 176
+
+Wessex, South, Dorsetshire, 2, 38, 39, 44, 134, 135, 138, 249, 291, 292
+
+Wessex, Upper, Hampshire, 2, 257
+
+West Bay, 237, 238, 239, 241
+
+West Stafford, 157
+
+Wey, River, 212
+
+Weyhill, “Weydon Priors,” 23–25
+
+Weyhill Fair, 24, 25
+
+“Weydon Priors,” Weyhill, 23–25
+
+Weymouth, “Budmouth,” 71, 200, 207, 209, 210, 212, 221, 225, 226, 232,
+246
+
+Whitcomb, 65
+
+Willapark Point, 8
+
+Wilts, 2
+
+Wimborne Minster, “Warborne,” 106, 138, 270–276
+
+Wincanton, 39
+
+Winchester, “Wintoncester,” 9–17, 21, 148
+
+Windsor “Castle Royal,” 2
+
+Winterborne Came, 65
+
+Winterborne Monkton, 208, 210
+
+Winterborne St. Martin, or Martinstown, 153
+
+Winterborne Whitchurch, 47, 48, 146
+
+Winterslow, 16
+
+“Winterslow Hut,” 27
+
+“Wintoncester,” Winchester, 9–17, 21, 148
+
+“Wishing Well,” Upwey, 211–213
+
+_Withered Arm_, _The_, 74
+
+Wolveton House, 168, 205, 207
+
+Woodbury Hill, Bere Regis, 138, 140
+
+_Woodlanders_, _The_, 43, 176, 286, 191, 195, 197, 198, 308, 312
+
+Woodlands, 298, 299
+
+Woodyates Inn, 35, 36, 38, 40
+
+Wool, 38, 123, 126, 130
+
+Woolbridge, “Wellbridge,” 124, 127
+
+Woolbridge House, 122, 123, 125
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“YALBURY HILL,” YELLOWHAM HILL, 59
+
+Yellowham Woods, “Yalbury Great Wood,” 59, 150
+
+Yeo, River, 176, 178, 186, 191
+
+Yeovil, “Ivell,” 169, 176–178
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+  _Printed by Hazell_, _Watson & Viney_, _Ld._, _London and Aylesbury_.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{174}  In text the genealogy is: Thomas Horner of Mells _m._ 1713
+Susannah, daughter of Thomas Strangeways, of Melbury, co. Dorset, born
+1690, died 1758: they had issue Elizabeth Horner (born 1723, died 1792).
+
+Elizabeth Horner _m._ 1736 Sir Stephen Fox, afterwards 1st Earl of
+Ilchester, etc.  Born 1706, Died 1776.—DP.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HARDY COUNTRY***
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>The Hardy Country, by Charles G. Harper</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Hardy Country, by Charles G. Harper
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Hardy Country
+       Literary landmarks of the Wessex Novels
+
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+
+
+Release Date: September 7, 2014  [eBook #46801]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HARDY COUNTRY***
+</pre>
+<p>This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/fp.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Weymouth: St. Mary Street and statue of George III."
+title=
+"Weymouth: St. Mary Street and statue of George III."
+ src="images/fp.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h1><span class="GutSmall">THE</span><br />
+HARDY COUNTRY</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center">LITERARY LANDMARKS OF<br />
+THE&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; WESSEX&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+NOVELS</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
+/>
+CHARLES G. HARPER<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">AUTHOR OF &ldquo;THE INGOLDSBY
+COUNTRY,&rdquo; ETC.</span></p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Here shepherds pipe their rustic song,<br
+/>
+Their flocks and rural nymphs among.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/tp.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Medallion"
+title=
+"Medallion"
+ src="images/tp.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>ILLUSTRATED BY THE
+AUTHOR</i></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONDON<br />
+ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">1904</p>
+<h2><a name="pagev"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+v</span><i>PREFACE</i></h2>
+<p><i>Dorsetshire</i>, <i>the centre of the</i> &ldquo;<i>Hardy
+Country</i>,&rdquo; <i>the home of the Wessex Novels</i>, <i>is a
+land literally flowing with milk and honey</i>: <i>a land of
+great dairies</i>, <i>of flowers and bees</i>, <i>of rural
+industries</i>, <i>where rustic ways and speech and habits of
+thought live long</i>, <i>and the kindlier virtues are not
+forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in towns</i>: <i>a
+land desirable for its own sweet self</i>, <i>where you may see
+the beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey
+of which I have spoken</i>, <i>and where that flow of milk is no
+figure of speech</i>.&nbsp; <i>You may indeed hear the swish of
+it in the milking pails at almost every turn of every
+lane</i>.</p>
+<p><i>Thatch survives in every village</i>, <i>as nowhere
+else</i>, <i>and here quaint towns maintain their quaintness at
+all odds</i>, <i>while elsewhere foolish folk seek to be&mdash;as
+they phrase it</i>&mdash;&ldquo;<i>up to date</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+<i>It is good</i>, <i>you think</i>, <i>who explore these
+parts</i>, <i>to be out of date and reckless of all the tiresome
+worries of modernity</i>.</p>
+<p><i>Spring is good in Dorset</i>, <i>summer better</i>,
+<i>autumn&mdash;when the kindly fruits of the earth are
+ingathered and </i><a name="pagevi"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+vi</span><i>the smell of pomace is sweet in the mellow
+air&mdash;best</i>.&nbsp; <i>Winter</i>?&nbsp; <i>Well</i>,
+<i>frankly</i>, <i>I don&rsquo;t know</i>.</p>
+<p><i>To all these natural advantages has been added in our
+generation the romantic interest of Mr. Thomas Hardy&rsquo;s
+novels of rural life and character</i>, <i>in which real places
+are introduced with a lavish hand</i>.&nbsp; <i>The identity of
+those places is easily resolved</i>; <i>and</i>, <i>that feat
+performed</i>, <i>there is that compelling force in his genius
+which inevitably</i>, <i>sooner or later</i>, <i>magnetically
+draws those who have read</i>, <i>to see for themselves what
+manner of places and what folk they must be in real life</i>,
+<i>from whose characteristics such poignant tragedy</i>, <i>such
+suave and admirable comedy</i>, <i>have been evolved</i>.&nbsp;
+<i>I have many a time explored Egdon</i>, <i>and observed the
+justness of the novelist&rsquo;s description of that sullen
+waste</i>: <i>have traversed Blackmoor Vale</i>, <i>where</i>
+&ldquo;<i>the fields are never brown and the springs never
+dry</i>,&rdquo; <i>but where the roads&mdash;it is a
+cyclist&rsquo;s criticism&mdash;are always shockingly bad</i>:
+<i>in fine</i>, <i>have visited every literary landmark of the
+Wessex Novels</i>.&nbsp; <i>If I have not found the rustics so
+sprack-witted as they are in</i> <span class="smcap">The Return
+of the Native</span> <i>and other stories&mdash;why</i>, <i>I
+never expected so to find them</i>, <i>for I did not imagine the
+novelist to be a reporter</i>.&nbsp; <i>But&mdash;this is in
+testimony to the essential likeness to life of his women&mdash;I
+know</i> &ldquo;<i>Bathsheba</i>&rdquo;; <i>only she is not a
+farmer</i>, <i>nor in</i> &ldquo;<i>Do&rsquo;set</i>,&rdquo;
+<i>and I have met</i> &ldquo;<i>Viviette</i>&rdquo; <i>and</i>
+&ldquo;<i>Fancy</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; <i>They were called by other
+names</i>, <i>&rsquo;tis true</i>; <i>but they were</i>, <i>and
+are</i>, <i>those distracting characters come to life</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="pagevii"></a><span class="pagenum">p. vii</span><i>A
+word in conclusion</i>.&nbsp; <i>No attempt has here been made to
+solemnly</i> &ldquo;<i>expound</i>&rdquo; <i>the
+novelist</i>.&nbsp; <i>He</i>, <i>I take it</i>, <i>expounds
+himself</i>.&nbsp; <i>Nor has it been thought necessary to
+exclude places simply for the reason that they by some chance do
+not find mention in the novels</i>.&nbsp; <i>These pages are</i>,
+<i>in short</i>, <i>just an attempt to record impressions
+received of a peculiarly beautiful and stimulating literary
+country</i>, <i>and seek merely to reflect some of the joy of the
+explorer and the enthusiasm of an ardent admirer of the
+novelist</i>, <i>who here has given tongues to trees and a voice
+to every wind</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">CHARLES G. HARPER.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Petersham</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Surrey</span>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>July</i> 1904.</p>
+<h2><a name="pageix"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+ix</span>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="GutSmall">CHAP.</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; FAWLEY MAGNA;
+OXFORD</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page9">9</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page47">47</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>DORCHESTER</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page62">62</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>DORCHESTER (<i>continued</i>)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page74">74</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><a name="pagex"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. x</span>IX.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>SWANAGE</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page84">84</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">X.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>CORFE CASTLE</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WAREHAM</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page114">114</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page122">122</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XIV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>BERE REGIS</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page133">133</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page148">148</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XVI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND YEOVIL</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page168">168</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XVII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>SHERBORNE</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XVIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XIX.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
+(<i>continued</i>)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XX.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WEYMOUTH</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page214">214</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>THE ISLE OF PORTLAND</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page222">222</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><a name="pagexi"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. xi</span>XXIV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WIMBORNE MINSTER</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXVI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page277">277</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXVII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY (<i>continued</i>)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page288">288</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXVIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page297">297</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXIX.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>INDEX</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page313">313</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="pagexiii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xiii</span>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Weymouth: St. Mary Street and Statue of George III.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>Frontispiece</i></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Fawley Magna</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image3">3</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>High Street, Oxford, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image4">4</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>High Street, Winchester</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image11">11</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Winchester Cathedral, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image14">14</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Weyhill Fair</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image24">24</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Salisbury Cathedral</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image30">30</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stonehenge</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image32">32</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Pentridge</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image36">36</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Eastbury</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image41">41</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Blandford Forum</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image45">45</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image49">49</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Weatherbury Castle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image50">50</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image51">51</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Piddletown</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image55">55</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A Quaint Corner in Piddletown</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image57">57</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Lower Walterstone Farm; Original of
+&ldquo;Bathsheba&rsquo;s Farm&rdquo; in <i>Far from the Madding
+Crowd</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image59">59</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Ten Hatches, Dorchester</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image69">69</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Dorchester Gaol</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image75">75</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Hangman&rsquo;s Cottage, Dorchester</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image77">77</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Colyton House, Dorchester</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image79">79</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Old Church, Swanage</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image89">89</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Encombe</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image95">95</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Corfe Castle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image99">99</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Corfe Castle, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Approach to Wareham: The Walls of Wareham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image116">116</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wareham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image119">119</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Abbot&rsquo;s Coffin, Bindon Abbey</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image123">123</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Woolbridge House</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image125">125</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Woolbridge House: Entrance Front</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image127">127</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image128">128</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Chamberlain&rsquo;s Bridge</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image130">130</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Rye Hill, Bere Regis</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image131">131</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bere Regis</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image135">135</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bere Regis</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image137">137</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bere Regis: Interior of Church</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image141">141</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&ldquo;Toothache,&rdquo; Bere Regis</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image143">143</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&ldquo;Headache,&rdquo; Bere Regis</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image143">143</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bere Regis: The Turberville Window</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image145">145</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stinsford Church; the &ldquo;Mellstock&rdquo; of <i>Under
+the Greenwood Tree</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image149">149</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Birthplace of Thomas Hardy</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image158">158</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Birthplace of Thomas Hardy</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image159">159</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Duck Inn, Original of the &ldquo;Quiet Woman&rdquo;
+Inn in <i>The Return of the Native</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image161">161</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Tincleton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image163">163</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>An Egdon Farmstead</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image165">165</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A Farm on Egdon</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image166">166</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Cross-in-Hand, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image170">170</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Batcombe</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image171">171</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Tomb of &ldquo;Conjuring Minterne&rdquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image173">173</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Melbury House, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image174">174</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagexv"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xv</span>Sherborne Abbey Church, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image184">184</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Long Burton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image192">192</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image194">194</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image195">195</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Cerne Abbas</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image201">201</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image202">202</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Cerne Giant</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image203">203</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Cerne Abbas</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image206">206</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wolveton House</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image207">207</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Weymouth and Portland from the Ridgeway</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image209">209</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Wishing Well, Upwey</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image211">211</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Weymouth Harbour</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image219">219</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sandsfoot Castle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image223">223</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bow and Arrow Castle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image229">229</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Portisham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image233">233</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Road out of Abbotsbury</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image235">235</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sheep-Shearing in Wessex, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image236">236</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>West Bay, Bridport</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image239">239</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>High Street and Town Hall, Bridport</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image243">243</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sutton Poyntz: the &ldquo;Overcombe&rdquo; of <i>The
+Trumpet Major</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image247">247</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bincombe</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image249">249</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Poxwell Manor</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image251">251</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Owermoigne: the Smugglers&rsquo; Haunt in <i>The
+Distracted Preacher</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image253">253</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Lulworth Cove</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image254">254</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Lulworth Cove</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image255">255</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Lytchett Heath: The Equestrian Effigy of George III.:
+Entrance to Charborough Park, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image256">256</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bournemouth: The Invalids&rsquo; Walk</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image258">258</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Poole Quay</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image267">267</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sturminster Marshall: Anthony Etricke&rsquo;s Tomb,
+Wimborne Minster, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image270">270</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Wimborne Clock Jack</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image273">273</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wimborne Minster: the Minster and the Grammar School,
+<i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image274">274</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Tower, Charborough Park</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image281">281</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Weather-vane at Shapwick: the &ldquo;Shapwick
+Monster&rdquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image283">283</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Maypole, Shillingstone</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image285">285</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image286">286</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Marnhull</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image289">289</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Gold Hill, Shaftesbury</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image295">295</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Observatory, Horton, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image298">298</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Horton Inn: the &ldquo;Lorton Inn&rdquo; of <i>Barbara of
+the House of Grebe</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image299">299</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Monmouth Ash</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image300">300</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image303">303</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Milton Abbas, <i>Facing</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image306">306</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Milton Abbas, an Early &ldquo;Model&rdquo; Village</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image307">307</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Abbot Milton&rsquo;s Rebus, Milton Abbey</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image309">309</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Milton Abbey</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image310">310</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Turnworth House</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image311">311</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>CHAPTER
+I</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">PRELIMINARIES: THE
+HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the literary partition of
+England, wherein the pilgrim may discover tracts definitely and
+indissolubly dedicated to Dickens, to Tennyson, to Ingoldsby, and
+many another, no province has been so thoroughly annexed or so
+effectively occupied as that associated with the Wessex novels
+written by Mr. Thomas Hardy.&nbsp; He holds Wessex in fee-simple,
+to the exclusion of all others; and so richly topographical are
+all those romances, that long ere sketch-maps showing his
+literary occupancy of it were prepared and published in the
+uniform edition of his works, there were those to whom the
+identity of most of his scenes offered no manner of doubt.&nbsp;
+By the circumstances of birth and of lifelong residence, the
+&ldquo;Wessex&rdquo; of the novels has come to denote chiefly his
+native county of Dorset, and in especial the neighbourhood of
+Dorchester, the county town; but Mr. Hardy was early an
+expansionist, and his outposts were long ago thrown forward, to
+at last make his <a name="page2"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+2</span>Wessex in the domain of letters almost coterminous with
+that ancient kingdom of Saxon times, which included all England
+south of the Thames and west of Sussex, with the exception of
+Cornwall.&nbsp; The very excellent sketch-map prepared for the
+definitive edition of Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s works very clearly shows
+the comparative density of the literary settlements he has
+made.&nbsp; Glancing at it, you at once perceive that what he
+chooses to term &ldquo;South Wessex&rdquo;&mdash;named in merely
+matter-of-fact gazetteers Dorsetshire&mdash;is thickly studded
+with names of his own mintage, unknown to guidebook or ordnance
+map, and presently observe that the surrounding divisions of
+Upper, North, Mid, Outer, and Lower Wessex&mdash;as who should
+say Hampshire, Berkshire, Wilts, Somerset, and Devon&mdash;are,
+to follow the simile already adopted, barely colonised.</p>
+<p>His nearest frontier-post towards London is Castle Royal, to
+be identified with none other than Windsor; while near by are
+Gaymead (Theale), Aldbrickham (Reading), and Kennetbridge
+(Newbury).&nbsp; In the midst of that same division of North
+Wessex, or Berkshire, are marked Alfredston and Marygreen,
+respectively the little town of Wantage, birthplace of Alfred the
+Great, and the small village of Fawley Magna, placed on the
+draughty skyline of the bare and shivery Berkshire downs.</p>
+<p>Then, near the eastern border of Upper Wessex is Quartershot,
+or Aldershot, and farther within its confines Stoke-Barehills, by
+which name Basingstoke and the unclothed uplands partly
+surrounding it are indicated.&nbsp; Its &ldquo;gaunt,
+unattractive, ancient church&rdquo; is accurately imaged in a
+phrase, and it is just as true that the most familiar object of
+the <a name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 3</span>place is
+&ldquo;its cemetery, standing among some picturesque
+medi&aelig;val ruins beside the railway&rdquo;; for indeed
+Basingstoke cemetery and the fine ruins of the chapel once
+belonging to the religious who, piously by intent, but rather
+blasphemously to shocked ears, styled themselves the
+&ldquo;Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost,&rdquo; stand immediately
+without the railway station.&nbsp; At Stoke-Barehills, Jude and
+Sue, visiting the Agricultural Show, were observed by Arabella,
+Jude&rsquo;s sometime wife, with some jealousy.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image3" href="images/p3.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Fawley Magna"
+title=
+"Fawley Magna"
+ src="images/p3.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Finally, northernmost of all these transfigured outer
+landmarks, is Christminster, the university town and city of
+Oxford, whose literary name in these pages derives from the
+cathedral of Christ <a name="page4"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+4</span>there.&nbsp; This remote corner of his kingdom is
+especially and solely devoted to the grievous story of <i>Jude
+the Obscure</i>, a pitiful tale of frustrated ambition,
+originally published serially in <i>Harper&rsquo;s Magazine</i>,
+under the much more captivating, if less descriptive, title of
+<i>Hearts Insurgent</i>.&nbsp; The story opens at Fawley Magna,
+to whose identity a clue is found in the name of Fawley given the
+unhappy Jude.&nbsp; The village, we are told, was &ldquo;as
+old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an
+upland adjoining the undulating North Wessex downs.&nbsp; Old as
+it was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of
+the local history that remained absolutely unchanged. . . .&nbsp;
+Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted and
+quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into
+heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilised as pigsty walls,
+garden-seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the
+flower-beds of the neighbourhood.&nbsp; In place of it a tall new
+building of German-Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had
+been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of
+historic records who had run down from London and back in a
+day.&rdquo;&nbsp; Who was that obliterator thus held up to
+satire?&nbsp; Inquiries prove the church to have been rebuilt in
+1866, and its architect to have been none other than G. E.
+Street, R.A., than whom the middle Victorian period had no more
+accomplished architect.&nbsp; Truly enough, its design is
+something alien, but candour compels the admission that, however
+detached from local traditions, it is really a very fine
+building, and its designer quite undeserving of so slighting a
+notice.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image4" href="images/p4.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"High Street, Oxford"
+title=
+"High Street, Oxford"
+ src="images/p4.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 5</span>From
+Fawley the scene of Jude&rsquo;s tragedy changes to
+Christminster, the Oxford of everyday commerce.&nbsp; Oft had he,
+as a boy, seen from this vantage-point the faint radiance of its
+lights reflected from the sky at night, twenty miles away.&nbsp;
+His anticipations and disillusionments, his strong resolves and
+stumblings by the way, over stumbling-blocks of his own and of
+extraneous making, picture a strong character brought low, like
+Samson by Delilah&mdash;cheated of scholarly ambition by the
+guardians of learning, who open its gates only to wealth or
+scholarships acquired by early opportunity.&nbsp; Take <i>Jude
+the Obscure</i> as you will, it forms a somewhat serious
+indictment of university procedure: &ldquo;They raise
+pa&rsquo;sons there, like radishes in a bed.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis all
+learning there&mdash;nothing but learning, except
+religion.&rdquo;&nbsp; Jude sought learning there, and Holy
+Orders, but never rose beyond his trade of stonemason, and, after
+many fitful wanderings through Wessex, ends tragically at
+Oxford.</p>
+<p>Since <i>Jude the Obscure</i> was written Oxford has gained
+another historic personality, none the less real than the great
+figures of actual life who have trodden the pavements of its High
+Street.&nbsp; You may follow all the innermost thoughts of that
+mere character in a novel, and see fully exposed the springs that
+produce his actions; and thus he is made seem more human than all
+your Wolseys and great dignitaries, whose doings, smothered in
+dust, and whose motives, buried deep beneath their own
+subterfuges and the dark imaginings of historians with little but
+ancient verbiage to rely upon, seem only the spasmodic,
+involuntary capers of so many irresponsible jumping-jacks.&nbsp;
+Nowadays, when I <a name="page6"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+6</span>think of Oxford, it is to recall poor Jude Fawley&rsquo;s
+fascination by it, like the desire of the moth for the star, or
+for the candle that eventually scorches its wings and leaves it
+maimed and dying.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is a city of light,&rdquo; he
+exclaimed, not knowing (as how should he have known?) that the
+light it emits is but the phosphorescent glow of decay.&nbsp; And
+when I walk the High Street, &ldquo;the main street&mdash;that
+ha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t another like it in the world,&rdquo; it is not
+of Newman or his fellow Tractarians I think, but of Jude the
+stonemason, feeling with appreciative technical fingers the
+mouldings and crumbling stones of its architecture.</p>
+<p>In one novel, <i>A Pair of Blue Eyes</i>, Mr. Hardy has made
+an expedition far beyond the confines of his Wessex.&nbsp; Away
+beyond &ldquo;Lower Wessex,&rdquo; or Devonshire&mdash;itself
+scarce more than incidentally referred to in the whole course of
+his writings&mdash;he takes the reader to the north coast of
+Cornwall, the &ldquo;furthest westward of all those convenient
+corners wherein I have ventured to erect my theatre for these
+imperfect little dramas of country life and passions; and it lies
+near to, or no great way beyond, the vague border of the Wessex
+kingdom, on that side which, like the westering verge of modern
+American settlements, was progressive and uncertain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Castle Boterel&rdquo; he styles the stage of his
+tragical story of <i>A Pair of Blue Eyes</i>; a place to be found
+on maps under the style and title of Boscastle.&nbsp; That tiny
+port and harbour on the wildest part of a wild coast obtains its
+name, in a manner familiar to all students of Cornish topography,
+by a series of phonetic corruptions.&nbsp; Originally the site of
+a castle owned by the Norman family of De Bottreaux, <a
+name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 7</span>its name has in
+the course of centuries descended from that knightly designation
+to that it now bears.&nbsp; Leland, four hundred years ago,
+described the place as &ldquo;a very filthy Toun and il
+kept,&rdquo; and probably had still in mind and in nostrils when
+he wrote the scent of the fish-cellars and the fish-offal which
+to this day go largely towards making up the bouquet of most of
+the smaller Cornish fishing-ports.</p>
+<p>Still, as in Leland&rsquo;s time, goes the little brook,
+running down from the tremendously hilly background &ldquo;into
+the Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles,&rdquo; and still the harbour
+remains, from the mariner&rsquo;s point of view, &ldquo;a pore
+Havenet, of no certaine Salvegarde,&rdquo; winding, as it does,
+in the shape of a double S, between gigantic rocky headlands, and
+most difficult of approach or exit.&nbsp; It will thus be
+guessed, and guessed rightly, that, although poor as a harbour,
+Boscastle is a place of commanding picturesqueness.&nbsp; Its
+Cornish atmosphere, too, confers upon it another
+distinction.&nbsp; In the romantic mind of the novelist the
+district is &ldquo;pre-eminently (for one person at least) the
+region of dream and mystery.&nbsp; The ghostly birds, the
+pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the
+waters, the bloom, of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from
+the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an
+atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But it is not always like that at Boscastle.&nbsp; There are
+days of bright sunshine, when the sea is in colour something
+between a sapphire and an opal, when the cliffs reveal unexpected
+hues and the sands of Trebarrow&mdash;the &ldquo;Trebarwith
+Strand&rdquo; of the novel&mdash;shine golden, in contrast with
+the dark <a name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+8</span>slaty headland of Willapark Point&mdash;the &ldquo;cliff
+without a name&rdquo; where Elfride, the owner of that pair of
+blue eyes, saves the prig, Henry Knight, by the singular
+expedient none other than the author of the Wessex novels would
+have conceived.&nbsp; The average reader may perhaps be allowed
+his opinion that it had been better for Elfride had she saved her
+underclothing and allowed Knight to drop from his precarious
+hand-hold on the cliff&rsquo;s edge into the sea below waiting
+for him.</p>
+<p>The town of &ldquo;St. Launce&rsquo;s&rdquo; mentioned in the
+book is of course Launceston, and &ldquo;Endelstow&rdquo; is the
+village of St. Juliot&rsquo;s.</p>
+<h2><a name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 9</span>CHAPTER
+II</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WINCHESTER: THE
+ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">But</span>, to have done with these
+preliminary triflings in the marches of the Hardy Country, let us
+consider in what way the Londoner may best come to a
+thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land.&nbsp; On all
+counts&mdash;by force of easy access, and by its ancient
+circumstance&mdash;Winchester is indicated.&nbsp; &ldquo;The city
+of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore-time capital of
+Wessex,&rdquo; stands at the gate of this literary country and
+hard by the confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and
+history it is closely akin.&nbsp; At one in feeling with that
+hoary hunting preserve, it is itself modern in but little
+measure, and loves to linger upon memories of the past.&nbsp;
+Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical counters
+with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty
+game of history was played; but do, by the presence of their
+works, make the least impressionable feel that they were
+creatures of blood and fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake
+nations; groping darkly in superstition, without doubt, but
+perceiving the light, distant and dim, and striving with all the
+strength of their strong natures to win toward it.&nbsp; They
+fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had <a
+name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 10</span>done for
+paganism, and were not&mdash;it really seems necessary to insist
+upon it&mdash;creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals
+are sealed; but lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and
+hated, and despaired and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with
+perhaps even greater keenness, than any Edwardian liege of this
+twentieth century.&nbsp; Still runs the Itchen, bright and clear
+as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed, to be in their
+turn ousted in governance by the Norman-French; and still,
+although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of
+Norman domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed,
+stolid, and long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and
+Wessex, and in him that ancient kingdom, although unknown to
+modern political geographies, survives.</p>
+<p>Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and
+for your intrinsic worth, alike.&nbsp; Changing, although ever so
+slowly, with the years, your developments make, not as elsewhere,
+for black bitterness of heart and vain regrets for the things of
+sweet savour and good report, swept away into the dustheaps and
+potsherds of &ldquo;progress,&rdquo; but for content and happy
+assent.&nbsp; In these later years, for example, it has occurred
+to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior
+and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England,
+ruling at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in <span
+class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 901, and buried here in a spot still
+shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey.&nbsp; That is a noble,
+heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to
+commemorate the millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough
+keeping with Winchester&rsquo;s ancient dignity.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page11"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 11</span>
+<a name="image11" href="images/p11.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"High Street, Winchester"
+title=
+"High Street, Winchester"
+ src="images/p11.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 12</span>Near
+by, where its imposing bulk is reared up against the giant
+background of St. Giles&rsquo;s Hill, you may still see and hear
+the Itchen rushing furiously under the old City Mill by Soke
+Bridge, where dusty millers have ground corn for a thousand
+years.&nbsp; Released from the mill-leat, the stream regains its
+placid temper and wanders suavely along daisy-dappled meads to
+St. Cross, and so at last to lose itself in Southampton Water;
+still fishful all the way, as in the days of old Izaak Walton
+himself, who lies in the south transept of the cathedral yonder,
+and has a sanctified place in these liberal-minded times in a
+tabernacle of the restored reredos, in the glorious company of
+the apostles, the saints, kings and bishops, who form a very
+mixed concourse in that remarkable structure.&nbsp; I fear that
+if they were all brought to life and introduced to one another,
+they would not form the happiest of families.</p>
+<p>But that&rsquo;s as may be.&nbsp; From this vantage-point by
+King Alfred&rsquo;s statue&mdash;or &ldquo;&AElig;lfred,&rdquo;
+as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the
+unscholarly&mdash;you may see, as described in Tess, &ldquo;the
+sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the medi&aelig;val
+cross, and from the medi&aelig;val cross to the bridge&rdquo;;
+but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low Norman
+tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being
+beckoned afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane,
+and, diligently inquiring, at last find it.&nbsp; Best it is to
+come to the cathedral by way of that aforesaid medi&aelig;val
+cross in the High Street, hard by the curiously overhanging
+penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry, <a
+name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 13</span>which, to the
+astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a
+backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike
+space of trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old
+residences of cathedral dignitaries with nothing to do and
+exceedingly good salaries for doing it.&nbsp; It has been
+remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some sixty per
+cent. of the famous men whose careers are included in the
+<i>Dictionary of National Biography</i> were the sons of
+clergymen.&nbsp; No wonder at all, I take it, in this, for it is
+merely nature&rsquo;s compensating swing of the pendulum.&nbsp;
+The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing up energy
+for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest
+empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest
+scoundrels too, have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of
+the Church.</p>
+<p>That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a
+history to its squatness&mdash;a history bound up with the
+tragical death of Rufus.&nbsp; The grave of the Red King in the
+cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story whose inner
+history has never been, and never will be, fully explained; but
+by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless
+king&rsquo;s death at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced
+by the glanced arrow said to have been aimed at the wild red deer
+by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem that the clergy were more
+intimately connected with that &ldquo;accident&rdquo; than was
+seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of
+that time.&nbsp; It must not be forgotten that the king had
+despoiled the Church and the Church&rsquo;s high dignitaries with
+a thorough and <a name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+14</span>comprehensive spoliation, nor can it be blinked that
+certain of them had denounced him and prophesied disaster with an
+exactness of imagery possible only to those who had prepared the
+fulfilment of their boding prophecies.&nbsp; &ldquo;Even
+now,&rdquo; said one, &ldquo;the arrow of retribution is fixed,
+the bow is stretched.&rdquo;&nbsp; This was not metaphor, merely:
+they prophesied who had with certainty prepared fulfilment.&nbsp;
+And when the thing was consummated and the body of the Red King
+was buried in the choir beneath the original central tower, the
+ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was not,
+according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the
+insufficient support given to its great crushing weight by the
+inadequate pillars, but to the fact that one was buried beneath
+who had not received the last rites of the Church.&nbsp; If
+indeed that be so, the mills of God certainly do grind
+slowly.</p>
+<p>For the rest, the cathedral is the longest in England.&nbsp;
+Longer than Ely, longer than St. Albans, it measures from east to
+west no less than 556 feet.&nbsp; As we read in the story of
+<i>Lady Mottisfont</i>, Wintoncester, among all the romantic
+towns in Wessex, is for this reason &ldquo;probably the most
+convenient for meditative people to live in; since there you have
+a cathedral with nave so long that it affords space in which to
+walk and summon your remoter moods without continually turning on
+your heel, or seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll
+under cover from the rain or sun.&nbsp; In an uninterrupted
+course of nearly three hundred steps eastward, and again nearly
+three hundred steps westward amid those magnificent tombs, you
+can, <a name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 15</span>for
+instance, compare in the most leisurely way the dry dustiness
+which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and bishops with
+the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of
+commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest
+out-of-doors.&nbsp; Then, if you are in love, you can, by
+sauntering in the chapels and behind the episcopal chantries with
+the bright-eyed one, so steep and mellow your ecstasy in the
+solemnities around that it will assume a rarer and fairer
+tincture.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image14" href="images/p14.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Winchester Cathedral"
+title=
+"Winchester Cathedral"
+ src="images/p14.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old
+Guildhall every evening at eight o&rsquo;clock, the sentimental
+survival of an old-time very real and earnest ordinance; the West
+Gate remains in the wall, hard by the fragments of the royal
+castle; down in the lower extremity of the city the
+bishop&rsquo;s palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered,
+ivy-covered walls: much in fine remains of Winchester&rsquo;s
+ancient state.</p>
+<p>But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for
+Salisbury.</p>
+<h2><a name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+16</span>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WINCHESTER TO
+STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">From</span> Wintoncester to
+Melchester&mdash;that is to say, from Winchester to
+Salisbury&mdash;is twenty-three miles if you go by way of
+Stockbridge and Winterslow; if by the windings of the valley
+roads by King&rsquo;s Somborne and Mottisfont, anything you like,
+from thirty upwards, for it is a devious route and a
+puzzling.&nbsp; We will therefore take the highway and for the
+present leave the byways severely alone.</p>
+<p>The high road goes in an ascent, a white and dusty streak,
+from Winchester to Stockbridge, the monotonous undulations of the
+chalky downs relieved here and there on the skyline by distant
+woods, and the wayside varied at infrequent intervals by
+murmurous coppices of pines, in whose sullen depths the riotous
+winds lose themselves in hollow undertones or absolute
+silences.&nbsp; But before the traveller comes thus out into the
+country, he must, emerging from the West Gate, win to the open
+through the recent suburb of Fulflood; for &ldquo;Winton&rdquo;
+as its natives lovingly name it, and as the old milestones on
+this very road agree to style it, has after many years of slumber
+waked to life again, and is growing.&nbsp; It is not a large nor
+a bustling suburb, this recent fringe upon Winchester&rsquo;s
+ancient kirtle, <a name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+17</span>and you are soon out of it and breasting the slope of
+Roebuck Hill.&nbsp; Here, looking back, the tragic outlines of
+the prison, with grey-slated roof and ugly octagonal red-brick
+tower, cut the horizon: an unlovely palimpsest set above the
+medi&aelig;val graciousness of the ancient capital of all
+England, but one that has become, in some sort, a literary
+landmark in these later years, for it figures in the last scene
+of <i>Tess of the D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i>.&nbsp; In the last
+chapter of that strenuous romance you shall read how from the
+western gate of the city two persons walked on a certain morning
+with bowed heads and gait of grief.&nbsp; They were Angel Clare,
+the husband, and &rsquo;Liza-Lu, the sister of poor Tess, come to
+witness the hoisting of the black flag upon the tower of that
+inimical building.&nbsp; They witnessed this proof that
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Justice&rsquo; was done, and the President of the
+Immortals (in &AElig;schylean phrase) had ended his sport with
+Tess,&rdquo; not from this Stockbridge road, but from the first
+milestone on the road to Romsey, whence the city may be seen
+&ldquo;as in an isometric drawing&rdquo; set down in its vale of
+Itchen, &ldquo;the broad cathedral tower with its Norman windows
+and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St.
+Thomas&rsquo;s, the pinnacled tower of the college, and, more to
+the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to
+this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.&nbsp;
+Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St. Catherine&rsquo;s
+Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon
+was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Turning away from the contemplation of these things, and
+overpassing the crest of Roebuck Hill <a name="page18"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 18</span>and its sponsorial inn, the road dips
+down suddenly into the tiny village of Weeke, whose name is
+sometimes, with romantic medi&aelig;valism, spelled
+&ldquo;Wyke.&rdquo;&nbsp; For myself, did I reside there, I would
+certainly have my notepaper stamped &ldquo;Wyke next
+Winchester,&rdquo; and find much satisfaction therein.&nbsp; Wyke
+consists, when fully summed up, of a characteristic rural
+Hampshire church, with little wooden belfry and walls of flint
+and red brick, of some scattered farms and of a roadside pond, a
+great prim red-bricked house of Georgian date, and a row of
+pollard limes on a grassy bank overlooking the road.</p>
+<p>And then?&nbsp; Then the road goes on, past more uplands,
+divided into fields whose smooth convexity gives the appearance
+of even greater size than they possess: every circumstance of
+their featureless rotundity disclosed from the highway across the
+sparse hedges, reduced by free use of the billhook to the
+smallest semblance of a hedge, consistent with the preservation
+of a boundary.&nbsp; Wayside trees are to seek, and the wayfarer
+pants in summer for lack of shade, and in winter is chilled to
+the bone, as the winds roam free across Worthy downs.</p>
+<p>Such is the way up Harestock Hill; not so grim as perhaps this
+description may convey, but really very beautiful in its sort,
+with a few cottages topping the rise where a signpost points a
+road to Littleton and Crawley, and where the white-topped
+equatorial of an observatory serves to emphasise a wholly
+unobstructed view over miles of sky.&nbsp; It is only from vast
+skyfields such as this that one hears the song of the skylark on
+those still summer days when the sky is of the intensest azure
+blue and the bees are busy wherever <a name="page19"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 19</span>the farmer has left nooks for the
+wild-flowers to grow.&nbsp; On such days the dark woods of
+Lainston, crowning the distant ridge, lend a welcome shade.&nbsp;
+Fortunately they are easy of access, for the road runs by them
+and an inconspicuous stile leads directly into one of the
+rook-haunted alleys of those romantic avenues with which the
+place is criss-crossed.&nbsp; A slightly marked footpath through
+undergrowth thickly spread with the desiccated leaves of autumns
+past, where the hedgehog hides and squirrels and wild life of
+every kind abound, leads by a crackling track of dried twigs and
+the empty husks of last year&rsquo;s beech-nuts to another stile
+and across a byroad into another of the five grand avenues
+leading to Lainston House, a romantically gloomy, but
+architecturally very fine, late seventeenth-century mansion
+embowered amid foliage, with a ruined manorial chapel close at
+hand in a darkling corner amid the close-set mossy boles of the
+trees.&nbsp; The spot would form an ideal setting for one of the
+Wessex tales, and indeed has a part in a sufficiently queer story
+in actual life.&nbsp; That tale is now historic&mdash;how
+Walpole&rsquo;s &ldquo;&AElig;lia L&aelig;lia Chudleigh&rdquo;
+was in 1745 privately married, in this now roofless chapel, to
+Captain Hervey, a naval officer who afterwards succeeded to the
+title of third Earl of Bristol.&nbsp; &ldquo;Miss
+Chudleigh,&rdquo; however, she still continued to be at
+Court.&nbsp; Twenty-five years later she was the heroine of a
+bigamy case, having married, while her first husband was living,
+Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston.&nbsp; This was that lively lady
+who, Walpole tells us, &ldquo;went to Ranelagh as Iphigenia, but
+as naked as Andromeda.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page20"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 20</span>The
+ruined chapel has long been in that condition.&nbsp; Its font
+lies, broken and green with damp, on the grass, and the old
+ledger-stones that cover the remains of Chudleighs and Dawleys,
+successive owners of the manor, are cracked and defaced.&nbsp;
+The &ldquo;living&rdquo; of Lainston is worth &pound;60 per
+annum, and goes with that of the neighbouring village of
+Sparsholt, the vicar holding it by virtue of preaching here once
+a year.&nbsp; Stress of weather occasionally obliges him to
+perform this duty under the shelter of an umbrella, when his
+congregation, like that of the saint who preached to the birds,
+is composed chiefly of rooks and jackdaws.&nbsp; But their
+responses are not always well timed, and the notes of the jackdaw
+sound uncommonly like the scoffings of the ribald.</p>
+<p>One emerges from Lainston woods only to perceive this to be a
+district of many woodlands.&nbsp; Across the road is Northwood,
+where, close by Eastman&rsquo;s great school, are thick coppices
+of hazels and undergrowths that the primroses and bluebells
+love.&nbsp; In another direction lies Sparsholt.&nbsp; None may
+tell what the &ldquo;Spar&rdquo; in the place-name of this or the
+other Sparsholt in Berkshire means, but &ldquo;holt&rdquo;
+signifies a wood; and thus we may perceive that the surroundings
+must still wear very much the aspect they owned when the name was
+conferred.&nbsp; Sparsholt has no guidebook
+attractions&mdash;nothing but its old thatched cottages and quiet
+surroundings to recommend it.&nbsp; But the fragrant scent of the
+wood-smoke from cottage hearths is over all.&nbsp; You may see
+its blue filmy wreaths curling upwards on still days, against the
+dark background of foliage.&nbsp; It is a rustic fragrance never
+forgotten, an aroma which, <a name="page21"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 21</span>go whithersoever you will, brings
+back the sweet memory of days that were, and the sound of a voice
+in more actual fashion than possible to the notes of a
+well-remembered song, or the scent of a rose.</p>
+<p>They are not woods of forest trees that beset this district,
+but hillside tangles of scrub oaks, of hazels and alders, where
+the wild-flowers make a continual glory in early spring.&nbsp;
+There are the labyrinths of No Man&rsquo;s Land, the intricacies
+of Privet and Crab Wood, through whose bosquets run the
+long-deserted Roman road from Winchester to Old Sarum, and the
+nameless spinneys dotted everywhere about.&nbsp; Away on the
+horizon you may perceive a monument, capping a hill.&nbsp; It is
+no memorial of gallantries in war, but is the obelisk erected on
+Farley Mount to the horse of a certain &ldquo;Paulet St.
+John,&rdquo; which jumped with him into a chalk-pit twenty-five
+feet deep, emerging, with his rider, unhurt.&nbsp; That was in
+1733.&nbsp; An inscription tells how that wonderful animal was
+afterwards entered for the Hunters&rsquo; Plate, under the name
+of &ldquo;Beware Chalk Pit,&rdquo; at the races on Worthy downs,
+and won it.</p>
+<p>Continuing on to Stockbridge, whose race-meeting has recently
+been abolished, the way grows grim indeed, with that Roman
+grimness characteristic of all the Wessex chalky down
+country.&nbsp; The road is long, and at times, when the sun is
+setting and the landscape fades away in purple twilight, the
+explorer becomes obsessed, against all reason, with the weird
+notion that the many centuries of civilisation are but a dream
+and the distant ages come back again.&nbsp; To this bareness the
+pleasant little town of Stockbridge, situated delightfully in the
+valley of the <a name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+22</span>Anton, is a gracious interlude.&nbsp; In its old
+churchyard the curious may still see the whimsical epitaph to
+John Bucket, landlord of the &ldquo;King&rsquo;s Head&rdquo; inn,
+who died, aged 67, in 1802:</p>
+<blockquote><p>And is, alas! poor Bucket gone?<br />
+Farewell, convivial honest John.<br />
+Oft at the well, by fatal stroke<br />
+Buckets like pitchers must be broke.<br />
+In this same motley shifting scene,<br />
+How various have thy fortunes been.<br />
+Now lifting high, now sinking low,<br />
+To-day the brim would overflow.<br />
+Thy bounty then would all supply<br />
+To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry.<br />
+To-morrow sunk as in a well,<br />
+Content unseen with Truth to dwell.<br />
+But high or low, or wet or dry,<br />
+No rotten stave could malice spy.<br />
+Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise<br />
+And claim thy station in the skies;<br />
+Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine,<br />
+Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In 1715, when the poet Gay rode horseback to Exeter and wrote
+a rhymed account of his journey for the Earl of Burlington, he
+described Stockbridge in doleful dumps.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Because
+for seven years there had been no election:</p>
+<blockquote><p>Sad melancholy ev&rsquo;ry visage wears;<br />
+What! no election come in seven long years!<br />
+Of all our race of Mayors, shall Snow alone<br />
+Be by Sir Richard&rsquo;s dedication known?<br />
+Our streets no more with tides of ale shall float!<br />
+Nor cobblers feast three years upon one vote.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Some of this seems cryptic, but it is explained by the fact of
+Sir Richard Steele having published, September 22nd, 1713, a
+quarto pamphlet <a name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+23</span>entitled <i>The Importance of Dunkirk considered</i> . .
+. <i>in a letter to the Bailiff of Stockbridge</i>, whose name
+was John Snow.&nbsp; The number of voters at Stockbridge was then
+about seventy, and its population chiefly cobblers.&nbsp; To say
+it was a corrupt borough is merely to state what might be said of
+almost every one at that time; but it seems to have been
+especially notable, even above its corrupt fellows, for a
+contemporary chronicler is found writing: &ldquo;It is a very wet
+town and the voters are wet too.&rdquo;&nbsp; He then continues,
+as one deploring the depreciation of securities, &ldquo;The
+ordinary price of a vote is &pound;60, but better times may
+come.&rdquo;&nbsp; But when elections only came septennially, the
+wet voters who subsisted three years upon one vote must have gone
+dry, poor fellows, an unconscionable while.</p>
+<p>Some ten miles north of Stockbridge, on the road past Andover,
+and overlooking the valley of the Anton, is Weyhill, a Hardy
+landmark of especial importance, for it is the point whence
+starts that fine tale, <i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i>,
+described in its sub-title as &ldquo;The Life and Death of a Man
+of Character.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is a pleasant country of soft
+riverain features by which you who seek to make pilgrimage to
+this spot shall fare, coming into the quiet, cheerful little
+market-town of Andover, and thenceforward near by the villages
+which owe their curiously feminine names to their baptismal
+river, the Anton.&nbsp; There you shall find Abbot&rsquo;s Ann
+and Little Ann, and I daresay, if you seek long enough, Mary Ann
+also.&nbsp; Weyhill, a hamlet in the parish of Penton Mewsey, is
+a place&mdash;although to look at it, you might not <a
+name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 24</span>suspect
+so&mdash;of hoary antiquity, and its Fair&mdash;still famous, and
+still the largest in England&mdash;old enough to be the subject
+of comment in <i>Piers Plowman&rsquo;s Vision</i>, in the
+line:</p>
+<blockquote><p>At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Alas that such things should be! this old-time six-days&rsquo;
+annual market is now reduced to four.&nbsp; It is held between
+October 10th and 13th, and divided into the Sheep, Horse, Hops,
+Cheese, Statute or Hiring, and Pleasure Fairs.&nbsp; On each of
+these days the three miles&rsquo; stretch of road from Andover is
+thronged with innumerable wayfarers and made unutterably dusty by
+the cabs and flys and the dense flocks of sheep and cattle on
+their way to the Fair ground.</p>
+<p>There are quaint survivals at Weyhill Fair.&nbsp; An
+umbrella-seller may still, with every recurrent year, be seen
+selling the most bulgeous and antique umbrellas, some of them
+almost archaic enough to belong to the days of Jonas Hanway, who
+introduced the use of such things in the eighteenth century; and
+unheard-of village industries display their produce to the
+astonished gaze.&nbsp; Here, for example, you see an exhibit of
+modern malt-shovels, together with the maker of them, the
+&ldquo;W. Choules from Penton&rdquo; whose name is painted up
+over his unassuming corner; and although the Londoner has
+probably never heard of, and certainly never seen, malt-shovels,
+the making of them is obviously still a living industry.</p>
+<p>Greatly to the stranger&rsquo;s surprise, Weyhill, although in
+fact situated above the valley of the Anton, does not appear to
+be situated on a hill at <a name="page25"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 25</span>all.&nbsp; The road to &ldquo;Weydon
+Priors,&rdquo; by which name it figures in <i>The Mayor of
+Casterbridge</i>, is indeed, as the novelist sufficiently hints,
+of no very marked features.&nbsp; It is &ldquo;a road neither
+straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly,&rdquo; and at
+times other than Fair-time is as quiet a country road&mdash;for a
+high road&mdash;as you shall meet; and, except for that one week
+in the year, Weyhill is as a derelict village.&nbsp; There, on a
+grassy tableland, stand, deserted for fifty-one weeks out of
+every fifty-two, the whitewashed booths and rows of sheds that
+annually for a brief space do so strenuous a trade, and scarce a
+human being comes into view.&nbsp; Even now, just as in the
+beginning of the story, Weyhill does not grow: &ldquo;Pulling
+down is more the nater of Weydon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image24" href="images/p24.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Weyhill Fair"
+title=
+"Weyhill Fair"
+ src="images/p24.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>It is on the last day of the old six-days&rsquo; Fair, in
+1829, that the story opens, with a man and woman&mdash;the woman
+carrying a child&mdash;walking along this dusty road.&nbsp; That
+they were man and wife was, according to the novelist&rsquo;s
+sardonic humour, plain to see, for they carried along with them a
+&ldquo;stale familiarity, like a nimbus.&rdquo;&nbsp; The man was
+the hay-trusser, Michael Henchard, whose after rise to be Mayor
+of Casterbridge and whose final fall are chronicled in the
+story.&nbsp; This opening scene is merely in the nature of a
+prologue, disclosing the itinerant hay-trusser seeking work,
+coming to the Fair and there selling his wife for five guineas to
+the only bidder, a sailor&mdash;the second chapter resuming the
+march of events eighteen years later.</p>
+<h2><a name="page26"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+26</span>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">STOCKBRIDGE TO
+SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Returning</span> to Stockbridge, <i>en
+route</i> for Salisbury, eight miles more of roads of the same
+unchanging characteristics, but growing more plentifully carpeted
+with crushed flints as we advance, bring us to Wiltshire and to a
+junction with the Exeter Road from Andover at Lobcombe
+Corner.&nbsp; In the neighbourhood are &ldquo;the Wallops,&rdquo;
+as local parlance refers to a group of three villages, Over and
+Nether Wallop, with the wayside settlement of Little (or Middle)
+Wallop in between.&nbsp; It is this last-named to which Mr. Hardy
+refers when he tells how the ruined and broken-hearted Mayor of
+Casterbridge, fleeing from the scene of his vanished greatness
+and resuming his early occupation of hay-trusser, became employed
+at a &ldquo;pastoral farm near the old western highway. . .
+.&nbsp; He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a
+sense that, situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles,
+he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he
+would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Dorchester, otherwise Casterbridge, is in fact just forty-nine
+and a half miles distant, down this old Exeter Road.</p>
+<p>In less than another mile on our westward way <a
+name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 27</span>the sight of
+a solitary house in all this apparently uninhabited wilderness
+arouses speculations in the pilgrim&rsquo;s
+mind&mdash;speculations resolved on approach, when the sight of
+the recently restored picture-sign of the &ldquo;Pheasant,&rdquo;
+reared up on its posts on the short grass of the open down,
+opposite its door, proclaims this to be the old coaching inn once
+famed as &ldquo;Winterslow Hut.&rdquo;&nbsp; None ever spoke of
+the inn in those days as the &ldquo;Pheasant,&rdquo; although
+that was the sign of it, plainly to be seen; as &ldquo;Winterslow
+Hut&rdquo; it was always known, and a more lonely, forbidding
+place of seclusion from the haunts of man it would be difficult
+to find.&nbsp; It was once, appropriately enough, the retreat of
+a lonely, forbidding person&mdash;the self-selected place of
+exile from society of Hazlitt, the essayist, who, parting from
+his wife at the village of West Winterslow (whence the inn takes
+its name of &ldquo;Winterslow Hut&rdquo;) two miles away, lived
+here from 1819 to 1828.&nbsp; Here he wrote the essays on
+&ldquo;Persons one would wish to have seen,&rdquo; and the much
+less sociable essay, &ldquo;On Living to One&rsquo;s
+Self&rdquo;&mdash;an art he practised here to his own
+satisfaction and the cheerful resignation of the many persons
+with whom he quarrelled.&nbsp; And here he saw the Exeter Mail
+and the stage-coaches go by, and must have found the place even
+lonelier, in the intervals after their passing, than it seems now
+that the Road, as an institution, is dead and the Rail conveys
+the traffic to and from Salisbury and the west, some two miles
+distant, across country hidden from view from this point beneath
+the swelling shoulders of the unchanging downs.</p>
+<p>Salisbury spire is soon seen, when the long drop <a
+name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 28</span>into the
+valley of the Wiltshire Avon, down Three Mile Hill, begins; its
+slender spire, the tallest in England, thrusting its long
+needle-point 404 feet into the blue, and oddly peering out from
+the swooping sides of the downs, long before any suspicion of
+Sarum itself&mdash;as the milestones style it&mdash;has occupied
+the mind of the literary pilgrim.</p>
+<p>Salisbury, like some bland and contented elderly spinster,
+does not look its age.&nbsp; When you are told how Old Sarum was
+abandoned, New Sarum founded, and everything recreated <i>ad
+hoc</i> at the command of Bishop Poore, impelled thereto by a
+vision, in the then customary way, you are so impressed with what
+we are used to regard as such thoroughly &ldquo;American&rdquo;
+proceedings that you forget, in the apparent modernity of such a
+method, how very long ago all this was done.&nbsp; This great
+change of site took place about 1220, and sixty years later the
+great cathedral, remarkable and indeed unique among all our
+cathedrals for being designed and built, from the laying of the
+foundation stone to the roofing-in of the building, in
+one&mdash;the Early English&mdash;style, was completed.&nbsp; It
+was actually a century later that the spire itself was
+finished.</p>
+<p>Much of this seeming youthfulness of Salisbury is due to the
+regularity of plan upon which the city is laid out, and to the
+comparative breadth of its streets.&nbsp; To that phenomenally
+simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, whose like certainly could never
+have been met with outside the pages of <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>,
+Salisbury seemed &ldquo;a very desperate sort of place; an
+exceedingly wild and dissipated city.&rdquo;&nbsp; Here we smile
+superior, although it is true <a name="page29"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 29</span>that in his short story, <i>On the
+Western Circuit</i>, Mr. Hardy presents Melchester, as he names
+this fair city, as given over to blazing orgies in the progress
+of Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting merry-go-rounds,
+glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than they
+ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he
+should have been.&nbsp; Granting the truth of this picture of
+Melchester Fair, it is to be observed that this is but an
+interlude in a twelvemonth&rsquo;s programme of polished,
+decorous, and well-ordered urbanity.&nbsp; Its character is more
+truly portrayed in <i>Jude the Obscure</i>, where Sue Bridehead
+having gone to the city, to enter the Training College in the
+Close, her cousin Jude follows her.&nbsp; He found it &ldquo;a
+quiet and soothing place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its
+tone; a spot where worldly learning and intellectual smartness
+had no establishment.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was here he obtained work
+at his trade of stonemason, labouring on the restoration of the
+cathedral; here that Sue shocked his ecclesiastical and
+medi&aelig;val bent, meeting his suggestion that they should sit
+for a talk in the cathedral by the proposal that she would rather
+wait in the railway station: &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the centre of
+town life now&mdash;the cathedral has had its day!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+To his shocked interjection, &ldquo;How modern you are!&rdquo;
+she replied defensively, &ldquo;I am not modern, either.&nbsp; I
+am more ancient than medi&aelig;valism, if you only knew&rdquo;;
+meaning thereby that she was enamoured of classicism and the old
+pagans.</p>
+<p>To Sue the cathedral was not unsympathetic merely by force of
+that clear-cut regularity which impresses most beholders with a
+sense of a splendid, <a name="page30"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 30</span>but cold, perfection.&nbsp; There are
+those who compare this great fane with Tennyson&rsquo;s Lady
+Clara Vere de Vere:</p>
+<blockquote><p>Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly
+null,<br />
+Dead perfection, no more;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>but while those critics are critics only of design and carved
+stones, who would welcome something in its regular features
+paralleled by a tip-tilted nose in a human face, Sue was
+obviously preoccupied by the sense that it, not alone among
+cathedrals, has outlived the devotional needs that produced it,
+and is little more than a magnificent museum of architectural
+antiquities.&nbsp; That magnificence would be even more complete
+and pronounced had not the egregious James Wyatt been let loose
+upon the &ldquo;restoration&rdquo; of it, towards the close of
+the eighteenth century, when he cast out and destroyed most of
+its internal adornments, and pulled down and utterly obliterated
+the beautiful detached bell tower, coeval with the cathedral
+itself, which stood, away from it, on the north side.</p>
+<p>It is perhaps worthy of remark that there may be noticed in
+the cathedral the tomb, with somewhat bombastic inscription, of
+Dr. D&rsquo;Albigny Turberville, the seventeenth-century oculist,
+who died, aged 85, in 1696.&nbsp; The flagrant Latin, which tells
+us that his fame shall perish no sooner than this marble, does
+not allow for human forgetfulness, nor for the advances of
+science.</p>
+<p>The Normal School in the Close, whence Sue escaped, after
+being confined to her room as a punishment for her night&rsquo;s
+escapade with Jude, is a prominent building, described as
+&ldquo;an ancient <a name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+31</span>edifice of the fifteenth century, once a palace . . .
+with mullioned and transomed windows, and a courtyard in front
+shut in from the road by a wall.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image30" href="images/p30.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Salisbury Cathedral"
+title=
+"Salisbury Cathedral"
+ src="images/p30.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>From the ever-impending tragedy of Jude&rsquo;s ambitions it
+is a relief to turn to the pure comedy of Betty Dornell, the
+first Countess of Wessex, in that collection of diverting short
+stories, <i>A Group of Noble Dames</i>.&nbsp; Looking upon those
+two old inns, the &ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo; in the High Street and
+the &ldquo;White Hart,&rdquo; we are reminded that it was to the
+first-named that Betty resorted with that husband with whom,
+although married at an early age, she had not lived.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Twice we met by accident,&rsquo; pleaded Betty
+to her mother.&nbsp; &lsquo;Once at Abbot&rsquo;s Cernel and
+another time at the &ldquo;Red Lion,&rdquo;
+Melchester.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;O, thou deceitful girl!&rsquo; cried Mrs.
+Dornell.&nbsp; &lsquo;An accident took you to the &ldquo;Red
+Lion&rdquo; whilst I was staying at the &ldquo;White
+Hart&rdquo;!&nbsp; I remember&mdash;you came in at twelve
+o&rsquo;clock at night and said you&rsquo;d been to see the
+cathedral by the light o&rsquo; the moon!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;My ever-honoured mamma, so I had!&nbsp; I only
+went to the &ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo; with him
+afterwards.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nine miles to the north of Melchester stands Stonehenge,
+reached after their flight through the deserted midnight streets
+of the city by Tess and Angel Clare, vainly endeavouring to elude
+justice after the murder of the sham D&rsquo;Urberville at
+Sandbourne.&nbsp; The night was &ldquo;as dark as a cave,&rdquo;
+and a stiff breeze blew as they came out upon the black solitudes
+of Salisbury Plain.&nbsp; For some miles they had proceeded thus,
+when &ldquo;on a sudden <a name="page32"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 32</span>Clare became conscious of some vast
+erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass.&nbsp;
+They had almost struck themselves against it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;What monstrous place is this?&rsquo; said
+Angel.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;It hums,&rsquo; said she.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Hearken!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming
+tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed
+harp.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was indeed Stonehenge, &ldquo;a very Temple
+of the Winds.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And here, as the night wore away, and Tess lay sleeping on the
+Altar Stone, and the great trilithons began to show up blackly
+against the coming dawn, the figure of a man advancing towards
+them appeared rising out of the hollows of the great plain.&nbsp;
+At the same time Clare heard the brush of feet behind him: they
+were surrounded.&nbsp; Thoughts of resistance came to him; but
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s no use, sir,&rsquo; said the foremost
+plain-clothes man: &lsquo;There are sixteen of us on the Plain,
+and the whole country is reared.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; And so they
+stood watching while Tess finished her sleep.</p>
+<p>Stonehenge sadly requires such romantic passages as this to
+renew its interest, for, truth to tell, the first glimpse of this
+mysterious monument of prehistoric ages is wofully
+disappointing.&nbsp; No use to strive against that disappointment
+as you come up the long rises from Amesbury under the midday sun
+and see its every time-worn cranny displayed mercilessly in the
+impudent eye of day: the interval between anticipation and
+realisation is too wide, and the apparent smallness and
+insignificance of the great stone circles must, although
+unwillingly, be allowed.&nbsp; This comparative insignificance
+is, however, largely the effect of their almost boundless <a
+name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 33</span>environment
+of vast downs, tumid with the attendant circles of prehistoric
+tumuli, each tumulus or barrow crowned with its clump of trees,
+like the tufted plumes of a hearse.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image32" href="images/p32.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Stonehenge"
+title=
+"Stonehenge"
+ src="images/p32.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Mystery continues to shroud the origin of Stonehenge, which
+was probably standing when the Romans first overran Britain, and
+seems by the most reasoned theories to have really been a Temple
+of the Sun.&nbsp; Its name is only the comparatively modern one
+of &ldquo;Stanenges,&rdquo; or &ldquo;the hanging stones,&rdquo;
+given by the Saxons, who discovered it with as much astonishment
+as exhibited by any one of a later age, and so named it, not from
+any reference to the capital punishment of <i>sus. per coll.</i>,
+but from the great lintel-stones that are laid flat upon the tall
+rude columns, and may fancifully be said to hang in mid-air, at a
+height of twenty-five feet.</p>
+<p>Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a &ldquo;monument to
+all time,&rdquo; speak not according to knowledge, for the poor
+old relic is becoming sadly weatherworn and decrepit, and has
+aged rapidly of late years.&nbsp; No good has been wrought it by
+the fussy interferences and impertinences of
+&ldquo;scientific&rdquo; men, who, taking advantage of an alleged
+necessity for shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the
+soil and strove to wrest its secret by the method of sifting the
+spadesful of earth and stone chippings.&nbsp; Then a last
+indignity befell it.&nbsp; Sir Edward Antrobus, of Amesbury, lord
+of the manor, claimed Stonehenge as his manorial property, and,
+erecting a barbed-wire fence around it, levied a fee of a
+shilling a head for admission through the turnstiles that click
+you through, for all the world as though <a
+name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 34</span>you were
+entering some Earl&rsquo;s Court Exhibition.&nbsp; The impudence
+that has found it possible to do these things, in defiance of
+undoubted public rights of way, bulks majestically&mdash;much
+larger than Stonehenge itself, whose grey pile it indeed
+belittles and vulgarises.</p>
+<h2><a name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+35</span>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">THE OLD COACH-ROAD:
+SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is thirty-eight and a half miles
+from Salisbury to Dorchester, the &ldquo;Casterbridge&rdquo; of
+the novels, along the old coach-road to Exeter.&nbsp; Speaking as
+an exploratory cyclist, I would ten times rather go the reverse
+way, from west to east, for the gradients are all against the
+westward traveller, and westerly winds are the prevailing airs
+during summer and autumn.&nbsp; It is, indeed, a terribly
+difficult road, exposed, and very trying in its long rises.&nbsp;
+One charming interlude there is, three miles from Salisbury, at
+the beautifully situated little village of Coombe Bissett, set
+down in the deep valley of an affluent of the Wiltshire Avon; but
+it is heartbreaking work climbing out of it again, up the
+inclines of Crowden Down.&nbsp; At eight miles&rsquo; distance
+from Salisbury the old Woodyates Inn, long since re-christened
+the &ldquo;Shaftesbury Arms,&rdquo; stands in a lonely situation
+beside the road, looking regretful for bygone coaching
+days.&nbsp; Its old name, deriving from &ldquo;wood-gates,&rdquo;
+indicated its position on the south-western marches of the wooded
+district of Cranborne Chase.&nbsp; When railways disestablished
+coaches and the road resumed its solitude, the old inn became for
+a time the home of William Day&rsquo;s <a name="page36"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 36</span>training establishment for
+racehorses.&nbsp; He tells, in his recollections, of the drinking
+habits of the old Wiltshire farmers in general, and of two in
+particular, who used to call at Woodyates when on their way to or
+from Salisbury.&nbsp; They would talk, over the fire and their
+glasses of grog, somewhat in this fashion of their drunken
+exploits when riding home horseback: &ldquo;Well, John, I fell
+off ten times.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, Thomas, and I fell off a
+dozen times: you see, I rode the old black horse, and he always
+jerks me about so.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was said that there was
+scarcely a yard of ground over the eight miles that these
+worthies had not fallen on to from their horses.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image36" href="images/p36.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Pentridge"
+title=
+"Pentridge"
+ src="images/p36.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>At the distance of a mile from the coach-road at this point,
+where, by the way, we leave Wilts and enter Dorset, is the Hardy
+landmark of &ldquo;Trantridge,&rdquo; to be identified with the
+little village of Pentridge set down on the map.&nbsp; It was to
+Trantridge that Tess came early in her career, from her home at
+Marnhull in the Vale of Blackmore, to take service with Mrs.
+Stoke-D&rsquo;Urberville of The <a name="page37"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 37</span>Slopes, relict of Mr. Simon Stoke,
+merchant or money-lender, who had unwarrantably assumed the name,
+the crest, and arms of the knightly
+D&rsquo;Urbervilles&mdash;dead and gone and powerless to resent
+the affront.&nbsp; It would be useless to seek The Slopes, rising
+in all the glory of its new crimson brick &ldquo;like a geranium
+bloom against the subdued colours around&rdquo;; but plain to
+see, not far away, is the &ldquo;soft azure landscape of the
+Chase&mdash;a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the
+few remaining woodlands in England, of undoubted prim&aelig;val
+date.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was in the Chase that the ruin of Tess was
+wrought by Alec D&rsquo;Urberville.</p>
+<p>The exceedingly rustic village of Pentridge nestles under the
+lee of a long, partly wooded hill, probably the
+&ldquo;ridge&rdquo; referred to in the place-name.&nbsp; In the
+little highly restored or rebuilt church with the stone spirelet
+is now to be seen, since August, 1902, when it was erected, the
+plain white marble tablet:</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">To
+the Memory of</span><br />
+ROBERT BROWNING,</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">of Woodyates, in this parish, who
+died Nov. 25th, 1746,<br />
+and is the first known forefather of<br />
+Robert Browning, the poet.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">He was formerly footman and butler
+in the<br />
+Bankes family.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;All service ranks the same
+with God.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="smcap">Browning</span>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>This Tablet</i><br />
+was erected by some of the poet&rsquo;s friends and admirers<br
+/>
+1902.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Much reflected glory doubtless accrues to &ldquo;the Bankes
+family&rdquo; from this tablet, which owes its being <a
+name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 38</span>to the
+exertions of Dr. F. J. Furnivall.&nbsp; It seems that the
+poet&rsquo;s ancestor, after severing his connection with the
+Bankes, became landlord of the Woodyates Inn, and churchwarden
+here.</p>
+<p>This entrance to Dorsetshire is not so favourable an one as
+that, for example, from Somerset, by Templecombe and Stalbridge
+or Sherborne, where Dorset is indeed like unto the Land of
+Promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, where herds of
+cattle low musically in mead or byre, and the earth is
+alluvial&mdash;rich, deep, and sticky.</p>
+<p>Here is the more arid, elevated country of open down; chalky,
+and producing only coarse grass, pine-trees, bracken, and
+furze&mdash;a sheep-grazing, as opposed to a cattle-rearing,
+district.&nbsp; Dorset is indeed a greatly varied county in the
+character of its soils.&nbsp; The sheep-grazing districts may be
+said to be this of the north-east border, and those other
+stretches of lofty, almost waterless chalk downs, running due
+east and west, parallel with the coast, with a similarly lengthy,
+but broader, stretch in a like direction, from where the downs
+rise from the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, past Milton Abbas
+and Cerne Abbas, on to Beaminster.&nbsp; In between these are the
+valleys of the River Frome&mdash;the &ldquo;Vale of Great
+Dairies&rdquo; of <i>Tess of the D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i>, and the
+&ldquo;Vale of Little Dairies&rdquo; in the same story, otherwise
+Blackmore Vale.&nbsp; A glance at the map will show the River
+Frome flowing in its &ldquo;green trough of sappiness and
+humidity&rdquo; from the neighbourhood of Beaminster, past
+Chilfroom, Frome Vanchurch, and Frampton, which most obviously
+take their name from the stream, to Dorchester, Moreton, Wool,
+and <a name="page39"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+39</span>Wareham, whence it pours its enriching waters into Poole
+Harbour; and another glance will discover the Vale of Little
+Dairies, or Blackmore, bounded by Blandford and Minterne Magna,
+and the heights of High Stoy on the south, and by Shaftesbury,
+Wincanton, and Sherborne on the north; including within its
+compass Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton, together with a host
+of small villages.&nbsp; The natural outlet of this last
+district&mdash;which, despite the name of &ldquo;Little
+Dairies,&rdquo; given to it in the pages of the novels, is a
+larger area than that of the Frome valley, and of course produces
+in the aggregation more&mdash;is the railway junction of
+Templecombe, which, beyond being a mere junction, is also an
+exceedingly busy and bustling place for the receipt of all this
+dairy produce of Blackmore.</p>
+<p>Such are, roughly, the main agricultural divisions of Dorset,
+which is, to the hard-working farmer who is his own bailiff, with
+his family to aid in the dairy-work, still a county where ends
+may be made to meet, with a considerable selvedge or overlapping
+to sweeten his industry.&nbsp; Despite a very general belief
+current in towns, there are still considerable numbers of these
+families.&nbsp; The farmer and his wife have largely grown out of
+the rustic speech, and their sons and daughters&mdash;the
+daughters especially, the adaptive dears!&mdash;have got culture
+for leisure moments, but they are none the less practical for
+that.&nbsp; A generation ago, perhaps, things were not so
+pleasing, for the then would-be up-to-date attempted the
+absurdity of aping the leisured classes, while seeking to carry
+on farming and obtain a living by it.&nbsp; Such as those came to
+grief, and <a name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+40</span>were rightly the butts of outside observers, as well as
+of moralists of their own class.&nbsp; A thorough-going farmer of
+that period, who saw the daughters of his neighbour going on the
+way to their music-lesson, reported his feelings and sayings as
+follows:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;While I and an&rsquo; my wife were out a-milken, they
+maidens went by, an&rsquo; I zaid to her, &lsquo;Where be they
+maidens a-gwoin&rsquo;?&rsquo; an&rsquo; she zaid, &lsquo;Oh!
+they be a-gwoin&rsquo; to their music.&rsquo;&nbsp; An&rsquo; I
+zaid, &lsquo;Oh! a-gwoin&rsquo; to their music at
+milken-time!&nbsp; That &rsquo;ull come to zom&rsquo;ehat, that
+wull.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; And it doubtless did come to a pretty
+considerable deal, if&mdash;as a doctor might say&mdash;the
+course of the disease was normal.</p>
+<p>Resuming the main road, which for the distance of a mile
+beyond Woodyates is identical with the old Roman road, the Via
+Iceniana, that ancient relic of a past civilisation may presently
+be seen parting company from the modern highway, and going off by
+itself, to the left, across the downs, making for the great
+fortified hill of Badbury Rings.&nbsp; It is known locally as the
+Achling Dyke, and is somewhat conspicuously elevated above the
+bracken, the gorse, and heather of these wilds.</p>
+<p>Now, passing a few scattered cottages, we come&mdash;in
+fifteen miles from Coombe Bissett&mdash;to a village, the first
+on this lonely main road.&nbsp; Tarrant Hinton, this welcome
+village, stands on a sparkling little stream, without doubt the
+&ldquo;tarrant,&rdquo; or torrent, whence it and a small
+sisterhood of neighbouring settlements obtain a generic
+name.&nbsp; There are Tarrant Gunville, Tarrant Monkton, Tarrant
+Rawston, Tarrant Rushton, Tarrant Keynston, and Tarrant Crawford;
+and then, as below the last-named place <a
+name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 41</span>the little
+stream falls into the Stour, there are no more Tarrants.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image41" href="images/p41.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Eastbury"
+title=
+"Eastbury"
+ src="images/p41.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>To Tarrant Gunville belongs Eastbury Park, a place of
+Hardyesque and romantic aspect; but, so far, not made the vehicle
+of any of his stories.&nbsp; It has, to be sure, a story of its
+own&mdash;a tale of vaulting ambition which fell on t&rsquo;other
+side.&nbsp; Eastbury was built, like many another ponderous and
+overgrown mansion of the eighteenth century, by Vanbrugh, to the
+commission of George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty,
+who, growing enormously rich by long-continued peculation,
+blossomed out as a patron of the arts and a friend of
+literature.&nbsp; But before his huge house could be completed he
+was gathered to his fathers and to judgment upon his illegitimate
+pickings, leaving all his wealth to his grandnephew, George Bubb
+<a name="page42"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 42</span>Dodington,
+afterwards Lord Melcombe, who lavished &pound;140,000 on the
+completion of the works.&nbsp; Here he too became a patron, and
+entertained the literary men of his time until 1762, when, dying,
+the property went to Earl Temple, who, unable to afford the
+expense of maintaining the immense place, actually
+offered&mdash;and offered in vain&mdash;an income of &pound;200 a
+year to any one who would reside at Eastbury and keep it in
+repair.&nbsp; As this bait failed, the great house was dismantled
+and demolished, piecemeal, in 1795, only one wing remaining to
+attest its former grandeur.</p>
+<p>But traces of that grandeur are not wanting, from the iron
+railings, stone piers, and decorative kerbs, carved boldly with
+an acanthus-leaved design, that conduct into the demesne, to the
+magnificent clumps of beeches and other forest trees studding the
+sward of what was the park; and that remaining wing itself, still
+disclosing in its arcade, or loggia, something of
+Vanbrugh&rsquo;s design.</p>
+<p>Eastbury, of course, is haunted&mdash;so much is to be
+expected of such a place; but those who have seen the headless
+coachman and his ghostly four-in-hand issuing from the park
+gates, or returning, are growing scarce, and times are become so
+sceptical that even they cannot obtain credence.&nbsp; So, with a
+sigh for the decay of belief, we will e&rsquo;en on through
+Pimperne down to Blandford, which good town, of fine dignified
+classic architectural presence, the coach-road enters in a timid
+back-doors manner, down a narrow byway.</p>
+<p>Blandford is further dignified by that curious pedantic
+Latinity very marked in many Dorsetshire place-names.&nbsp; In
+this manner it is made to figure <a name="page43"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 43</span>as &ldquo;Blandford Forum,&rdquo; a
+rendering of &ldquo;Blandford Market.&rdquo;&nbsp; In Mr. Thomas
+Hardy&rsquo;s pages it is &ldquo;Shottsford Forum,&rdquo; and so
+appears in his story of <i>Barbara of the House of Grebe</i>, in
+<i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>, and again in <i>The
+Woodlanders</i>, wherein it is stated, from the mouth of a rustic
+character, that &ldquo;Shottsford is Shottsford still: you
+can&rsquo;t victual your carcass there unless you&rsquo;ve got
+money, and you can&rsquo;t buy a cup of genuine there, whether or
+no&rdquo;; this last a sad drawback from the amenities of a
+delightful town.&nbsp; But there is a very excellent pump, and an
+historic, in the broad High Street, whereon, cast in enduring
+iron, it may be read how a certain John Bastard, a
+&ldquo;considerable sharer&rdquo; in the great calamity by which
+Blandford was burnt in 1731, &ldquo;humbly erected this monument,
+in grateful Acknowledgement of the Divine Mercy, That has since
+raised this Town, Like the Phoenix from its Ashes, to its present
+flourishing and beautiful State.&rdquo;&nbsp; That, it will be
+allowed, is rather a fine, curly, and romantic way of putting
+it.&nbsp; A rider to this inscription goes on to say that in 1899
+the Corporation of Blandford converted the pump into a
+drinking-fountain, and that the Blandford Waterworks Company, not
+halting in good deeds, gratuitously supplies the water.</p>
+<p>The pilgrim who, arriving in Blandford hot, dusty and thirsty,
+and perhaps mindful of that alleged impossibility of buying a cup
+of genuine, essays to drink from the fountain, is at first
+surprised at the keen interest taken in his proceedings by a
+quickly collecting group of urchins.&nbsp; Their curiosity
+appears to be in the nature of surprise at the sight of a grown
+man drinking water, but light is shed upon <a
+name="page44"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 44</span>it when,
+pressing hard the obstinate knob that releases the fount, the
+thing suddenly gives way and squirts half a pint or so up his
+sleeve.&nbsp; This is a never-failing form of entertainment to
+the youth of Blandford, and a cheap one.</p>
+<p>Not once, but several times has Blandford been destroyed by
+fire.&nbsp; It owed these disasters to the old Dorsetshire
+fashion of thatched roofs, and only in time, by dint of repeated
+happenings in this sort, learned wisdom.&nbsp; This light dawned
+at the time when the classic revival in architecture was
+flourishing, and thus, as already hinted, Blandford&rsquo;s High
+Street is wholly of that character.&nbsp; Classicism does not
+often make for beauty in English towns, but here the general
+effect is admirable, and although the stone of the fine
+church-tower&mdash;designed in the same taste&mdash;is of a
+jaundiced greenish-yellow hue, it is a noble feature.</p>
+<p>Blandford&rsquo;s natives have sometimes won to a great deal
+more than local fame; witness Alfred Stevens, the designer of the
+Wellington monument in St. Paul&rsquo;s Cathedral, who was born
+in 1817, in Salisbury Street, that back-doors coach-road entrance
+into the town already mentioned.&nbsp; Willowes, the unhappy
+husband of Barbara, of the House of Grebe, was a descendant of
+one of the old families of glass-painters of Shottsford mentioned
+in that story, and more particularly referred to by Aubrey, the
+antiquary, who says: &ldquo;Before the Reformation, I believe
+there was no country or great town in England but had glasse
+painters.&nbsp; Old Harding of Blandford in Dorsetshire, where I
+went to schoole, was the only country glasse painter that ever I
+knew.&nbsp; Upon play daies I was wont to visit <a
+name="page46"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 46</span>his shop and
+furnaces.&nbsp; He dyed about 1643, aged about 83 or
+more.&rdquo;&nbsp; That craft has long since died out from the
+town.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image45" href="images/p45.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Blandford Forum"
+title=
+"Blandford Forum"
+ src="images/p45.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>A beautiful backward view of the town is obtained on leaving
+it, over the Town Bridge that spans the sluggish, lily-grown
+Stour, at the entrance to Lord Portman&rsquo;s noble park of
+Bryanstone.&nbsp; Here a dense overarching canopy of trees gives
+a grateful shade on summer days and frames the distant prospect
+whence the classic tower of the church grandly rises.&nbsp; The
+entrance-gates to the domain of Bryanstone are jealously kept
+locked and guarded, but there be ways of circumventing this
+churlish exclusiveness and of seeing the astonishingly beautiful
+scenery of the park, as the present writer has by chance
+discovered for himself.&nbsp; You, at the cost of some effort in
+hill-climbing, take the defences in the rear, and entering away
+back by the farmstead and workshops of the estate, come down by
+the finest of the scenery to those selfsame locked gates at these
+outskirts of Blandford, to observe and hear with some secret
+satisfaction the expressed horror of the lodge-keeper, only too
+anxious to let you out and be rid of you.</p>
+<p>But, for the unenterprising, there is a sufficiently beautiful
+distant view of the park and of the new mansion from the Town
+Bridge.&nbsp; A former Lord Portman in 1780 employed James Wyatt
+to build him a classic mansion which remained until the rule of
+the present owner of the title, who demolished and replaced it
+with the fine mansion designed by Norman Shaw, R.A., and built in
+red brick and Portland stone.</p>
+<h2><a name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+47</span>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">THE OLD COACH-ROAD:
+BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">From</span> this point the old coach-road
+becomes astonishingly hilly, so that mere words cannot accurately
+portray it, and recourse must be had to the eloquent armoury of
+the printer&rsquo;s case to set it forth in any truly convincing
+manner.&nbsp; The series of semicircular dumpling hills is not
+adequately to be shadowed forth by the aid of mere
+brackets&mdash;we must picture them thus:</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p47.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Representation of Hills in Type"
+title=
+"Representation of Hills in Type"
+ src="images/p47.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>and, to give some notion of the quality of the surface during
+the heats of summer, let a glaring white surface five inches deep
+in dust and powdered flint be imagined, the whole stirred up into
+a stifling halo of floating particles by the frequent passage of
+a flock of sheep.&nbsp; Such is the Exeter Road between Blandford
+and Dorchester in the merry months of summer.</p>
+<p>Five miles of this bring us to the village of Winterborne
+Whitchurch, anciently referred to as &ldquo;Album
+Monasterium&rdquo; or &ldquo;Blaunch Minster,&rdquo; situated in
+the stony bottom where the little stream called the Winterborne
+does not in summer flow across the road.&nbsp; John Wesley,
+grandfather of the <a name="page48"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+48</span>more famous John, the founder of Methodism, was vicar of
+this parish in 1658, and on the Restoration was dispossessed,
+when he took to a life of itinerant preaching amid the hills and
+dales of Dorsetshire, not altogether dissimilar from that of his
+celebrated grandson.&nbsp; Here, about 1540, was born George
+Turberville, the poet.&nbsp; To this succeeds, in less than
+another three miles, Milborne St. Andrew, on the less dried up
+Mill Bourne.&nbsp; This, the &ldquo;Millpond St.
+Jude&rsquo;s&rdquo; alluded to in <i>Far from the Madding
+Crowd</i>, is a pretty place, of an old-world coaching interest,
+reflected from its partly thatched &ldquo;Royal Oak&rdquo; inn
+and the post office, once the &ldquo;White Hart,&rdquo; with the
+imposing effigy of a white hart still prominent on its cornice,
+in company with those of two foxes and a row of miniature
+cannon.&nbsp; Up along a byroad, past the feathery poplars that
+lend so feminine an air of beauty to the village, is the church,
+and then the Manor House Farm, once the residence of the Mansell
+Pleydells, who since the building of Whatcombe House, near by
+Winterborne Whitchurch, in 1758, have left this residence to
+farming.&nbsp; The red-brick pillars of the entrance-gates
+remain&mdash;partly ruined and standing foolishly, without a
+trace of the old carriage drive that once went between
+them&mdash;on the grass, surmounted still with sculptured
+displays of military trophies surrounding a cartouche bearing the
+lichened arms of the Pleydells, including an inescutcheon of
+pretence showing that before they allied themselves with a
+Mansell they married money with a Morton.&nbsp; It is a fine
+house, full of character, with unusually&mdash;and somewhat
+foreign-looking&mdash;high-pitched roof.&nbsp; Grand old trees
+lead up to it, and in the distance <a name="page49"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 49</span>one perceives a manorial
+pigeon-house, against the skyline.&nbsp; The old drive led round
+to the other side of the mansion, where it is divided from the
+meadows by a moatlike cut in the Mill Bourne, now, however,
+richer in mud than in water, and crossed by a brick bridge.&nbsp;
+We can picture Lady Constantine, the susceptible young and
+wealthy widow of the defunct Sir Blount, stealing at night over
+this bridge, to visit Swithin St. Cleeve, stargazing in his
+lonely tower on the hilltop.&nbsp; In the garden, with its
+sundial, are pretty old-world box-edged flower-beds and shady
+arbours.&nbsp; Foundations of many demolished buildings are
+traceable in the meadows.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image49" href="images/p49.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew"
+title=
+"The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew"
+ src="images/p49.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The scene of <i>Two on a Tower</i> is a selection from various
+places.&nbsp; &ldquo;The tower,&rdquo; Mr. Hardy writes <a
+name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 50</span>to me,
+&ldquo;had two or three originals&mdash;Horton, Charborough,
+etc.&rdquo;&nbsp; Those other places are duly described in these
+pages, but the &ldquo;etc.&rdquo; covers the curious brick
+obelisk built on the summit of the earthwork-encircled hill near
+by this old manor-house of Milborne St. Andrew, and called
+Weatherbury Castle.&nbsp; Standing on this &ldquo;fir-shrouded
+hilltop,&rdquo; one may see, for many miles around, summer
+conflagrations among the furze on Bere Heath, the tall tower in
+Charborough Park, which, much more than this obelisk, resembles
+Swithin&rsquo;s observatory, and, near at hand, below, this old
+manor-house, the &ldquo;Welland House&rdquo; of the story.&nbsp;
+From this eyrie, too, you perceive the old Exeter Road swooping
+whitely downhill, and hear the hum of threshing-machines, coming
+up, like the drowsy buzz of insects, from the vale.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image50" href="images/p50.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Weatherbury Castle"
+title=
+"Weatherbury Castle"
+ src="images/p50.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>It is not difficult to detect sarcasm in the description of
+this hill.&nbsp; It &ldquo;was (according to some <a
+name="page52"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 52</span>antiquaries)
+an old Roman camp&mdash;if it were not (as others insisted) an
+old British castle, or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field of
+Witanagemote&mdash;with remains of an outer and an inner vallum,
+a winding path leading up between their overlapping ends by an
+easy ascent.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image51" href="images/p51.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle"
+title=
+"The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle"
+ src="images/p51.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Not so easy, really&mdash;indeed, demanding a rather strenuous
+climb.&nbsp; And when you are on the crest of that ancient glacis
+(impregnable it might well have been when men fought hand to
+hand) it is with some difficulty you penetrate the dense woodland
+growing within this <i>ceinture</i>.&nbsp; Little can in these
+times be seen of the obelisk from without: only from one
+particular view-point can you observe its ultimate inches and the
+metal ball that caps it, rising mysteriously from amid the
+topmost branches of the fir-trees.&nbsp; Its situation is exactly
+described in the story: &ldquo;The gloom and solitude which
+prevailed round the base were remarkable.&nbsp; The sob of the
+environing trees&rdquo; (how like, by the way, to that passage in
+Mr. W. S. Gilbert&rsquo;s <i>Ruddigore</i>, &ldquo;the sob of the
+breeze is heard in the trees&rdquo;) &ldquo;was here expressively
+manifest, and, moved by the light breeze, their thin straight
+stems rocked in seconds, like inverted pendulums, while some
+boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar&rsquo;s sides, or occasionally
+clicked in catching each other.&nbsp; Below the level of their
+summits the masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun
+never pierced that moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation.&nbsp;
+Pads of moss grew in the joints of the stonework, and here and
+there shade-loving insects had engraved on the mortar patterns of
+no human style or meaning, but curious and suggestive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page53"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 53</span>
+<a href="images/p53.jpg">
+<img class='floatright' alt=
+"E.M.P. inscription on obelisk"
+title=
+"E.M.P. inscription on obelisk"
+ src="images/p53.jpg" />
+</a>The why or purpose of this slight brick structure are
+lost.&nbsp; The only clue, afforded by the inscription on a stone
+tablet set in the lichened bricks, points to it being the
+handiwork of a Pleydell.&nbsp; It was, in fact, built by Edmund
+Morton Pleydell, but his purpose, if indeed he had one beyond a
+singular notion of ornament, has passed, with himself, beyond
+these voices; and the neglected condition of the
+monument&mdash;if indeed it be a monument&mdash;fully bears out
+the moral reflection in <i>Two on a Tower</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here
+stood this aspiring piece of masonry, erected as the most
+conspicuous and ineffaceable reminder of a man that could be
+thought of; and yet the whole aspect of the memorial betokened
+forgetfulness.&nbsp; Probably not a dozen people within the
+district knew the name of the person commemorated, while perhaps
+not a soul remembered whether the column were hollow or solid,
+whether with or without a tablet explaining its date and
+purpose.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Regaining the high road and passing uphill by where the
+Dewlish toll-gate once stood, and by an up-and-down course
+infinitely varied as to gradient, we come at length down to the
+valley of the Piddle, and to Piddletown, the
+&ldquo;Weatherbury&rdquo; of <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>,
+where Gabriel Oak, come down in the world by the agency of Fate
+and his foolish young sheep-dog, took service with his
+distractingly elusive dear, Bathsheba Everdene, the
+lady-farmer.&nbsp; Weatherbury, as Mr. Hardy regretfully tells
+us, is not the Weatherbury he once knew.&nbsp; It has indeed been
+very largely rebuilt, and the rather stern and prim limestone
+cottages that stand <a name="page54"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+54</span>prominently in one of its several streets do not
+altogether prepossess one in favour of this village that is not
+quite a townlet and yet may quite possibly resent the more rustic
+definition.&nbsp; The &ldquo;several&rdquo; streets are, after
+all, rather roads, with rows of houses and cottages less
+integrally than incidentally there, and the several are perhaps
+reducible to a term less connotive of number; but they run in
+unexpected directions and uncovenanted angles, and so make an
+imposing show, comparable with the effect produced by six supers
+who, by judicious stage-management in passing and repassing, can
+be made to represent an army.&nbsp; But the Piddle, running
+sparkling and clear through Piddletown, redeems the conjoined
+effect of those streets and gives the place a final and
+definitive <i>cachet</i> of rurality, by no means belied by the
+very large, though very rustic, church&mdash;happily still
+unrestored, and, with its tall pews and fine Jacobean carved oak
+choir-gallery, a perfect picture of an ancient Wessex place of
+worship.&nbsp; Hardean village choirs and Gabriel Oak&rsquo;s
+bass voice take, if it be possible, an even greater air of
+actuality to the pilgrim who enters here.</p>
+<p>The interest of Piddletown church is added to by the fine and
+curious bowl font, diapered in an unusual pattern, and by the
+tombs of the Martins of Athelhampton, who lie medi&aelig;vally
+recumbent in effigy in their own chapel, quite unconcerned,
+although scored over with the initials of the undistinguished,
+and although their old manor-house of Athelhampton, near by, on
+the road to Bere Regis, has since the time they became extinct
+passed through several alien hands.&nbsp; Poor old fellows!&nbsp;
+Their somewhat threatening motto, under their old <a
+name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 56</span>monkey crest,
+of &ldquo;He who looks at Martin&rsquo;s ape Martin&rsquo;s ape
+shall look at him!&rdquo; has lost any point it ever had.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image55" href="images/p55.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Piddletown"
+title=
+"Piddletown"
+ src="images/p55.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>A touching epitaph desires your prayers for two of the
+family:</p>
+<blockquote><p>Here lyeth the body of Xpofer Martyn Esquyer,<br
+/>
+Sone and heyre unto Syr Willym Martyn, knyght,<br />
+Pray for there Soules with harty desyre<br />
+That bothe may be sure of Eternall lyght;<br />
+Calling to Remembraunce that ev&rsquo;ry wyhgt<br />
+Most nedys dye, and therefor lett us pray<br />
+As other for us may do Another day.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This church of Piddletown, or &ldquo;Weatherbury,&rdquo; is
+the scene of Sergeant Troy&rsquo;s belated remorse and of the
+acute misery of that incident where, coming by the light of a
+lantern and planting flowers on Fanny Robin&rsquo;s grave, he
+sleeps in the porch while the rain-storm breaks and the
+storm-water from the gurgoyles of the tower spouts furiously over
+the spot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle&rsquo;s jaws
+directed all its vengeance into the grave.&nbsp; The rich tawny
+mould was stirred into motion, and boiled like chocolate.&nbsp;
+The water accumulated and washed deeper down, and the roar of the
+pool thus formed spread into the night. . . .&nbsp; The flowers
+so carefully planted by Fanny&rsquo;s repentant lover began to
+move and writhe in their bed.&nbsp; The winter-violets turned
+slowly upside down, and became a mere mat of mud.&nbsp; Soon the
+snowdrops and other bulbs danced in the boiling mass like
+ingredients in a cauldron.&nbsp; Plants of the tufted species
+were loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 57</span>The
+street beside the church retains a good deal of its quaint
+features of thatch and plaster, with deep eaves where the
+house-martins build.&nbsp; A pretty corner including an old
+thatched house with architectonic windows closely resembling
+those of a Queen Anne bureau, and supported on pillars having a
+cousinship with classic art, is especially noticeable.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image57" href="images/p57.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"A quaint corner in Piddletown"
+title=
+"A quaint corner in Piddletown"
+ src="images/p57.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>If we wish to see the old mansion that served as model for
+Bathsheba&rsquo;s farm, we shall not find it in Piddletown, but
+must turn aside and proceed up the valley of the Piddle, in the
+direction of Piddlehinton and Piddletrenthide&mdash;usually
+termed &ldquo;Longpiddle.&rdquo;&nbsp; Before reaching these, at
+the distance of rather over a mile, we come to Lower Walterstone,
+where, behind noble groups of beeches, horse-chestnuts, and
+sycamores growing on raised <a name="page58"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 58</span>grassy banks, it will be found, in
+the shape of a Jacobean mansion eloquently portrayed by the
+novelist:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By daylight, the bower of Oak&rsquo;s new-found
+mistress, Bathsheba Everdene, presented itself as a hoary
+building, of the Jacobean stage of Classic Renaissance as regards
+its architecture, and of a proportion which told at a glance
+that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the manorial
+hall upon a small estate around it, now altogether effaced as a
+distinct property, and merged in the vast tract of a non-resident
+landlord which comprised several such modest demesnes.&nbsp;
+Fluted pilasters, worked from the solid stone, decorated its
+front, and above the roof pairs of chimneys were here and there
+linked by an arch, some gables and other unmanageable features
+still retaining traces of their Gothic extraction.&nbsp; Soft
+brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions upon the
+stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or sengreen sprouted
+from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings.&nbsp; A gravel
+walk leading from the door to the road in front was incrusted at
+the sides with more moss&mdash;here it was a silver-green
+variety, the nut-brown of the gravel being visible to the width
+of only a foot or two in the centre.&nbsp; This circumstance, and
+the generally sleepy air of the whole prospect here, together
+with the animated and contrasting state of the reverse
+fa&ccedil;ade, suggested to the imagination that, on the
+adaptation of the building for farming purposes, the vital
+principle of the house had turned round inside its body, to face
+the other way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The way from Piddletown to Dorchester, passing <a
+name="page59"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 59</span>the hamlet
+singularly and interestingly named &ldquo;Troy Town,&rdquo;
+which, although itself intrinsically without visible interest,
+invites speculation, presently passes over Yellowham Hill,
+clothed in luxuriant woods.&nbsp; This spot, the &ldquo;Yalbury
+Hill&rdquo; of Troy&rsquo;s excruciatingly pitiful meeting with
+Fanny Robin, figures, together with the woodlands&mdash;the
+&ldquo;Yalbury Great Wood&rdquo; of <i>Under the Greenwood
+Tree</i>&mdash;in several others among the Wessex stories.&nbsp;
+Coming to it in old times, the coaches changed horses at the
+&ldquo;Buck&rsquo;s Head&rdquo; inn, now quite disestablished and
+forgot, save for the humorous description of it to be found in
+the pages of <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>.&nbsp;
+Unswervingly the highway passes over its crest and down on the
+other side, the wayfarer along <a name="page60"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 60</span>it watched by bright-eyed squirrels
+and the other lesser fauna of this dense covert, while he thinks
+himself unobserved.&nbsp; It is a lovely road, but you should see
+it and its encompassing woods in autumn, when the October
+sunshine, with that characteristic golden sheen peculiar to the
+time of year, falls between the rich red trunks of the firs on to
+the golden-brown of the dried bracken; when the acorns are ripe
+on the dwarf oaks and fall with startling little crashes into the
+sere leaves of the undergrowth; when the nuts are ripe on the
+hazels and the squirrels&mdash;too busy now to follow the
+wayfarer&rsquo;s movements&mdash;are industriously all day long
+gathering store of them over against winter.&nbsp; Then Yellowham
+Woods are at their finest.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image59" href="images/p59.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Lower Walterstone Farm: Original of Bathsheba&rsquo;s farm"
+title=
+"Lower Walterstone Farm: Original of Bathsheba&rsquo;s farm"
+ src="images/p59.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Where the descent from this eminence reaches an intermediate
+level, preparatory to diving again downwards, the road takes a
+curve through the park-lands of Kingston House, a stately but
+cold-looking mansion of stone, figuring in that first novel,
+<i>Desperate Remedies</i>, as &ldquo;Knapwater
+House.&rdquo;&nbsp; The bias of the architect, as he then was, is
+prominently displayed in Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s description of it:
+&ldquo;The house was regularly and substantially built of clean
+grey freestone throughout, in that plainer fashion of Greek
+classicism which prevailed at the latter end of the last century,
+when the copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic
+variations in the Roman orders.&nbsp; The main block approximated
+to a square on the ground plan, having a projection in the centre
+of each side, surmounted by a pediment.&nbsp; From each angle of
+the north side ran a line of buildings lower than the rest,
+turning inwards again at their farthest end, and <a
+name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 61</span>forming
+within them a spacious open court, within which resounded an echo
+of astounding clearness.&nbsp; These erections were in their turn
+backed by ivy-covered ice-houses, laundries, and stables, the
+whole mass of subsidiary buildings being half buried beneath
+close-set shrubs and trees.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Leaving aside, for the present, an exploration of Stinsford,
+down the next turning, to come later to a particular and intimate
+discussion of it, we proceed to Dorchester, whose houses, and
+those of its allied suburb of Fordington, are now seen, crowning
+the ridge on which the old county town stands.</p>
+<h2><a name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+62</span>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">DORCHESTER</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Dorchester</span>, the
+&ldquo;Casterbridge&rdquo; of the novels, stands upon or, more
+correctly, above, the River Frome, and from that circumstance
+derived its ancient Roman name of Durnovaria, whose Latinity Mr.
+Hardy has exploited in the name of &ldquo;Durnover&rdquo; he
+confers upon Fordington.&nbsp; The Romans themselves did by no
+means invent their name for the station they founded here, but
+just adapted the title given by the native tribe of Durotriges to
+their settlement.&nbsp; Those natives, who were of Welsh stock,
+styled their habitation by the sufficiently Welsh name of
+Dwrinwyr, which, like all Cymric place-names, was descriptive and
+alluded to its watery situation.</p>
+<p>The approach to Dorchester has suffered in late years, in the
+pictorial point of view, from the decay and destruction of many
+of those magnificent old elms that once formed a noble
+introduction along this, the &ldquo;London Road&rdquo;; but it is
+not wholly to be bankrupted of beauty, for, although Dorchester
+may continue to grow, it is not in this direction that its
+suburbs will be thrown out.&nbsp; The flat water-meadows of the
+Frome forbid building operations here, and in effect say, at the
+bridge <a name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+63</span>immediately below where Fordington on its ridge stands
+on the thitherward bank of the stream&mdash;&ldquo;thus far and
+no farther!&rdquo;&nbsp; From this approach, looking to where
+Fordington&rsquo;s houses die away on the left hand, and to where
+the chalky downs begin to rise, you may obtain a distant view of
+the novelist&rsquo;s residence, a house he himself designed,
+standing beside the Wareham Road near where an old turnpike-gate
+stood, and called from it &ldquo;Max Gate.&rdquo;&nbsp; Looking,
+however, straight ahead, the road into Dorchester is seen
+becoming a street and going with inflexible Roman directness
+through the town, with the ancient church tower of Fordington
+slightly to the left, and the equally ancient church of St.
+Peter&rsquo;s immediately in front, in the centre of the town,
+where the two main streets cross.&nbsp; Attendant modern churches
+and chapels, and the Town Hall, with spires, act as
+satellites.&nbsp; To the right hand, rising bulky from the
+huddled mass of houses, is a grey building which but a little
+experience of touring in England identifies without need of
+inquiry as the gaol.</p>
+<p>Dorchester, figuring as the &ldquo;Casterbridge&rdquo; of that
+mayor whose surprising history is set forth in that powerful
+story, bulks large in the whole series of Wessex novels&mdash;as
+how could it fail of doing, seeing that the novelist himself was
+born at Upper Bockhampton, only three miles away?&nbsp; In
+masterly fashion he has described its salient points, as they
+were before modernity had come to obliterate them, or at least to
+take off the sharp edge of their singularity.&nbsp; He has
+expended much thought upon Roman Dorchester, and speculated upon
+what manner of place it was fifteen hundred years ago.&nbsp; <a
+name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+64</span>&ldquo;Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street,
+alley, and precinct.&nbsp; It looked Roman, bespoke the art of
+Rome, concealed dead men of Rome.&nbsp; It was impossible to dig
+more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens
+without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who
+had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of
+fifteen hundred years.&rdquo;&nbsp; Nay, even within the
+precincts of his own garden, on the edge of the rotund upland
+that looks so wanly down upon the railway, relics of the
+legionaries have been discovered.&nbsp; Three of those stout
+warriors were there found.&nbsp; &ldquo;Each body was fitted
+with, one may almost say, perfect accuracy into the oval hole,
+the crown of the head touching the maiden chalk at one end and
+the toes at the other, the tight-fitting situation being strongly
+suggestive of the chicken in the egg-shell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>More attuned to modern times is that description of Dorchester
+as it appeared when Susan, Henchard&rsquo;s wife, with
+Elizabeth-Jane, entered it from the London Road that
+evening.&nbsp; Wonderfully observed and true is that passage
+where the light of the street lamps, glimmering through those
+engirdling trees that were then, even more than now, the great
+feature of the town, is made a snug and comforting contrast with
+the outside country, seeming &ldquo;strangely solitary and vacant
+in aspect, considering its nearness to life.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then
+the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of the people, as
+reflected in the character of the goods displayed in shop
+windows, is neatly shown, in a list of those objects: the
+hay-rakes, the seed-lips, butter-firkins, hoes and spades and
+mattocks; the horse-embrocations, <a name="page65"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 65</span>scythes, reaping-hooks, and
+hedger&rsquo;s and ditcher&rsquo;s gloves, articles all of
+everyday requirement.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;grizzled church&rdquo; to which they came was St.
+Peter&rsquo;s, whose tower showed &ldquo;how completely the
+mortar from the joints of the stonework had been nibbled out by
+time and weather, which had planted in the crevices thus made
+little tufts of stone-crop and grass, almost as far up as the
+very battlements.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yes, and so one vividly remembers
+it; but restoration has recently made away with all these
+evidences of age, and cleaned the stonework and renewed and
+pointed it, greatly to the aid of the tower&rsquo;s structural
+stability, &rsquo;tis true, but the very death of picturesque
+effect.&nbsp; There is a pleasing thing here, at the foot of this
+tower, where High East Street and High West Street join.&nbsp; It
+is the bronze life-sized statue, in his habit as he lived, of
+&ldquo;Pa&rsquo;son Barnes,&rdquo; otherwise the Reverend William
+Barnes, the Dorset poet, described by Thomas Hardy as he is
+represented here&mdash;&ldquo;an aged clergyman, quaintly attired
+in caped cloak, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather
+satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his
+hand.&rdquo;&nbsp; This quaint figure, whose life and thoughts
+and writings were racy of the soil whence he sprang&mdash;he was
+born in the Vale of Blackmore&mdash;was for many years a quite
+inadequately rewarded schoolmaster, and only late in life was
+given, first the living of Whitcomb, and then that of Winterborne
+Came, near Dorchester.&nbsp; His poems in the Dorsetshire
+vernacular, long known and admired, were not pecuniarily
+successful.&nbsp; &ldquo;What a mockery is life!&rdquo; said
+he.&nbsp; &ldquo;They praise me, and take away my bread!&nbsp;
+They may be putting up a statue to me <a name="page66"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 66</span>some day, when I am dead, while all I
+want now is leave to live.&nbsp; I asked for bread, and they gave
+me a stone!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Prophetic indeed! for here is the statue, with beneath it the
+inscription:</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">WILLIAM BARNES<br />
+1801&ndash;1886</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and the quotation from one of his own folk-poems:</p>
+<blockquote><p>Zoo now I hope his kindly f&euml;ace<br />
+Is gone to vind a better pl&euml;ace,<br />
+But still wi&rsquo; vo&rsquo;k a&rsquo; left behind<br />
+He&rsquo;ll always be a kept in mind.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The mural monument of a sixteenth-century Thomas Hardy, within
+the church, attracts attention.&nbsp; The inscription states him
+to have been &ldquo;esquire&rdquo; and of Melcombe Regis, and
+goes on to describe his benefactions to the town and the
+gratitude of the &ldquo;Baylives and Burgisses&rdquo;
+therefor.&nbsp; To &ldquo;commend to posterity an example soe
+worthy of imitation,&rdquo; they erected this tablet.&nbsp; He is
+said to be the common ancestor of Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, the
+friend and comrade of Nelson, and of Thomas Hardy, the
+novelist.</p>
+<p>Still from this tower of St. Peter&rsquo;s sounds the curfew
+chime, with the stroke of eight o&rsquo;clock every evening, as
+described in the story; its &ldquo;peremptory clang&rdquo; the
+signal for shop-shutting throughout the town.&nbsp; &ldquo;Other
+clocks struck eight from time to time&mdash;one gloomily from the
+gaol, another from the gable of an alms-house, with a preparative
+creak of machinery more audible than the note of the
+bell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page67"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 67</span>In High
+East Street stands, just as described, the principal inn&mdash;I
+suppose in these times one should, for fear of disrespect say
+&ldquo;hotel&rdquo;&mdash;of Dorchester, the &ldquo;King&rsquo;s
+Arms,&rdquo; white-faced, with the selfsame &ldquo;spacious
+bow-window projected into the street over the main
+portico,&rdquo; the whole not too imposing for comfort, and not
+too homely for dignity.&nbsp; It was a coaching house in days
+gone by.&nbsp; From a step above the pavement on the opposite
+side of the street Susan and Elizabeth-Jane, amid the crowd,
+witnessed the dinner given to the mayor, and through the archway
+Boldwood carried Bathsheba, fainting at the news of her
+husband&rsquo;s death.</p>
+<p>Equally white-faced, but a good deal more picturesque, is the
+&ldquo;White Hart,&rdquo; down at the end, or the beginning if
+you will, of the sloping street, as you enter the town.&nbsp; By
+it runs the Frome, and in its courtyard on market-days may be
+seen such a concourse of carriers&rsquo; carts as rarely
+witnessed nowadays.&nbsp; Dorchester is a busy carrying centre,
+by no means spoiled in that respect by railways, which yet fail
+to reach many of its surrounding villages.</p>
+<p>The brick bridge that here spans the Frome, and the stone
+bridge some distance farther away, spanning a branch of the same
+stream out away in the meads, have their parts in the <i>Mayor of
+Casterbridge</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;These bridges had speaking
+countenances.&nbsp; Every projection in each was worn down to
+obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from generations
+of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year made
+restless movements against these parapets, as they had stood
+there, meditating on the aspect of affairs.&nbsp; In the case <a
+name="page68"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 68</span>of the more
+pliable bricks and stones, even the flat faces were worn into
+hollows by the same mixed mechanism.&nbsp; The masonry of the top
+was clamped with iron at each joint; since it had been no
+uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the coping off and
+throw it down into the river, in reckless defiance of the
+magistrates.&nbsp; For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the
+failures of the town&mdash;those who had failed in business, in
+love, in sobriety, in crime.&nbsp; Why the unhappy hereabout
+usually chose the bridges for their meditations in preference to
+a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
+goes on to tell how there was a marked difference in quality
+between the frequenters of the near bridge of brick and the far
+one of stone.&nbsp; The more thoroughgoing failures and those
+with the most threadbare characters, or with no characters at
+all, save bad ones, preferred the near bridge: to reach it
+entailed less trouble, and it was not for such as them to mind
+the glare of publicity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The <i>mis&eacute;rables</i> who would pause on the
+remoter bridge were of a politer stamp.&nbsp; They included
+bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called
+&lsquo;out of a situation&rsquo; from fault or lucklessness, the
+inefficient of the professional class&mdash;shabby-genteel men,
+who did not know how to get rid of the weary time between
+breakfast and dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner
+and dark.&rdquo;&nbsp; These unfortunates gazed steadily into the
+river, never turning to notice passers-by, and indeed shrinking
+from observation.&nbsp; And so day by day they looked and looked
+in the stream, until at last their bodies were sometimes found in
+it.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image69" href="images/p69.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Ten Hatches, Dorchester"
+title=
+"Ten Hatches, Dorchester"
+ src="images/p69.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 70</span>When
+Henchard&rsquo;s ruin was complete, he too began to frequent the
+stone bridge, and would have ended in the same way, not at the
+bridge itself, but over in the meadows where the many branches of
+the Frome are regulated and controlled by a number of sluices
+known as Ten Hatches.&nbsp; &ldquo;To the east of Casterbridge
+lay moors and meadows, through which much water flowed.&nbsp; The
+wanderer in this direction, who should stand still for a few
+moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from
+these waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their
+sundry tones, from near and far parts of the moor.&nbsp; At a
+hole in a rotten weir they executed a recitative; where a
+tributary brook fell over a stone breastwork they trilled
+cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic cymballing; and
+at Durnover Weir they hissed.&nbsp; The spot at which their
+instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches,
+whence during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of
+sounds.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The ruined mayor, to whom, and not the cold, successful Donald
+Farfrae, the reader&rsquo;s sympathies go out, would have ended
+all his troubles here with a plunge in the waters, had it not
+been for the ghastly floating Skimmington effigy of himself he
+saw floating down the current as he was about to drop in.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gray&rsquo;s Bridge,&rdquo; as the stone structure on
+the London Road is known, is that toward which Bob Loveday, in
+the <i>Trumpet Major</i>, gazed anxiously, awaiting the coach
+bearing his Matilda, and across it, of course, on their way to
+Longpiddle, went those &ldquo;Crusted Characters,&rdquo; telling
+stories in the carrier&rsquo;s <a name="page71"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 71</span>cart jogging along with them so
+comfortably from the &ldquo;White Hart.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The fateful, almost sentient, character many natural objects
+are made to assume in the march of Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s tragic
+stories is expressly shown in his description of the Roman
+amphitheatre of Maumbury, at the farther or western extremity of
+Dorchester, beside the road to Weymouth.&nbsp; He styles it
+&ldquo;the Ring, on the Budmouth Road,&rdquo; and explains how
+&ldquo;it was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to
+modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It is not, as might be gathered from this passage, a building,
+like the Coliseum, but a vast amphitheatre formed by
+earthworks.&nbsp; Used by the Romans as the scene of their
+gladiatorial displays, it has doubtless witnessed many an act of
+savage cruelty, but is now a solitude.&nbsp; A sinister place it
+has been always, for, when executions were public affairs, the
+gallows stood within the old arena; and until well into the
+eighteenth century the populace came to it in thousands to
+witness the execution of felons where, before the dawn of the
+Christian era, fighting men had struggled to the death: where
+perhaps, in early Christian times, in the days of the Diocletian
+persecution, Christians had been sacrificed.&nbsp; It was here,
+in 1705, that Mary Channing was executed, under the most fearful
+circumstances of barbarity belonging to the penalties prescribed
+for <i>petit treason</i>.&nbsp; The crimes known by that name
+included several forms of rebellion against authority, among them
+the murder of a husband by a wife.&nbsp; A husband being then,
+much more than now, in the eyes of the law in a position of
+authority over his wife, to murder <a name="page72"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 72</span>him was not merely murder&mdash;it
+was <i>petit treason</i> as well, and therefore deserving of
+exceptional punishment.&nbsp; Mary Brookes, married by the wish
+of her parents, against her own inclination, to one Richard
+Channing of Dorchester, a grocer, almost ruined him by her
+extravagance, and then poisoned him by giving him white mercury,
+first in rice-milk, and twice afterwards in a glass of
+wine.&nbsp; At the Summer Assizes, 1704, she was found guilty and
+condemned to death.&nbsp; On March 21st, 1705, accordingly, she
+was strangled here, in this arena, and then burned, the horrible
+spectacle being witnessed by ten thousand persons.&nbsp; She was
+but nineteen years of age.&nbsp; This Golgotha was disestablished
+in 1767, when the gallows was removed to the decent solitudes of
+Bradford Down, a mile and a half along the Exeter Road, on the
+way to Bridport.&nbsp; It was to this spot that a mayor of
+Dorchester desired to escort a distinguished traveller leaving
+the town, after being presented with the customary address.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;May I be allowed to accompany your Highness as far as the
+gallows?&rdquo; he asked, greatly to the dismay of that departing
+Serenity, to whom the allusion seemed more ill-omened than really
+it was.&nbsp; It is a tale told of many places and many mayors,
+and he would be a clever commentator who should distinguish the
+real original.</p>
+<p>The lone amphitheatre of Maumbury has thus, it will be seen,
+real tragical associations fitting it for the novelist&rsquo;s
+more sombre humours.&nbsp; He tells how intrigues were there
+carried forward, how furtive and sinister meetings happened
+within the rim of these ancient earthworks, and how, although <a
+name="page73"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 73</span>the patching
+up of long-standing feuds might be attempted on this spot, seldom
+had it been the place of meeting of happy lovers.&nbsp; In this
+ring, then, the reconciliation of Susan and Henchard took place,
+after eighteen years, and was but the prelude to miseries and
+disasters.</p>
+<h2><a name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+74</span>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">DORCHESTER
+(<i>continued</i>)</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Henchard&rsquo;s</span>
+house&mdash;&ldquo;one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey
+old brick,&rdquo; there are many such here&mdash;was in the
+neighbourhood of North Street, and not far from that Corn
+Exchange where Bathsheba was wont, on market days, to mingle with
+the burly farmers and corn-factors, like a yacht among ironclads,
+displaying for inspection the sample wheat in her outstretched
+palm.</p>
+<p>Down here, too, is the gaol, whose mass is seen from the meads
+on approaching the town.&nbsp; It has been much altered, but the
+heavy stone gateway, together with the flanking walls of red
+brick, is very much as of old.&nbsp; Happily, such things as are
+noticed in that gruesome short story, <i>The Withered Arm</i>,
+are things only of dreadful memory.&nbsp; At that time the
+populace of Dorchester were accustomed to wait below in the
+meadows, eager to witness the executioner, the
+criminals&mdash;murderers, burglars, rick-firers, sheep and
+horse-stealers, even down to those convicted of petty
+larceny&mdash;being capitally condemned and hanged as high as,
+possibly indeed higher than, Haman, whose place of suspension is
+notoriously and traditionally lofty.&nbsp; Gertrude Lodge, coming
+here for the cure of her withered arm by <a
+name="page75"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 75</span>the agency of
+the dead man&rsquo;s touch, observed, as all could then not help
+observing, those &ldquo;three rectangular lines against the
+sky,&rdquo; which indicated the coming execution and the
+morrow&rsquo;s exhibition, to be followed by the merry-makings of
+Hang Fair.&nbsp; When she enquired the hour of execution, she was
+told: &ldquo;The same as usual&mdash;twelve o&rsquo;clock, or as
+soon after as the London mail-coach gets in.&nbsp; We always wait
+for that, in case of a reprieve.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image75" href="images/p75.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Dorchester Gaol"
+title=
+"Dorchester Gaol"
+ src="images/p75.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>In Dorchester Gaol&mdash;we have no space here for those
+merely actual persons of flesh and blood who have been
+incarcerated, or who have suffered in it&mdash;those more real
+characters of fiction, Boldwood and Marston were confined; and
+hence the Shottsford watchmaker of <i>The Three Strangers</i>,
+lying under sentence of death, escaped along the downs to Higher
+Crowstairs, where, while sheltering in the <a
+name="page76"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 76</span>ingle-nook of
+the cottage, two other strangers, one of them the hangman deputed
+to execute the demands of the law upon him on the morrow, take
+shelter from the weather.</p>
+<p>To follow this gloomy train a little longer, the veritable
+Hangman&rsquo;s Cottage, home of this erstwhile busy functionary,
+at a time when Dorchester demanded the whole time and energies of
+a Jack Ketch, and not a very occasional visit from one common to
+the whole kingdom, may be seen, at the foot of Glydepath Lane, in
+a fine damp situation near the river.&nbsp; It is one of a tiny
+group of heavily thatched old rustic cottages built of grouted
+flint and chalk, faced and patched with red brick, and held
+together with iron ties, so that in their old age they shall not,
+some night, altogether collapse and deposit their inhabitants
+among the potatoes, the peas, and cabbages of their fertile
+gardens.&nbsp; Dorchester paid its hangman a regular salary, and
+in the intervals between his more important business, he was
+under engagement to perform those minor punishments of whipping
+and scourging, of putting in the stocks, and of pillorying, by
+whose plentiful administration Old England was made the
+&ldquo;Merry England&rdquo; of our forefathers.&nbsp; Let not the
+reader, however, seek a covert satire here.&nbsp; It is not to be
+gainsaid that it was a &ldquo;Merry England,&rdquo; for the times
+were so brutal that, in all such degrading and pitiful spectacles
+as these, the populace took the keenest delight.&nbsp; Sufficient
+for the day&mdash;! and those who made merry did not stop to
+consider that they who were now spectators might soon very likely
+afford in their own persons the same spectacle.</p>
+<p>Miserable times!&nbsp; Proof of them, do you need <a
+name="page77"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 77</span>seek it, is
+to be found in the Dorchester Museum, where the leaden weights,
+boldly inscribed &ldquo;<span
+class="GutSmall">MERCY</span>,&rdquo; are pointed out as the
+contribution, years ago, of an exceptionally tender-hearted
+governor of the gaol to a more pitiful method of ending the
+condemned man who was to die for his crime of arson.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image77" href="images/p77.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Hangman&rsquo;s Cottage, Dorchester"
+title=
+"The Hangman&rsquo;s Cottage, Dorchester"
+ src="images/p77.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The man was of unusually light weight, and, as those were the
+times when men really were slowly and painfully hanged and choked
+by degrees, before criminals were given a drop and their necks
+broken, it was thought a kindly thing on the part of this
+governor that he <a name="page78"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+78</span>should have provided these heavy weights, to attach to
+this particular victim&rsquo;s feet and so help to shorten his
+misery.</p>
+<p>This museum it was that Lucetta, keen to get the girl out of
+the way, suggested for Elizabeth Jane&rsquo;s entertainment; with
+affected enthusiasm and a good deal of veiled womanly sarcasm at
+the expense of antiquities, describing how it contained
+&ldquo;crowds of interesting things&mdash;skeletons, teeth, old
+pots and pans, ancient boots and shoes, birds&rsquo;
+eggs&mdash;all charmingly instructive.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But enough of such things, let us to other quarters.</p>
+<p>Looking on to the cheerful and prosperous South Street from
+the corner of Durngate Street is the substantial &ldquo;grey
+fa&ccedil;ade&rdquo; of Lucetta&rsquo;s house, where lived
+Henchard&rsquo;s lady-love, whose affections were so readily
+transferable.&nbsp; The lower portion of this, the &ldquo;High
+Place Hall&rdquo; of the story, has suffered a transformation
+into business premises, but the resounding alleyways of Durngate
+Street and neighbouring lanes are as gloomy as those spots are
+described.&nbsp; &ldquo;At night the forms of passengers were
+patterned by the lamps in black shadows upon the pale
+walls,&rdquo; and so they are still.</p>
+<p>But the description of Lucetta&rsquo;s house in those pages is
+a composite picture; a good deal of it deriving from an old
+mansion in another part of the town.&nbsp; This will be found by
+taking a narrow thoroughfare leading out of the north side of
+High West Street, and called, in different parts of its course,
+Glydepath Lane and Glydepath Street.&nbsp; In this quiet byway is
+the early eighteenth-century mansion known as Colyton House,
+sometime a town <a name="page79"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+79</span>residence of the Churchill family, and so named from the
+little Devonshire town of Colyton, near which is situated Ash,
+that old dwelling, now a farmhouse, whence the historic
+Churchills sprang.</p>
+<p>Readily to be seen, in a blank wall, is the long-filled-in
+archway, with the dreadful keystone mask, alluded to in the pages
+of <i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image79" href="images/p79.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Colyton House, Dorchester"
+title=
+"Colyton House, Dorchester"
+ src="images/p79.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Originally the mask had exhibited a comic leer, as
+could still be discerned; but generations of Casterbridge boys
+had thrown stones at the mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the
+blows thereof had chipped off the lips and jaws as if they had
+been eaten away by disease.&rdquo;&nbsp; Its appearance is indeed
+of a ghastly leprous nature, infinitely shuddery.</p>
+<p>At this end of the town, out upon the Charminster road is the
+great Roman encampment of Poundbury, or, locally,
+&ldquo;Pummery,&rdquo; where Henchard spread <a
+name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 80</span>that feast,
+deserted by those for whom it was intended, in favour of the
+rival entertainment in the West Walks, prepared by the hateful
+Farfrae, that paragon of all the business and higher virtues,
+whom the reader perversely, but not unnaturally, detests.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Roman&rdquo; it has been in this last passage declared,
+but, in truth, its origin has been as widely disputed as that of
+Weatherbury Castle, where the varying theories arouse Mr.
+Hardy&rsquo;s sarcasm so markedly.&nbsp; It lies without the site
+of the Roman walls of Durnovaria, and probably formed some
+advanced outpost or great camp in the long years of the Roman
+occupation of Britain, before the establishment of security and
+the growth of their towns.&nbsp; Those Roman walls are now for
+the most part gone and their sites were long ago planted with
+avenues, now growing aged and past their prime, and ceased to be
+that clean-cut barrier between <i>urbs</i> and <i>rure</i> they
+formed of old, when Dorchester of pre-railway days had not grown
+too big for that girdle the Romans had set about her: a girdle
+not too constrictive for the needs of the Middle Age, nor even in
+the eighteenth century with any suspicion of tight-lacing, but
+all too compressive soon after the coaches had given way to
+trains, and steel rails and steam along them had sent up the
+birthrate.&nbsp; A notable passage in <i>The Mayor of
+Casterbridge</i> tells how there were not, quite a little while
+ago, any suburbs here, in the modern sense, nor any gradual
+fusion of town and country.&nbsp; &ldquo;The farmer&rsquo;s boy
+could sit under his barleymow, and pitch a stone into the window
+of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to
+acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed
+judge, when <a name="page81"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+81</span>he condemned a sheep stealer, pronounced sentence to the
+tune of &lsquo;Baa,&rsquo; that floated in at the window from the
+remainder of the flock browsing hard by.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But those bounds have in several places been leaped, and, in
+especial where the South Walk runs, modern villas have redly
+replaced the golden grain or the green pastures.&nbsp; Changed
+manners and customs have brought about this alteration, quite as
+much as increased population.&nbsp; The four old traditional
+streets of the town, together with their more immediate
+offshoots, have been resigned more exclusively to business than
+of yore, and made less a residence.&nbsp; The butchers, the
+bakers, the candlestick-makers, who would once have scorned to
+live anywhere else than over &ldquo;the shop,&rdquo; will now not
+very often condescend to make their homes in the upper stages of
+their &ldquo;stores&rdquo; or &ldquo;establishments,&rdquo; or by
+what other pretty names modern finesse elects to describe shops
+and counters and tills and such like things by which tradespeople
+become rich.</p>
+<p>And, by that same token, the business premises thus deserted
+for snug suburban villas, are themselves changing.&nbsp; One
+could never, in modern times, have strictly called Dorchester
+generally picturesque, in the prominent circumstances of those
+four main streets: repeated conflagrations that destroyed most of
+the really old and interesting houses forbade that, and replaced
+thatch and barge-boarded gables with plain brick fronts, severe
+in unornamental rectangular windows, and ending on the skyline
+with unimaginative straight copings.&nbsp; But the latest
+manifestations of these times, when they say business is a
+struggle and all trades alike carried on less for the profit of
+the purveyor, than for the good of <a name="page82"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 82</span>the purchaser, are expensive carved
+stone and brick frontages, with good artistic features.&nbsp; As
+art in this country only spells much expenditure of good money
+and as building operations are always costly, it is a little
+difficult to square all these developments with the talk of
+&ldquo;hard times.&rdquo;&nbsp; South Street, in especial, is
+being grandly transformed, and &ldquo;Napper&rsquo;s Mite,&rdquo;
+the crouching row of almshouses, built from the benefaction of
+the good Sir Robert Napper, in 1615, made to look additionally
+humble by newly risen tall buildings.&nbsp; But the town
+authorities have not yet removed the old rusticated stone obelisk
+that stands in Cornhill, in the centre of the town, where High
+East and High West Streets, and North and South Streets
+meet.&nbsp; It serves the multum-in-parvo purposes of a pump, a
+lamp-standard, and a leaning-stock for Dorchester&rsquo;s weary
+or born-tired, and is moreover a landmark.&nbsp; But the two
+dumpy little houses at the corner, which were properly dumpy and
+humble and&mdash;so to speak&mdash;knew their place, and abased
+themselves in the presence of their betters&mdash;that is to say,
+in the contiguity of St. Peter&rsquo;s across the road&mdash;have
+been rebuilt, with the result that their tall upstanding
+pretentiousness detracts not a little from the height of that
+&ldquo;grizzled tower.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so, turning to the left at this corner, we leave
+Dorchester for Bridport, along High West Street, the quietest of
+all these thoroughfares, and looking rather &ldquo;out of
+it,&rdquo; and somewhat glad of that fact, in a dignified,
+exclusive way, typified by its aristocratic old houses, and its
+old County Hall.&nbsp; It is true there are a few shops in High
+Street, but they are by no means pushful shops.&nbsp; They <a
+name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 83</span>never make
+&ldquo;alarming sacrifices,&rdquo; nor sell off.&nbsp; Indeed,
+were I not fearful of offending susceptibility, I might declare a
+belief that they never sell anything at all, and are kept by
+&ldquo;grown-ups,&rdquo; not grown tired of playing at shops when
+they did so arrive at years supposed to be those of
+discretion.&nbsp; Here is a quiet shop&mdash;where they will
+doubtless sell you something, if you really enter and firmly
+insist upon it&mdash;occupying one of the few really old and
+picturesque houses in the main thoroughfare; it is the house
+&ldquo;by tradition&rdquo; occupied by the infamous Judge
+Jeffreys, when visiting Dorchester on the business of that
+special occasion, the Bloody Assize, holden to try the unhappy
+wretches arraigned for their part in Monmouth&rsquo;s Rebellion
+of 1685.&nbsp; The old house bears an inscription to this
+effect.&nbsp; Over three hundred prisoners faced the judge at
+that awful time, and two hundred and ninety received sentence of
+death.&nbsp; Of these the number actually executed was
+seventy-four, and, as the old gossip at the &ldquo;Three
+Mariners&rdquo; tells, portions of their bodies were gibbeted in
+various parts of the county, &ldquo;different j&rsquo;ints sent
+about the country like butcher&rsquo;s meat.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so we leave Dorchester and its, on the whole, grim
+memories, along an avenue, fellow to that by which the town was
+entered.</p>
+<h2><a name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+84</span>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">SWANAGE</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> name of Swanage shares with
+that of Swansea, the honour of being, perhaps, the most poetic
+that any seaside resort ever owned.&nbsp; It is a corruption of
+the Danish name of &ldquo;Swanic,&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;Swanwich,&rdquo; and there seems to be no reason to
+doubt&mdash;although there exists a school of antiquarians
+sceptical enough to doubt it&mdash;that the place was then, as
+its name indicates, a place of swans.&nbsp; Your modern
+antiquary, disgusted at the childish legends once everywhere
+accepted as sober historical facts, rushes to the other extreme,
+and, although a thing be obvious, will not allow its obviousness,
+unless supported by documentary or other tangible evidence.&nbsp;
+He must needs disregard the self-evident, and delve deeply and
+unavailingly in attempts to prove that &ldquo;things are not what
+they seem.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Conjectures that there was at that time a royal swannery here
+are based upon the known fondness of royal personages for
+preserving that bird, once thought a table delicacy, and upon the
+existence from ancient times of the famous Abbotsbury swannery,
+along this same coast.&nbsp; But it is needless here to labour
+the point; and although the little stream, more and more
+pollutedly with every year <a name="page85"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 85</span>of the extension of modern Swanage,
+still flows down into the sea under the name of the Swan Brook,
+the argument supported by it in favour of the obvious origin of
+the place-name shall be no further pursued.</p>
+<p>But the surrounding quarries have for many centuries past
+given a very different character to Swanage than that of a
+village with a marshy creek inhabited by swans.&nbsp; Few places
+ever proclaimed the industries by which they lived more
+prominently than did this little port, until well within recent
+recollection.&nbsp; A colliery town no more insistently obtrudes
+the circumstances by which it earns its livelihood than Swanage
+displayed evidences of its cleanly trade and craft of
+stone-working and stone-exporting.</p>
+<p>The varieties of stone from the quarries to the rear of
+Swanage are among the most famous building and decorative stones
+in the world; for here we are at the gates of Isle of Purbeck,
+where, not only the oolitic limestone of the same nature as
+&ldquo;Portland stone&rdquo; is quarried, but that (to
+antiquaries at least) far more generally known material,
+&ldquo;Purbeck marble,&rdquo; as well.&nbsp; No ancient church or
+cathedral of any considerable size or elaboration was considered
+complete without shafts and font and other decorative features of
+Purbeck marble, sometimes polished, at other times left in its
+native state; and thus, from very early times until the beginning
+of the sixteenth century, when more strikingly coloured and
+patterned foreign marbles began to find their way into England,
+Swanage in particular, and Purbeck in general, enjoyed an amazing
+prosperity.</p>
+<p><a name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 86</span>Swanage
+in Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s pages is &ldquo;Knollsea,&rdquo; and is
+described in <i>The Hand of Ethelberta</i> as a
+village:&mdash;&ldquo;Knollsea,&rdquo; we learn, &ldquo;was a
+seaside village lying snug within two headlands, as between a
+finger and thumb.&rdquo;&nbsp; A very true simile, as a glance on
+the map, upon the configuration of Swanage Bay, will satisfy
+those curious in the exactness or otherwise of literary
+images.&nbsp; But time has very rapidly vitiated the justness of
+what follows:&mdash;&ldquo;Everybody in the parish who was not a
+boatman was a quarrier, unless he were the gentleman who owned
+half the property and had been a quarryman, or the other
+gentleman who owned the other half and had been to
+sea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same
+special sort as their pursuits.&nbsp; The quarrymen in white
+fustian understood practical geology, the laws and accidents of
+dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the ways of the world
+and mammon; the seafaring men, in Guernsey frocks, had a clearer
+notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies
+than of any inland town in their own country.&nbsp; This, for
+them, consisted of a busy portion, the Channel, where they lived
+and laboured, and a dull portion, the vague unexplored miles of
+interior at the back of the ports, which they seldom thought
+of.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This charming picture of an out-of-the world place remained,
+very little blurred by change, until well on into the
+&rsquo;80&rsquo;s of the nineteenth century, when it occurred to
+exploiting railway folk that the time was ripe for the
+construction of a branch railway from Wareham.&nbsp; With the
+opening of that line the primitive houses, and the equally <a
+name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 87</span>primitive
+people who lived in them, suffered a change almost as sudden and
+complete as though a harlequin had waved his wand over their
+heads.</p>
+<p>There was indeed something exceptionally primitive in the
+Swanage people.&nbsp; They were chiefly quarrymen, and like all
+quarry folk, mining the great blocks of stone from mother earth,
+a strangely reserved and isolated race.&nbsp; A man who, felling
+timber, might conceivably remain all his life mentally detached
+from his occupation, following it only mechanically, could not
+long in these quarries, rich in the embalmed stoniness of myriads
+of humble creatures living in the pal&aelig;ozoic age, remain
+unaffected by his surroundings.&nbsp; An imaginative man might,
+not inaptly, conceive himself as a phenomenally gigantic giant
+working in some vast petrified graveyard among the petrifactions
+of a world infinitely little; and, as the dyer&rsquo;s hand is
+subdued to the dye he works in, and&mdash;a less classic
+allusion&mdash;as the photographer acquires a permanent stain
+from his collodion, he could scarce escape the almost inevitable
+mental twist resulting from the surroundings.</p>
+<p>And as they were, and in some measure still are, individually
+peculiar, so collectively they retain their exclusiveness.&nbsp;
+Still, with every recurrent Shrove Tuesday, their guild meets at
+Corfe, under the presidency of warden and steward; and even in
+these days it is not open for an outsider to become a Purbeck
+quarryman.&nbsp; It is an industry only to be followed by
+patrimony and by due admission into its membership in the
+prescribed manner, which is that of appearing at the annual court
+with a penny loaf in one hand, a pot of beer in the other, and a
+<a name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 88</span>sum of six
+shillings and eightpence in the pocket, ready to be duly paid
+down.</p>
+<p>With all the changes that have overtaken Swanage, who knows
+nowadays, save very old folk, that Swanage people are, or were,
+locally &ldquo;Swanage Turks&rdquo;?&nbsp; When&mdash;outside
+Swanage, of course&mdash;you asked why so named, you were apt to
+be told &ldquo;Tarks, we al&rsquo;us carls &rsquo;em, &rsquo;cos
+they don&rsquo;t know nawthen about anything.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+informant in this particular instance was a Poole man.&nbsp; None
+could possibly have brought this charge of comprehensive and
+thorough-going ignorance against the natives of Poole, for that
+ancient port was a sink of iniquity, and inhabited, if we are to
+believe the history books&mdash;which there is no reason we
+should not do&mdash;by ruffians who were by no means unspotted of
+the world, but had plumbed the depths of every wickedness.&nbsp;
+Since Swanage has become the terminus of a branch railway and
+become a seaside resort, its &ldquo;Turks&rdquo; have acquired a
+very considerable amount of worldly wisdom, and can argue and
+chop logic with you, as well as the best.</p>
+<p>To those who knew and loved old Swanage, the change that has
+come with its tardy accessibility by rail is woeful, but to those
+who have not so known and loved, I daresay it seems, by contrast
+with Bournemouth, a place strangely undeveloped.&nbsp; The
+trouble with the first-named is that development has been all too
+rapid, and has utterly robbed Swanage of its immemorial character
+as the port whence the famous Purbeck stone was shipped.&nbsp;
+Alas! pretentious houses of a tall and terrible ugliness now
+stand in the middle of the bay, on the shore immediately in front
+of what used merely by <a name="page89"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 89</span>courtesy to be called &ldquo;the
+town,&rdquo; but is now actually grown to that status.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;bankers&rdquo;&mdash;rows upon rows of stacked slabs of
+Purbeck stone that used to form so striking a feature of the
+shore, and were wont, to a stranger seeing them first on a
+moonlit night, to look so grisly, as though this were some
+close-packed seashore cemetery&mdash;the circumstance of
+facetious irony&mdash;the grown prosperity of Swanage has built
+banks, where the Swanage tradesfolk doubtless deposit heavily
+from the profits of their summer trading.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image89" href="images/p89.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Old Church, Swanage"
+title=
+"The Old Church, Swanage"
+ src="images/p89.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>In the distance, along the curving shore of Swanage Bay, there
+has arisen with the development of the Durlstone estate, a grand
+hotel, and in the <a name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+90</span>town itself&mdash;the folly of it!&mdash;uninteresting
+modern commercial buildings have replaced the quaint old cottages
+that, built as they were, in a peculiarly local fashion, with
+great stone slabs and rude stone tiling, had their like nowhere
+else.&nbsp; Now, the rows of newly arisen streets are such as
+have their counterparts in every town, and you can dine
+<i>&agrave; la carte</i> or <i>table-d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te</i> at
+the many hotels and boarding-houses, as their announcements
+boldly inform the visitor, quite as elaborately as in great
+cities.&nbsp; All, without doubt, very refined and up to date,
+but perhaps not to all of us, who keep the simple and robustious
+appetites of our beginnings, so pleasing a change from the time
+(of which Kingsley speaks) when a simple glass of ale and a crust
+of bread and cheese at a rustic inn was all one wished, and
+certainly all one could have got.</p>
+<p>Of those times there are but little &ldquo;islands,&rdquo; so
+to speak, left in the surging mass of modern brick and
+stone.&nbsp; One of them is the ancient church, whose tower is
+thought to be Saxon&mdash;the church where Ethelberta Petherwin,
+in <i>The Hand of Ethelberta</i>, marries Lord Mountclere.&nbsp;
+Another, tucked away behind the Town Hall, and only to be with
+some difficulty discovered, is the old village lock-up.&nbsp; No
+dread Bastille this, but an affair resembling a stone tool-house,
+twelve feet by eight, and lighted only by the holes in the
+decaying woodwork of its nail-studded door.&nbsp; It was built in
+1803, &ldquo;erected&rdquo; as the old inscription tells us,
+&ldquo;for the prevention of Wickedness and Vice by the Friends
+of Religion and Good Order.&rdquo;&nbsp; The inference to be
+drawn from the small size of this place of incarceration is that
+the &ldquo;Wickedness and Vice&rdquo; of Swanage were <a
+name="page91"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 91</span>on a very
+insignificant scale.&nbsp; Although Swanage has grown so greatly,
+and now owns a very fine and large police-station, it is not to
+be inferred that the delinquencies have increased in proportion,
+but rather that officialism has made a larger growth, and that
+Swanage, like poor old England in general, is over-governed.</p>
+<p>Among other outstanding features of Swanage, conferred upon it
+by the late Mr. Mowlem, of the London contracting firm of Mowlem
+and Burt, is the Wellington Clock Tower, the Gothic pinnacled
+structure now ornamenting the foreshore, in what were once the
+private gardens of &ldquo;the Grove.&rdquo;&nbsp; But &ldquo;the
+Grove&rdquo; has now, like many another seashore estate, been cut
+up, and new villas now take the place of the older
+exclusiveness.</p>
+<p>The Clock Tower, one of the many memorials to the great Duke
+of Wellington, stood, until about 1860, on the south side of
+London Bridge, but was removed when the roadway was widened at
+that point.&nbsp; Once removed, the good folk of Southwark were
+at a loss what to do with it, and so solved their difficulty by
+presenting its stones to Mr. Mowlem, the contractor.&nbsp; They
+thought he had been saddled with a &ldquo;white elephant,&rdquo;
+and chuckled accordingly; but they little knew their man.&nbsp;
+He considered the relic &ldquo;just the thing&rdquo; for his
+native town of Swanage, and accepting it with the greatest
+alacrity, despatched it hither, and presented it to his friend
+Mr. Docwra, of &ldquo;the Grove.&rdquo;&nbsp; This poor old
+monument to martial glory has suffered of late, for its pinnacle
+has been blown down and replaced by a copper sheathing very like
+a dish-cover.</p>
+<h2><a name="page92"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+92</span>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">SWANAGE TO CORFE
+CASTLE</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">That</span> pilgrim who, whether on foot
+or by cycle, shall elect to trace these landmarks, will find the
+road out of Swanage to Corfe, by way of Langton Matravers and
+Kingston a heart-breaking stretch of stony hills, whose blinding
+glare under a summer sun is provocative of ophthalmia, and whose
+severities of stone walling, in place of green hedges, recall the
+scenery of Ireland.&nbsp; Herston, too, the unlovely outskirt of
+Swanage, is not encouraging.&nbsp; But the world&mdash;it is a
+truism&mdash;is made up of all sorts, and here, as elsewhere,
+rewards come after trials.</p>
+<p>Langton Matravers, on the ridge-road, is, just as one might
+suppose from the stony nature of Purbeck, a village of stone
+houses, and very grim and unornamental ones too.&nbsp; Nine
+hundred souls live here, and so long as the &ldquo;Langton
+freestone&rdquo; won from its quarries is in good demand, are
+happy enough, although subject to every extremity of
+weather.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Matravers&rdquo; in the place-name
+derives from the old manorial lords, the Maltravers family, who
+dropped the &ldquo;l&rdquo; out of their name some time after one
+of their race, deeply implicated in the barbarous murder of
+Edward II., proved himself a very &ldquo;bad Travers&rdquo;
+indeed, and so made his name peculiarly descriptive.</p>
+<p><a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 93</span>Passing
+Gallows Gore Cottages&mdash;what a melodramatic address to
+own!&mdash;we come to Kingston village, along just such a road,
+with just such a view as that described in <i>The Hand of
+Ethelberta</i>, although, to be sure, she went, on that
+donkey-ride to Corfe, by another and very roundabout route,
+through Ulwell Gap, over Nine Barrow Down.&nbsp; Ordinary folk
+would have gone by the ordinary road; but then, you see,
+Ethelberta was a poetess, and
+&ldquo;unconventionality&mdash;almost eccentricity&mdash;was
+<i>de rigueur</i>&rdquo; for such an one.&nbsp; Hence also that
+unconventional, and uncomfortable, seat on the donkey&rsquo;s
+back.</p>
+<p>From this point Corfe Castle is exquisitely seen, down below
+the ridge, but situated on the course of the minor, but still
+mighty, backbone that bisects the Isle.&nbsp; From hence, too,
+the country may be seen spread out like a map, &ldquo;domains
+behind domains, parishes by the score, harbours, fir-woods and
+little inland seas mixing curiously together.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Dipping down out of sight of all these distant Lands of Promise,
+among the richly wooded lanes of Kingston, the glaring limestone
+road is exchanged for shaded ways, where sunlight only filters
+through in patches of gold, looking to the imaginative as though
+some giant had come this way and dropped the contents of his
+money-bags.&nbsp; Thatched cottages, tall elms, and old-fashioned
+roadside gardens are the features of Kingston; but above all
+these, geographically and in every other respect, is the great
+and magnificent modern church built for Lord Eldon and completed
+in 1880, after seven years&rsquo; work and a vast amount of money
+had been expended upon it.&nbsp; It was designed by
+Street&mdash;that same &ldquo;obliterator of historic
+records&rdquo;&mdash;who at Fawley <a name="page94"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 94</span>Magna earned Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s
+satire; but here were no records to obliterate.&nbsp; Certain
+reminiscences of the architect&rsquo;s early studies of the early
+Gothic of the Rhine churches may be traced here, in the exterior
+design of the apsidal chancel, strongly resembling that of
+Fawley, but one would hesitate to apply the opprobrious term of
+&ldquo;German-Gothic&rdquo; to this, as a whole.&nbsp; Its
+intention is Early English, but the general effect is rather of a
+Norman spirit informed with Early English details; an effect
+greatly accentuated by the heaviness and bulk of the central
+tower, intended by Lord Eldon to be a prominent landmark, and
+fulfilling that intention by the sacrifice of proportion to the
+rest of the building.&nbsp; Cruciform plan, size, and general
+elaboration render this a church particularly unfitted for so
+small and so rustic a village.&nbsp; Had its needs been studied,
+rather than the ecclesiological tastes of the third Lord Eldon,
+the little church built many years ago for the first earl, the
+great lawyer-lord, by Repton, would have sufficed; although to be
+sure it has all the faults of the first attempts at reviving
+Gothic.</p>
+<p>The Earl of Eldon purchased the manor of Kingston and the
+residence of Encombe from William Morton Pitt in 1807.&nbsp;
+Here, in that little church built by him, he lies, beside his
+&ldquo;Bessie,&rdquo; that Bessie Surtees with whom he, then
+plain and penniless John Scott, eloped from the old house on
+Sandhill, Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1772.&nbsp; His house of Encombe,
+the &ldquo;Enkworth Court,&rdquo; of <i>The Hand of
+Ethelberta</i>, lies deep down in the glen of Encombe, approached
+by a long road gradually descending into the cup-like crater by
+the only expedient of <a name="page95"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 95</span>winding round it.&nbsp; Think of all
+the beautiful road scenery you have ever seen or heard of, and
+you will not have seen or been told of anything more beautiful in
+its especial kind of beauty than this sequestered road down into
+Lord Eldon&rsquo;s retreat.&nbsp; <a name="page96"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 96</span>Jagged white cliffs here and there
+project themselves out of the steep banks of grass and moss above
+the way, draped with a profusion of small-leaved ground-ivy and a
+wealth of hart&rsquo;s-tongue ferns, and trees romantically shade
+the whole.&nbsp; An obelisk erected by the great statesman, on a
+bold bluff, to the memory of his brother, Lord Stowell, adds an
+element of romance to the scene, and then, plunging into a final
+mass of tangled woodland, the grey stone elevation of the house
+is seen, ghostlike, fronting a gravel drive, in its silence and
+drawn blinds looking less like the home of some fairy princess
+than the residence of a misanthrope, who has retired beyond the
+reach of the world and drawn his blinds, with the hope of
+persuading any who may possibly find their way here that he is
+not at home.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image95" href="images/p95.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Encombe"
+title=
+"Encombe"
+ src="images/p95.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Enkworth Court&rdquo; was, we are told, &ldquo;a house
+in which Pugin would have torn his hair,&rdquo; and Encombe
+certainly can possess no charms for amateurs of Gothic.&nbsp; Nor
+can it possibly delight students of the ancient Greek and Roman
+orders, for its architecture has classic intentions without being
+classical, and heaviness without dignity.&nbsp; But its interior,
+if it likewise does not appeal to a cultivated taste in matters
+connected with the mother of all the arts, is exceptionally
+comfortable.&nbsp; Here the old Chancellor, over eighty years of
+age, spent most of his declining days.&nbsp; &ldquo;His sporting
+days were over; he had but little interest in gardening or
+farming; and his only reading, beside the newspaper, was a
+chapter in the Bible.&nbsp; His mornings he spent in an
+elbow-chair by the fireside in his study&mdash;called his
+shop&mdash;which was ornamented <a name="page97"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 97</span>by portraits of his deceased master,
+George III. and his living companion, Pincher, a poodle
+dog.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>From Kingston to Corfe Castle, the bourne of innumerable
+summer visitors, is two miles.&nbsp; The first glimpse of town
+and castle is one which clearly shows how aptly the site of them
+obtained its original name of Corvesgate, from the Anglo-Saxon
+<i>ceorfan</i>, to cut.&nbsp; The site was so named long before
+castle or town were erected here, and referred to the passages
+cut or carved through the bold range of hills by the little river
+Corfe and its tributaries.&nbsp; Those clefts are clearly
+distinguished from here and from the main road between Corfe and
+Swanage, and are notched twice, so deeply into the stony range,
+that the eminence on which the castle stands is less like a part
+of one continuous chain of hills than an isolated conical hill
+neighboured by lengthy ridges.</p>
+<p>On that islanded hill, shouldered by taller neighbours, the
+castle was built, because at this point it so effectually guarded
+these passes from the shores of Purbeck to the inland
+regions.&nbsp; The position in these days seems a singular one,
+for from the upper slopes of those neighbours it is possible to
+look down into the castle and observe its every detail, but such
+things mattered little in days before artillery.</p>
+<p>A first impression of Corfe, if it be summer, is an impression
+of dazzling whiteness; resolved, on a nearer approach, into the
+pure white of the road and of the occasional repairs and
+restorations of the stone-built streets, the grey white of
+buildings past their first novelty, and the dead greyness of the
+roofing slabs of stone.&nbsp; There is little colour in Corfe
+when June has gone.&nbsp; The golden-green <a
+name="page98"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 98</span>lichens and
+houseleeks of spring have been sucked dry by the summer heats and
+turned to withered rustiness, and even the grass of the
+pyramidical hill on which the castle keep is reared has little
+more than an exhausted sage-green hue.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Corvsgate Castle,&rdquo; as we find it styled in <i>The
+Hand of Ethelberta</i>, is frequently the scene, at such a time
+of year, of meetings like that of the &ldquo;Imperial
+Association&rdquo; in that story.&nbsp; All that is to be known
+respecting these ruins, &ldquo;the meagre stumps remaining from
+flourishing bygone centuries,&rdquo; is the common property of
+all interested in historical antiquities, but there is something,
+it may be supposed, in revisiting the oft-visited and in
+retelling the old tale, which bids defiance to <i>ennui</i> and
+precludes satiety, even although the President&rsquo;s address be
+a paraphrase of the last arch&aelig;ological paper, and that the
+echo of its predecessor, and so forth, in endless
+<i>diminuendo</i>:</p>
+<blockquote><p>And smaller fleas have lesser fleas,<br />
+And so <i>ad infinitum</i>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>&ldquo;Carfe,&rdquo; as any Wessex man of the soil will name
+it, just as horses are &lsquo;harses&rsquo; and hornets become
+&lsquo;harnets&rsquo; in his ancient and untutored pronunciation,
+is, as already hinted, a place of stone buildings, where brick,
+although not unknown, is remarkable.&nbsp; Stone from foundation
+to roof, and stone slabs of immense size for the roofs
+themselves.&nbsp; In a place where building-stone is and has been
+so readily found it is, of course, in the nature of things to
+find the remains of a castle that must have been exceptionally
+large and strong, and here <a name="page100"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 100</span>they are, peering over the rooftops
+of the town from whatever point of view you choose.&nbsp; The
+castle is as essential a feature in all views of the town as it
+is in history; and rightly too, for had it not been for that
+fortress there would have been no town.&nbsp; It is a town by
+courtesy and ancient estate, and a village by size; a village
+that does not grow and has so far escaped the desecration of
+modern streets.&nbsp; The market cross, recently restored to
+perfection from a shattered stump, and the town hall both declare
+it to have been a town, as does, or did, the existence of a
+mayor, but such things have long become vanities.&nbsp; The
+return of two members to Parliament, a privilege Corfe enjoyed
+until reform put an end to it in 1832, proved nothing, for
+Parliamentary representation was no more fixed on the principle
+of comparative electorates than the representation of Ireland is
+now in the House of Commons.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image99" href="images/p99.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Corfe Castle"
+title=
+"Corfe Castle"
+ src="images/p99.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The temperance interest need by no means be shocked when it is
+said that the most interesting feature of Corfe, next to the
+castle, is its inn.&nbsp; The church does not count; for the body
+of it has been uninterestingly rebuilt, and only the fine tower,
+of Perpendicular date, remains.&nbsp; The inns, however, combine
+picturesqueness with the solid British comforts of old times and
+the less substantial amenities of the new.&nbsp; Here, looking
+upon the &ldquo;Bankes Arms,&rdquo; with its highly elaborate
+heraldic sign, you can have no manner of doubt as to what family
+is still paramount in Corfe, and I think, perhaps, that to
+shelter behind so gorgeous an achievement even reflects a halo
+upon the guest; while if the &ldquo;Greyhound&rdquo; can confer
+no such satisfaction, its unusual picturesqueness, <a
+name="page101"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 101</span>with that
+charming feature of a porch projecting over the pavement and
+owning a capacious room poised above the comings and goings, the
+commerce and gossipings of the people, can at least give a
+visitor the charm of what, although an ancient feature of the
+place, is at least a novelty to him.</p>
+<p>The three cylindrical stone columns of plethoric figure which
+support this porch and its room are more generally useful than
+the architect who placed them here, some two hundred and eighty
+years ago, probably ever imagined they would be.&nbsp; <i>He</i>
+devised them for the support of his gazebo above, but more than
+twenty generations of Wessex folk have found them convenient for
+leaning-stocks, and the comfortable support they give has further
+lengthened many a long argument which, had all contributing
+parties stood supported only by their own two natural posts that
+carry the bodily superstructure, would have been earlier
+concluded.&nbsp; The progress of an argument, discussion,
+narration, or negotiation under such unequal conditions is to be
+watched with interest.&nbsp; Time probably will forbid one being
+followed from beginning to end; but to be a spectator of one of
+these comedies from the middle onwards is sufficient.&nbsp; The
+length it has already been played may generally be pretty
+accurately estimated by the state of weariness or impatience
+exhibited by that party to it who is not supported by the
+pillar.&nbsp; The &ldquo;well, as I was saying&rdquo; of the one
+enjoying the leaning-stock, discloses, like the parson&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;secondly, Dear brethren,&rdquo; the fact that the
+discourse is well on the way, but the same thing may be gathered
+by those out <a name="page102"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+102</span>of earshot, in the man&oelig;uvres of the less
+fortunate of the two, the one who is supporting his own
+bulk.&nbsp; He stands upright, hands behind his back, while
+swaying his walking stick; then he leans his weight to one side
+upon it, first (if he be a stout man, whom it behoves to exercise
+caution) carefully selecting a safe crevice in the jointing of
+the pavement, as a bearing for the ferule of his ash-plant; then,
+growing weary of this attitude, he repeats the process on the
+other side, changing after a while to the expedient of a sideways
+stress, halfway up the body, by straining the walking stick
+horizontally against the wall.&nbsp; Then, having exhausted all
+possible movements, he takes a bulky silver watch from his
+pocket, and affects to find time unexpectedly ahead of him; and
+when this resort is reached the spectacle generally comes to a
+conclusion.</p>
+<p>But it is time to follow Ethelberta into the
+castle:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Ethelberta crossed the bridge over the
+moat, and rode under the first archway into the outer ward.&nbsp;
+As she had expected, not a soul was here.&nbsp; The arrow-slits,
+portcullis-grooves, and staircases met her eye as familiar
+friends, for in her childhood she had once paid a visit to the
+spot.&nbsp; Ascending the green incline and through another arch
+into the second ward, she still pressed on, till at last the ass
+was unable to clamber an inch further.&nbsp; Here she dismounted,
+and tying him to a stone which projected like a fang from a raw
+edge of wall, performed the remainder of the journey on
+foot.&nbsp; Once among the towers above, she became so interested
+in the windy corridors, mildewed dungeons, and the tribe <a
+name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 103</span>of daws
+peering invidiously upon her from overhead, that she forgot the
+flight of time.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The ruins that Ethelberta and the &ldquo;Imperial
+Association&rdquo; had come to inspect owe their heaped and
+toppling ruination to that last great armed convulsion in our
+insular history, the Civil War, whose two greatest personalities
+were Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell.&nbsp; Until that time the
+proud fortress had stood unharmed, as stalwart as when built in
+Norman times.</p>
+<p>The history of Corfe before those times is very obscure, and
+no one has yet discovered whether the first recorded incident in
+it took place at a mere hunting-lodge here or at the gates of a
+fortress.&nbsp; That incident, the first and most atrocious of
+all the atrocious deeds of blood wrought at Corfe, was the murder
+of King Edward &ldquo;the Martyr,&rdquo; in <span
+class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 978, by his stepmother, Queen
+Elfrida, anxious to secure the throne for her own son.&nbsp; The
+boy&mdash;he was only in his nineteenth year&mdash;had drawn rein
+here, on his return alone from hunting, and was drinking at the
+door from a goblet handed him by Elfrida herself when she stabbed
+him to the heart.&nbsp; His horse, startled at the attack, darted
+away, dragging the body by the stirrups, and thus, battered and
+lifeless, it was found.</p>
+<p>Built, or rebuilt, in the time of the Conqueror, Corfe Castle
+was early besieged, and in that passage gave a good account of
+itself and justified its existence, for King Stephen failed to
+take it by force or to starve the garrison out.&nbsp; How long he
+may have been pleased to sit down before it we do not know, for
+the approach of a relieving force <a name="page104"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 104</span>caused him to pack his baggage and
+be off.&nbsp; Strong, however, as it was even then, it was
+continually under enlargement in the reigns of Henry II., Henry
+III., and Edward I., and had a better right to the oft-used boast
+of being impregnable than most other fortresses.</p>
+<h2><a name="page105"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+105</span>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">CORFE CASTLE</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Like</span> some cruel ogre of folk-lore
+the Castle of Corfe has drunk deep of blood.&nbsp; Its strength
+kept prisoners safely guarded, as well as foes at arm&rsquo;s
+length, and many a despairing wretch has been hurried through the
+now ruined gatehouse, to the muttered &ldquo;God help him!&rdquo;
+of some compassionate warder.&nbsp; Through the great open Outer
+Ward and steeply uphill between the two gloomy circular
+drum-towers across the second ward, and thence to the Dungeon
+Tower at the further left-hand corner of the stronghold, they
+were taken and thrust into some vile place of little ease, to be
+imprisoned for a lifetime, to be starved to death, or more
+mercifully ended by the assassin&rsquo;s dagger.&nbsp;
+Twenty-four knights captured in Brittany, in arms against King
+John, in aid of his nephew, Arthur, were imprisoned here, in
+1202, and twenty-two of them met death by starvation in some foul
+underground hold.&nbsp; Prince Arthur, as every one knows, was
+blinded by orders of the ruthless king, and Arthur&rsquo;s
+sister, Eleanor, was thrown into captivity, first here and then
+at Bristol, where, after forty years, she died.&nbsp; Thus did
+monarchs dispose of rivals, and those who aided them, in the
+&ldquo;good old days,&rdquo; and other monarchs, <a
+name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 106</span>not so
+ferocious, or not so well able to take care of themselves, stood
+in danger of tasting the same fare, as in the case of Edward II.
+imprisoned here and murdered in the dungeons of Berkeley
+Castle.&nbsp; Sympathies go out to the unhappy captives and
+victims, but a knowledge of these things tells us that they would
+have done the same, had opportunity offered and the positions
+been reversed.</p>
+<p>This stronghold held many a humbler prisoner, among them those
+who had offended in one or other of the easy ways of offence in
+this, the King&rsquo;s deer-forest of Purbeck; and many others
+immured for mere caprice.&nbsp; The place must have reeked with
+blood and been strewn with bones like a hy&aelig;na&rsquo;s
+lair.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p106a.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Corfe Castle"
+title=
+"Corfe Castle"
+ src="images/p106a.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>So much for the domestic history of Corfe Castle.&nbsp; Its
+last great appearance in the history of the nation was during the
+civil wars of King and Parliament, when it justified the design
+of its builders, and proved the excellence of its defences by
+successfully withstanding two sieges; falling in the second
+solely by treachery.&nbsp; It had by that time passed through
+many hands, and had come at last to the Bankes family, by whom it
+is still owned.&nbsp; It was only eight years before the first
+siege in this war that the property had been acquired by the Lord
+Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes, who purchased
+it from the widow of that celebrated lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, the
+Coke of &ldquo;Coke upon Littleton.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p106b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Corfe Castle"
+title=
+"Corfe Castle"
+ src="images/p106b.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>When the civil war broke out, Sir John Bankes, called to the
+King&rsquo;s side at York, left his wife and children at their
+home of Kingston Lacy, near Wimborne Minster, whence, for
+security from the <a name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+107</span>covert sneers and petty annoyances offered them by the
+once humbly subservient townsfolk, not slow to note the trend of
+affairs, they removed in the autumn of 1642 to Corfe Castle,
+where they spent the winter unmolested.</p>
+<p>Although they thus sought shelter here, they probably had no
+idea of the heights to which the tide of rebellion would rise,
+and could scarce have anticipated being besieged; but the
+Parliamentary leaders in the district had their eyes upon a
+fortress which, already obsolete and the subject of antiquarian
+curiosity, could yet be made a place of strength, as the sequel
+was presently to show.</p>
+<p>The first attempt to gain possession of the castle was by a
+subterfuge, ingenious and plausible enough.&nbsp; The Mayor of
+Corfe had from time immemorial held a stag hunt annually, on May
+Day, and it was thought that, if on this occasion some additional
+parties of horse were to attend, and to seize the stronghold
+under colour of paying a visit, the thing would be done with
+ease.&nbsp; So probably it would, but for the keen feminine
+intuition of Lady Bankes, who closed the gates and mounted a
+guard upon the entrance-towers, so that when those huntsmen came
+and demanded surrender, scarcely in the manner of visitors, they
+were at once denied admission, and effectually unmasked.&nbsp;
+The revolutionary committee sitting at Poole then considered it
+advisable to despatch a body of sailors, who appeared before the
+castle, early one morning, to demand the surrender of four small
+dismounted pieces of cannon with which it was armed.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But,&rdquo; says the <i>Mercurius Rusticus</i>, a
+contemporary news-sheet, &ldquo;instead of delivering them,
+though at the time there were but <a name="page108"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 108</span>five men in the Castle, yet these
+five, assisted by the maid-servants, at their ladies&rsquo;
+Command, mount these peeces on their carriages againe, and lading
+one of them they gave fire, which small Thunder so affrighted the
+Sea-men that they all quitted the place and ran away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Operations thus opened, Lady Bankes proved herself a ready and
+resourceful general.&nbsp; By beat of drum she summoned tenants
+and friends, who, responding to the number of fifty, garrisoned
+the fortress for about a week, when a scarcity of provisions,
+together with threatening letters, and the entreaties of their
+wives, to whom home and children were more than King or
+Parliament, or the Bankes family either, made them shamble home
+again.&nbsp; We should perhaps not be too ready to censure
+them.&nbsp; Lady Bankes, however, did not despair.&nbsp; A born
+strategist, she perceived how vitally necessary it was, above all
+else, to lay in a stock of provisions; and to secure them, and
+time for her preparations she offered in the meekest way to give
+up those cannon which, after all, although they made the maximum
+of noise effected a minimum of harm.</p>
+<p>The enemy, pacified by this offer, removed the guns and left
+the castle alone for a while; thinking its defences weak
+enough.&nbsp; But it was soon thoroughly provisioned, supplied
+with ammunition, and garrisoned under the command of one Captain
+Lawrence, and when the Roundheads of Poole next turned their
+attention to Corfe, behold! it was bristling like a porcupine
+with pikes and musquetoons and all those ancient
+seventeenth-century engines of war, with which men were quaintly
+done to <a name="page109"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+109</span>death&mdash;when by some exceptional chance the
+marksmen earned their name and hit anybody.</p>
+<p>The middle of June had gone before the Parliamentary forces
+from Poole made their appearance.&nbsp; They numbered between two
+and three hundred horse and foot, and brought two cannon, with
+which they played upon the castle from the neighbouring hills,
+with little effect.&nbsp; Then came an interlude, ended by the
+appearance, on June 23rd, of Sir Walter Erle with between five
+and six hundred men, to reinforce the besiegers.&nbsp; They
+brought with them a &ldquo;Demy-Canon, a Culverin, and two
+Sacres,&rdquo; and with these fired a hail of small shot down
+into the castle upon those heights on either hand.&nbsp; The
+results were poor to insignificance, and it was then determined
+to attempt a storming of the castle.&nbsp; This grand advance,
+made on June 26th, was begun by intimidating shouts that no
+quarter would be granted, but the garrison were so little
+terrified by this fighting with the mouth that, tired of waiting
+the enemy from the walls, they even sallied out and slaughtered
+some of the foremost, who were approaching cautiously under cover
+of strange engines named the &ldquo;Sow&rdquo; and the
+&ldquo;Boar.&rdquo;&nbsp; The besiegers then mounted a cannon on
+the top of the church-tower, &ldquo;which,&rdquo; we are told,
+&ldquo;they, without fears of prophanation used,&rdquo; and
+breaking the organ, used the pipes of it for shot-cases.&nbsp;
+The ammunition included, among other strange missiles, lumps of
+lead torn off the roof and rolled up.</p>
+<p>All these things proving useless, a band of a hundred and
+fifty sailors was sent by the Earl of Warwick, with large
+supplies of petards and <a name="page110"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 110</span>grenadoes, and a number of scaling
+ladders, and then all thought the enterprise in a fair way of
+being ended.&nbsp; The sailors, nothing loth, were made drunk,
+the ladders were placed against the walls, and a sum of twenty
+pounds was offered to the first man up.&nbsp; With preparations
+so generous as these a riotous scaling-party, carrying pikes and
+hand-grenades, strove to mount the ladders, but were met by an
+avalanche of hot cinders, stones, and things still more
+objectionable, hoarded up by the garrison from those primitive
+sanitary contrivances called by antiquaries
+&ldquo;garderobes,&rdquo; against such a contingency as
+this.&nbsp; One sailor has his clothes almost burnt off his back,
+another&rsquo;s courage is dowsed with a pail of slops, others
+are knocked over, bruised and battered, into the dry moat, by a
+hundredweight of stone heaved over the battlements, and long
+ladders full of escaladers, swarming up, on one another&rsquo;s
+heels, are flung backward with tremendous crashes by prokers from
+arrow-slits in the bastioned walls.&nbsp; Soldiers under the
+machicolated entrance towers have had their steel morions crushed
+down upon their heads by heavy weights dropped upon them, and are
+left gasping for breath and slowly suffocating in that meat-tin
+kind of imprisonment; and a more than ordinarily active besieger,
+who has made himself exceptionally prominent, is suddenly
+flattened out by a heavy lump of lead.&nbsp; &ldquo;The knocks
+are too hot,&rdquo; as Shakespeare says, and the assailants are
+forced to retire, to bury their dead, to tend one another&rsquo;s
+hurts, and those most fortunate to cleanse themselves.&nbsp; That
+same night of August 4th, Sir Walter Erle, hearing a rumour of
+the King&rsquo;s forces approaching, hurriedly raised <a
+name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 111</span>the siege
+and retreated upon Poole, and not until February 1646 was Corfe
+Castle again molested.</p>
+<p>This time it was beset to more purpose.&nbsp; Lady Bankes, now
+a widow, for her husband had died in 1644, parted from his
+family, was at Corfe, vigilant, keen-eyed, loyal, and more or
+less strictly blockaded between Roundhead garrisons.&nbsp;
+Wareham was in their possession, Poole, as ever, a hotbed of
+disaffection, and Swanage watched by land and sea.&nbsp; A
+gallant deed performed at the opening of 1646 by one Cromwell, a
+youthful officer strangely enough, considering his name, on the
+Royalist side, was of no avail.&nbsp; He with his troops burst
+through the enemy&rsquo;s lines at Wareham and on the way
+encountered the Parliamentary governor of that place, whom he
+captured and brought to Corfe.&nbsp; This was undertaken to
+afford Lady Bankes an opportunity of escaping, if she wished, but
+she fortunately refused, for on the way back the little party
+were captured.</p>
+<p>The castle was then besieged by Colonel Bingham, and endured
+for forty-eight days the rigours of a strict investment.&nbsp; In
+the meanwhile, Lawrence, the governor, deserted and at the same
+time released the imprisoned governor of Wareham.&nbsp; Every one
+knew the King&rsquo;s cause here and in the whole of the kingdom
+to be in desperate straits, and the knowledge of fighting for a
+losing side unnerved all.&nbsp; Seeing the inevitable course of
+events, Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman, one of the defenders&rsquo;
+officers, secretly opened negotiations with the enemy for the
+surrender, and, succeeding in persuading the new governor, who
+had taken the post deserted by Lawrence, that a reinforcement
+from Somersetshire <a name="page112"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+112</span>was expected, under that guise at dead of night
+admitted fifty Parliamentary troops into the keep.&nbsp; When
+morning dawned the garrison found themselves betrayed; but,
+commanding as they did the lives of some thirty prisoners, they
+were able to exact favourable terms of surrender.&nbsp; And then,
+when all the defenders marched out, kegs of gunpowder were laid
+in keep and curtain-towers, down in dungeons and under roofs, and
+the match applied.&nbsp; When the roar and smoke of the explosion
+had died away, the stern walls that for five hundred years had
+frowned down upon the streets of Corfe had gone up in ruin.</p>
+<p>Not altogether destroyed, in the Biblical completeness of the
+fulfilled prophecies of &ldquo;not one stone upon another,&rdquo;
+concerning Nineveh, and the Cities of the Plain; for tall spires
+of cliff-like masonry still represent the keep and gateway, and
+curtain-towers remain in recognisable shapes, connected by riven
+jaws of masonry, so hard and so formless that they are not easily
+to be distinguished from the rock in which their foundations are
+set.&nbsp; Here a tower may be seen, lifted up bodily by the
+agency of gunpowder, and set down again at a distance, gently and
+as fairly plumb as it was it its original position: there another
+has been torn asunder, as one tears a sheet of paper, and a few
+steps away is another, leaning at a much more acute angle than
+the Leaning Tower of Pisa.&nbsp; Everywhere, light is let into
+dungeons and battlements abased; floors abolished and great empty
+stone fireplaces on what were second, third and fourth floors
+turned to mouthpieces for the winds.&nbsp; And yet, although such
+havoc has been wrought, and although it is almost <a
+name="page113"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 113</span>impossible
+to identify the greater part of its chambers, Corfe Castle is
+still a fine and an impressive ruin.&nbsp; It is grand when seen
+from afar, and not less grand when viewed near at hand, from the
+ravine in which runs the road to Wareham.</p>
+<h2><a name="page114"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+114</span>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WAREHAM</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">That</span> is a straight and easy road
+which in four miles leads from Corfe to Wareham, and a breezy and
+bracing road too, across heaths quite as unspoilt as those of
+&ldquo;Egdon,&rdquo; but of a more cheerful and hopeful
+aspect.&nbsp; <i>The Return of the Native</i>, whose scene is
+laid on the heaths to the north-west, could not, with the same
+justness of description, have been staged upon these, and from
+another circumstance, quite apart from this heart-lifting
+breeziness, these heaths have little in common with their
+brooding neighbours.&nbsp; They are enlivened with the signs of a
+very ancient and long-continued industry, for where the Romans
+discovered and dug in the great deposits of china-clay found here
+the Dorsetshire labourer still digs, and runs his truckloads on
+crazy tramways down to the quays upon Poole Harbour at
+Goathorn.&nbsp; Fragments of Roman pottery, made from this clay,
+are still occasionally found here, but since that time the clay
+has not been turned to extensive use on the spot where it is
+found, but is shipped for Staffordshire and abroad.&nbsp; Much of
+Poole&rsquo;s prosperity is due to the china-clay trade, carried
+on by the vessels of that <a name="page115"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 115</span>port, which receive it from barges
+crossing the harbour.&nbsp; It was early used for tobacco-pipes,
+and probably those of Sir Walter Raleigh&rsquo;s first
+experiments were made from the clay found here.&nbsp; So far back
+as 1760 the export of Purbeck china-clay had reached ten thousand
+tons annually.&nbsp; It has now risen to about sixty
+thousand.</p>
+<p>This northern portion of the Isle of Purbeck is indeed of
+altogether different character from the rugged stony southern
+half, beyond Corfe.&nbsp; It is low-lying and heathy, and the
+roads are a complete change from the blinding whiteness
+characterising those of Purbeck <i>Petr&aelig;a</i>, as it may be
+named.&nbsp; Here, mended with ironstone, they are of a ruddy
+colour.</p>
+<p>Leaving the clay-cutters and their terraced diggings behind,
+we come, past the paltry hamlet of Stoborough, within sight of
+Wareham, entered across a long causeway over the Frome marshes
+and over an ancient Gothic bridge spanning the Frome
+itself.&nbsp; Ahead is seen the tower of St. Mary&rsquo;s, one of
+the only two churches remaining of the original eight.&nbsp; Five
+of the others have been swept away, and the sixth is converted
+into a school.&nbsp; Wareham, it will be guessed, is not a
+mushroom place of yesterday, but has a past and has seen many
+changes.</p>
+<p>Wareham, &ldquo;the oldest arnshuntest place in Do&rsquo;set,
+where ye turn up housen underneath yer &rsquo;tater-patch,&rdquo;
+as described to the present historian by a rustic, who might have
+been the original of Haymoss, in <i>Two on a Tower</i>, is indeed
+of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that attractive
+fact.&nbsp; Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of
+the compass, do not perhaps afford the best <a
+name="page116"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 116</span>evidences
+of that age, for they are broad and straight and lined with
+houses which, if not all Georgian, are so largely in that style
+that they influence the general character of the thoroughfares
+and give them an air of the eighteenth century.&nbsp; For this
+there is an excellent reason, found in the almost complete
+destruction by fire of Wareham, on July 25th, 1762.</p>
+<p>To the ordinary traveller&mdash;and certainly to the
+commercial traveller&mdash;without a bias for history and
+antiquities, it is the dullest town in Wessex.&nbsp; Not decayed,
+like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void and still, and how it,
+under this constant solitude and somnolence, manages to retain
+its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle.</p>
+<p>Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks; but
+while Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has
+shrunk within them, and one who, climbing those stupendous
+fortifications, looks down upon the little town, sees gardens and
+orchards, pigsties and cowsheds plentifully intermingled with the
+streets, on the spot where other and vanished streets once
+stood.&nbsp; That &ldquo;once,&rdquo; however, was so long ago
+that the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and
+the mind dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident
+in such things, as upon the luxuriance of the gardens themselves
+and the prettiness of the picture they produce, intermingled with
+the houses.</p>
+<p>Wareham&mdash;&ldquo;Anglebury&rdquo; Mr. Hardy calls
+it&mdash;is, or was when the latest census returns were
+published, a town of two thousand and three inhabitants.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image116" href="images/p116a.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Approach to Wareham"
+title=
+"Approach to Wareham"
+ src="images/p116a.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has
+lost more than those odd three, thus coming within the fatal
+definition given somewhere, by some one, of a village.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p116b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Walls of Wareham"
+title=
+"The Walls of Wareham"
+ src="images/p116b.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page117"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+117</span>Things are in this way come to a parlous state, for
+this is the latest of a good many modern strokes.&nbsp; One,
+which hurt its pride not a little, was when, in the
+redistribution of Parliamentary seats, it lost its representation
+and became merged in a county division.&nbsp; Another&mdash;but
+why enumerate these undeserved whips and scorns?&nbsp; In one
+respect Wareham keeps an urban character.&nbsp; It has two
+inns&mdash;the &ldquo;Black Bear&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Red
+Lion&rdquo;&mdash;that call themselves hotels, and a score or so
+of minor houses where, if you cannot obtain a desirable
+&ldquo;cup of genuine,&rdquo; why, &ldquo;&rsquo;tis a sad thing
+and an oncivilised?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to
+style Wareham &ldquo;Anglebury,&rdquo; for that story is greatly
+concerned with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and
+the fortunes of the Kingdom of Wessex.&nbsp; Conveniently near
+the sea, within the innermost recesses of Poole Harbour, and yet
+removed from the rage and havoc of the outer elements, it lies on
+the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the two rivers
+Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from
+where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour.&nbsp; In a nook
+such as this you might think a town would have been secure, and
+that was the hope of those who founded it here.&nbsp; But, to
+render assurance doubly sure, those original
+town-builders&mdash;who were probably much earlier than the
+invading Saxons and are thought to have been some British
+tribe&mdash;heaped up and dug out those famous &ldquo;walls of
+Wareham,&rdquo; which surround the town to this day, and are not
+walls in the common acceptation of <a name="page118"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 118</span>the term, but ditches so deeply
+delved, and mounds so steeply piled that they are in some places
+little more scalable than a forthright, plumb up and down, wall
+of brick or masonry would be, and with an &ldquo;angle of
+repose&rdquo; sufficiently acute to astonish any modern railway
+engineer.</p>
+<p>Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earthworks, was a place
+of strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the
+bloody tangle of its long history.&nbsp; Strong defences require
+determined attacks.&nbsp; That history only opens with some
+clearness at the time of the Saxon occupation, when the piratical
+Danes were beginning to harry the coast, but it continues with
+accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays, repeated until
+the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by only a
+few dispirited defenders.&nbsp; In <span
+class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 876 these Northmen captured the
+place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them
+out.&nbsp; Some Saxon confidence then returned, but the old
+miseries were repeated when Canute, not yet the pious Canute of
+his last years, sailed up the Frome and not only destroyed this
+already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the greater part of
+Wessex.</p>
+<p>Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated
+place when the Conqueror came; but it was made to hold up its
+head once more, and the two mints it had owned in the time of
+Saxon Athelstan were re-established.&nbsp; The castle, whose name
+alone survives, in that of Castle Hill, was then built, and, in
+the added strength it gave, was the source of many troubles soon
+to come.&nbsp; It was surprised and seized for the Empress Maud
+in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four years <a
+name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 119</span>later, in
+the absence of its governor, the Earl of Gloucester, who
+returning, recaptured the town after a three-weeks&rsquo;
+siege.&nbsp; At length the treaty of peace and tolerance between
+Stephen and Maud gave the townsfolk&mdash;those few of them who
+had been courageous enough to remain, and fortunate enough to
+survive&mdash;an opportunity of creeping out of the cellars, and
+of looking around and reviewing their position.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hope
+springs eternal,&rdquo; and these remnants of the Wareham folk
+were in some measure justified of their faith, for it was not
+until another half-century had passed that the town was again
+besieged and taken.&nbsp; That event was an <a
+name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 120</span>incident in
+the contention between King John and his Barons, and a feature of
+it was the destruction of the castle, never afterwards
+rebuilt.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image119" href="images/p119.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Wareham"
+title=
+"Wareham"
+ src="images/p119.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could
+possibly have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and
+personal warfares, for it rendered Wareham a place of little
+account in the calculations of medi&aelig;val partisans; and then
+it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the Civil War of Crown
+and Parliament, when old times came again, in the bewildering
+circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament against
+the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined
+and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the
+property of their friends before they could recover it, and then
+stormed and surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse
+of History herself ceases to keep tally.&nbsp; Few people looked
+on: most took an active part, and the rector himself, &ldquo;a
+stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good things,&rdquo; was
+wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times.&nbsp; The
+obvious criticism here is that they must have been short
+sentences.&nbsp; The Parliamentary commander, Sir Anthony Ashley
+Cooper, was for punishing the &ldquo;dreadful malignancy shown
+towards the cause of righteousness&rdquo; by the Wareham people,
+and advised that the place be &ldquo;plucked down and made no
+town&rdquo;; but this course was not adopted.</p>
+<p>Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many
+horrid deeds.&nbsp; In that castle whose site alone remains,
+Robert de Belesme was starved to death in 1114, and on those
+walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit and prophet, one Peter
+of <a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+121</span>Pomfret, who had prophesied that the King should lose
+his crown, was hanged and quartered in 1213, after having been
+fed, in the manner of the prophet Micaiah, with the bread of
+affliction, and the water of affliction, in the gruesome dungeons
+of Corfe.&nbsp; For King John, the Ahab of our history, had a way
+of his own with seers of visions and prophesiers of disaster; and
+his way, it will be allowed, very effectually discouraged prying
+into futurity.</p>
+<p>Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called
+&ldquo;Bloody Bank,&rdquo; three poor fellows who had taken part
+in the Monmouth Rebellion were hanged, portions of their bodies
+being afterwards exposed, with ghastly barbarity, in different
+parts of the town.</p>
+<p>Following the long broad street from where the town is entered
+across the Frome, the &ldquo;Black Bear&rdquo; is passed,
+prominent with its porch and the great chained effigy of the
+black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the roof of
+it.&nbsp; Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a
+terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered
+tablet, handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we
+now come to the northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to
+the banks of the Piddle, may, looking backwards, see those old
+defences, the so-styled &ldquo;walls,&rdquo; heaped up with
+magnificent emphasis.</p>
+<p>They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and
+although it is a drama long since played, and the curtain rung
+down upon the last act, two hundred and fifty years ago, this
+scenery of it can still eloquently recall its dragonadoes and
+blood-boltered episodes.</p>
+<h2><a name="page122"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+122</span>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<p class="gutsumm">WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Leaving</span> Wareham by West Street,
+where there is a &ldquo;Pure Drop&rdquo; inn, perhaps suggesting
+the sign of the public where John Durbeyfield boozed, at far-away
+Marlott, a valley road leads by East Stoke to the remains of
+Bindon Abbey.</p>
+<p>The ruins of Bindon Abbey are few and formless, standing in
+tree-grown and unkempt grounds, where a black and green stagnant
+moat surrounds a curious circular mound.&nbsp; Those who
+demolished Bindon Abbey did their work thoroughly, for little is
+left of it save the bases of columns and the foundations of
+walls, in which arch&aelig;ological societies see darkly the
+ground plan of the old Cistercian monastery.&nbsp; A few stone
+slabs and coffins remain, among them a stone with the indent of a
+vanished life-sized brass to an abbot.&nbsp; The inscription
+survives, in bold Lombardic characters&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">ABBAS RICARDUS DE MANERS HIC TUMULATUR</span><br
+/>
+<span class="GutSmall">APP&OElig;NAS TARDUS DEUS HUNC
+SALVANS</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">TUEATUR.</span></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Close by is the stone sarcophagus in which Angel Clare,
+sleep-walking from Woolbridge House (which is represented in the
+story as being much nearer to this spot than it really is), laid
+Tess.&nbsp; <a name="page123"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+123</span>Near the ruin, beside the Frome, is Bindon Abbey Mill,
+where Angel Clare proposed to learn milling.</p>
+<p>
+<a name="image123" href="images/p123.jpg">
+<img class='floatright' alt=
+"The Abbot&rsquo;s Coffin, Bindon Abbey"
+title=
+"The Abbot&rsquo;s Coffin, Bindon Abbey"
+ src="images/p123.jpg" />
+</a>Here that thing not greatly in accord with monastic remains
+and hallowed vestiges of the olden times&mdash;a railway
+station&mdash;comes within sight and hearing at the end of Wool
+village.&nbsp; Old and new, quiet repose and the bustling conduct
+of business, mingle strangely here, for within sight of Wool
+railway station, and within hearing of the clashing of the heavy
+consignments of milk-churns, driven up to it, to be placed on the
+rail and sent to qualify the tea of London&rsquo;s great
+populations, stands the great, mellowed, Elizabethan, red brick
+grange or mansion known as Woolbridge House, romantically placed
+on the borders of the rushy river Frome.&nbsp; The property at
+one time belonged to the neighbouring Abbey of Bindon, from which
+it came to Sir Thomas Poynings, and then to John
+Turberville.&nbsp; Garrisoned as a strategic point during the
+Civil Wars, its history since that period is an obscure and
+stagnant one.&nbsp; Long since passed from Turberville hands, it
+now belongs to the Erle-Drax family of Charborough Park and
+Holnest.&nbsp; The air of bodeful tragedy that naturally enwraps
+the place and has <a name="page124"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+124</span>made many a passenger in the passing trains exclaim at
+sight of it, &ldquo;what a fitting home for a story!&rdquo; has
+at last been justified in its selection by the novelist as the
+scene of Tess&rsquo;s confession to her husband.&nbsp; It was
+here the newly married pair were to have spent their
+honeymoon.&nbsp; &ldquo;They drove by the level road along the
+valley, to a distance of a few miles, and, reaching Wellbridge,
+turned away from the village to the left, and over the great
+Elizabethan bridge, which gives the place half its name.&nbsp;
+Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged
+lodgings, whose external features are so well known to all
+travellers through the Frome Valley; once portion of a fine
+manorial residence, and the property and seat of a
+D&rsquo;Urberville, but since its partial demolition, a
+farm-house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It is not altogether remarkable that Clare found the
+&ldquo;mouldy old habitation&rdquo; somewhat depressing to his
+dear one; and she was altogether startled and frightened at
+&ldquo;those horrid women,&rdquo; whose portraits are actually,
+as in the pages of the novel they are said to be, on the walls of
+the staircase: &ldquo;two life-size portraits on panels built
+into the masonry.&nbsp; As all visitors are aware, these
+paintings represent women of middle age, of a date some two
+hundred years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be
+forgotten.&nbsp; The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk
+of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook
+nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting
+arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards
+in his dreams.&rdquo;&nbsp; They are indeed unprepossessing
+dames.&nbsp; One is growing indistinguishable, but the other
+still wickedly leers <a name="page126"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 126</span>at you, glancing from the tail of
+her eye, as though challenging admiration.&nbsp; A painted round
+or oval decorative frame surrounds these Turberville portraits,
+for such they are, and so they were explained to be to Clare, who
+uneasily recognised their likeness in an exaggerated form, to his
+own darling.&nbsp; All the old D&rsquo;Urberville vices of
+lawless cunning, medi&aelig;val ferocity, and callous
+heartlessness are reflected in those sinister portraits, which
+seemed to him to hold up a distorting mirror to the woman he had
+married, and certainly proved themselves of her kin.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image125" href="images/p125.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Woolbridge House"
+title=
+"Woolbridge House"
+ src="images/p125.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>A farm-house the place remains, the ground-floor rooms
+stone-flagged and chilly to modern notions, the fireplaces vast
+and cavernous as they are wont to be in such old houses.&nbsp; It
+is perhaps more romantic seen in the middle distance than when
+made the subject of closer study.&nbsp; But it is of course the
+home of a ghost story, and a very fine and aristocratic
+ghost-story too, made the subject of an allusion in <i>Tess of
+the D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i>.&nbsp; It seems that in that very
+long ago, generally referred to in fairy stories as &ldquo;once
+upon a time,&rdquo; there was a Turberville whose unholy passions
+so broke all bounds of restraint that he murdered a guest while
+the two of them were riding in the Turberville family
+coach.&nbsp; But as the guest was himself one of the family, it
+were a more judicial thing, perhaps, to divide the blame.&nbsp;
+This incident in the annals of a race who very improperly often
+figured as sheriffs and such-like guardians of law and order,
+took place on the road between Wool and Bere, and we are asked to
+believe that there are those who have heard the wheels of the
+blood-stained family <a name="page127"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 127</span>coach traversing this route.&nbsp;
+One or two are said to have seen it, but <i>they</i> are persons
+proved to own some mixture of that blood, for to none other is
+this pleasing spectacle of a black midnight coach and demon
+horses vouchsafed.&nbsp; But stay!&nbsp; Not so pleasing after
+all, this proof of ancestry, for to them it is a warning of
+impending disaster and dissolution.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image127" href="images/p127.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Woolbridge House: Entrance Front"
+title=
+"Woolbridge House: Entrance Front"
+ src="images/p127.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>That is a terribly dusty road which, in six miles, leads from
+Woolbridge to Bere Regis, across the heaths: in some
+summers&mdash;<i>experto crede</i>&mdash;so astonishingly deep in
+dust that it is not only impossible to ride a bicycle over it,
+but scarce possible to walk.&nbsp; But this heath road is as
+variable as the moods of a woman.&nbsp; It will be of this
+complexion at one time, and at another entirely different.&nbsp;
+It is perhaps only when this desirable difference rules that one
+<a name="page128"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+128</span>appreciates the scenery it passes through; scenery
+wholly of buff sand, purple heather, furze, and bracken, whose
+colours are by distance blended into that rich purple brown
+termed, in <i>The Return of the Native</i>,
+&ldquo;swart.&rdquo;&nbsp; For this is the district of that
+gloomy tale, perhaps at once the most powerful and painful in its
+tragic intensity of all the Wessex novels, and one in which the
+element of scenery adds most strikingly to the unfolding of
+futilities and disasters.&nbsp; &ldquo;Bere Heath&rdquo; it is,
+according to the chartographers of the Ordnance Survey, but to
+ourselves who are on literary pilgrimage bent, it is Egdon Heath
+whose &ldquo;swart abrupt slopes&rdquo; are here seen on every
+side, now rising into natural hillocks masquerading solemnly as
+sepulchral tumuli, now dipping into hollows where the rainwater
+collects in marshy pools and keeps green the croziers and
+fully-opened fronds of the bracken much longer than the parched
+growths, at the crests of these rises; and again spreading out
+into little scrubby plains.</p>
+<p>Mr. Hardy, who has translated the reticent solemnity of Egdon
+Heath into such poignant romance, has said how pleasant it is to
+think or dream that some spot in these extensive wilds may be the
+heath of Lear, that traditionary King of Wessex whose sorrows
+Shakespeare has made the subject of tragedy; and he has himself,
+in <i>The Return of the Native</i>, made these heaths the stage
+whereon a tragedy is enacted that itself bids fair to become a
+classic little less classical than the works of
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; True it is that his tragedy is in the rustic
+kind, and none of the characters in it far above the homespun
+sort, but the stricken <a name="page129"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 129</span>worm feels as great a pang as when a
+giant dies, and the woes of Mrs. Yeobright, of Clym, and of
+Eustacia and Damon Wildeve are none the less thrilling than those
+of that</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;. . . very foolish fond old man<br />
+Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>whose wanderings are the theme of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+muse.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image128" href="images/p128.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath"
+title=
+"Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath"
+ src="images/p128.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><i>The Return of the Native</i> is a story of days as well as
+nights, of fair weather and foul, of sunshine and darkness, but
+it is in essence the story of a darkened stage.&nbsp; The
+description of Egdon in the opening chapter is the keynote of a
+mournful fugue:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The face of the heath by its mere
+complexion added half an hour to evening: it could in like manner
+retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms
+scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless
+midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its
+nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the
+Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the
+heath who had not been there at such a time.&nbsp; It could best
+be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect
+and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the
+next dawn: then, and only then, did it tell its true tale.&nbsp;
+The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night
+showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be
+perceived in its shades and the scene.&nbsp; The sombre stretch
+of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and <a
+name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 130</span>meet the
+evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as
+rapidly as the heavens precipitated it.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>An artist who should come to Egdon, intent upon studying its
+colour-scheme, would be nonplussed by the more than usual
+fickleness and instability of its daylight hues.&nbsp; Shrouded
+in the black repose of night, its tone is a thing of some
+permanence, but under the effects of sunshine he finds it now
+purple, now raw sienna, shading off into Prout&rsquo;s Brown, and
+again rising to glints and fleeting stripes of rich golden
+yellow.&nbsp; It would be the despair of one who worked in the
+slow analytic manner of a Birket Foster, but the joy of an
+impressionist like a Whistler.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image130" href="images/p130.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Chamberlain&rsquo;s Bridge"
+title=
+"Chamberlain&rsquo;s Bridge"
+ src="images/p130.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The extremely rich and beautiful colouring of Wool and Bere
+Heaths deepens with the setting of the sun to a velvety blackness
+and gives to the fir-crowned hills melodramatic and tragical
+significances.&nbsp; Such an one is Gallows Hill, where the road
+goes in a hollow formed by the massive shoulders of the
+tree-studded <a name="page131"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+131</span>height.&nbsp; Here, the gossips say, with the
+incertitude of rustic indifference, a man hanged himself, or was
+hanged.&nbsp; When or why he committed what we have the authority
+of conventional old-time journalism for calling &ldquo;the rash
+deed,&rdquo; does not&mdash;in the same
+language&mdash;&ldquo;transpire.&rdquo;&nbsp; But certainly he
+selected a romantic spot for ending, for from the ragged crest,
+underneath one of those &ldquo;clumps and stretches of fir-trees,
+whose notched tops are like battlemented towers crowning
+black-fronted castles of enchantment,&rdquo; the moorland, under
+the different local names of Hyde Heath, Decoy Heath, and Gore
+Heath, but all one to the eye, goes stretching away some ten
+miles, to Poole Harbour, seen from this view-point, on moonlit
+nights, glancing like a mirror in a field of black velvet.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image131" href="images/p131.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Rye Hill, Bere Regis"
+title=
+"Rye Hill, Bere Regis"
+ src="images/p131.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 132</span>A
+juicy interlude to the summer dryness of these wastes is that dip
+in the road where one comes to the river Piddle at
+Chamberlain&rsquo;s Bridge, a battered old red brick pont that,
+by the aid of the quietly gliding stream and the dark, boding
+mass of fir-crowned Mat Hill in the background, makes a memorable
+picture.&nbsp; Only when Bere Regis comes within sight are the
+solitudes of Egdon left behind.&nbsp; Steeply down goes the way
+into the village, down Rye Hill, past the remarkably picturesque
+old thatched cottage illustrated here, perched on its steep
+roadside bank, and so at last on to the level where Bere Church
+is glimpsed, standing four-square and handsome in advance of the
+long street, backed by dense clumps of that tree, the fir, which
+has so strong an affection for these sandy heaths.&nbsp; Here
+then is the introduction to the
+&ldquo;Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill&rdquo; of the Wessex novels, the
+&ldquo;half-dead townlet . . . the spot of all spots in the world
+which could be considered the D&rsquo;Urbervilles&rsquo; home,
+since they had resided there for full five hundred
+years.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+133</span>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">BERE REGIS</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">This</span> &ldquo;blinking little
+place,&rdquo; and now perhaps a not even blinking, but fast
+asleep village, was at one time a market-town, and, more than
+that, as its latinised name would imply, a royal residence.&nbsp;
+Kingsbere, said to mean &ldquo;Kingsbury&rdquo;&mdash;that is to
+say, &ldquo;King&rsquo;s place&rdquo; or building&mdash;really
+obtained its name in very different fashion.&nbsp; It was plain
+&ldquo;Bere,&rdquo; long before the Saxon monarchs came to this
+spot and caused the latter-day confusion among antiquaries of the
+British &ldquo;bere,&rdquo; meaning an underwood, a scrub, copse,
+bramble, or thorn-bed, with the Anglo-Saxon
+&ldquo;byrig.&rdquo;&nbsp; We have but to look upon the
+surroundings of Bere Regis even at this day, a thousand years
+later, to see how truly descriptive that British name really
+was.&nbsp; It was of old a place greatly favoured by royalty,
+from that remote age when Elfrida murdered her stepson, Edward
+the King and Martyr, at Corfe Castle, and thrashed her own son
+Ethelred here with a large wax candle, for reproaching her with
+the deed.&nbsp; Those events happened in <span
+class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 978, and it is therefore not in any
+way surprising that no traces of the ferocious Queen
+Elfrida&rsquo;s residence have survived.&nbsp; Ethelred, we are
+told, hated wax candles ever after <a name="page134"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 134</span>that severe thrashing, and doubtless
+hated Bere as well; but it was more than ever a royal resort in
+the later times of King John, who visited it on several occasions
+in the course of his troubled reign.&nbsp; Thenceforward,
+however, the favours of monarchs ceased, and it came to depend
+upon the good will of the Abbots of Tarent Abbey and that of the
+Turbervilles, who between them became owners of the manor.</p>
+<p>The village street of Bere is bleak and barren.&nbsp; It is a
+street of rustic cottages of battered red brick, or a compost of
+mud, chopped straw, and lime, called &ldquo;cob,&rdquo; built on
+a brick base, often plastered, almost all of them thatched: some
+with new thatch, some with thatch middle-aged, others yet with
+thatch ancient and decaying, forming a rich and fertile bed for
+weeds and ox-eyed daisies and &ldquo;bloody warriors,&rdquo; as
+the local Dorsetshire name is for the rich red
+wall-flowers.&nbsp; Sometimes the old thatch has been stripped
+before the new was placed: more often it has not, and the merest
+casual observer can, as he passes, easily become a critic of the
+thoroughness or otherwise with which the thatcher&rsquo;s work
+has been performed, not only by sight of the different shades
+belonging to old and new, but by the varying thicknesses with
+which the roofs are seen to be covered.&nbsp; Here an upstairs
+window looks out immediately, open-eyed, upon the sunlight; there
+another peers blinkingly forth, as behind beetling eyebrows, from
+half a yard&rsquo;s depth of straw and reed, shading off from a
+coal-black substratum to a coffee-coloured layer, and thence to
+the amber top-coating of the latest addition.&nbsp; Warm in
+winter, cool in summer, is the testimony of cottagers towards <a
+name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 135</span>thatch; and
+earwiggy always, thinks the stranger under such roofs, as he
+observes quaint lepidoptera ensconced comfortably in his
+bed.&nbsp; Picturesque it certainly is, expensive too, although
+it may not generally be thought so; but it is more enduring than
+cheap slates or tiles, and, according to many who should know, if
+indeed their prejudices do not warp their statements, cheaper in
+the long run.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image135" href="images/p135.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bere Regis"
+title=
+"Bere Regis"
+ src="images/p135.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>It is, in fine, not easy to come to a definitive pronouncement
+on the merits or demerits, the comparative cheapness or
+costliness, of rival roofing materials.&nbsp; The cost of the
+materials themselves, payments for laying them, and the
+astonishing difference between the enduring qualities of thatch
+well and thatch indifferently laid forbid certitude.&nbsp; But
+all modern local authorities are opposed to thatch, chiefly on
+the score of its liability to fire.&nbsp; All the many and
+extensive fires of Dorsetshire have been caused by <a
+name="page136"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 136</span>ignited
+thatch; or else, caused in other ways, have been spread and
+magnified by it.&nbsp; Yet, here again your rustic will stoutly
+defend the ancient roofing, and declare that while such a roof is
+slowly smouldering, and before it bursts into a blaze, he can
+dowse it with a pail of water.&nbsp; No doubt, but that water,
+from a well perhaps two hundred feet deep, and that ladder from
+some neighbour half-a-mile away, are sometimes not to be brought
+to bear with the required celerity.</p>
+<p>This, let it be fervently said, is not an attack upon thatch:
+it is but the presentation of pros and cons, and is no argument
+in favour of that last word in utilitarian hideousness,
+corrugated galvanized iron, under whose shelter you freeze in
+winter and fry in summer.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, here are ruined cottages in the long street of
+Bere, whose condition has been brought about by just such causes,
+and whose continuation in that state is due, not to a redundancy
+of dwellings, but because the Lady of the Manor at Charborough,
+despising the insignificant rents here, will not trouble about,
+or go to the expense of, rebuilding.</p>
+<p>Hence the gaps in the long row, like teeth missing from a
+jaw.</p>
+<p>Not a little hard-featured and stern at first sight, owing to
+the entire absence of the softening feature of gardens upon the
+road, this long street of Bere has yet a certain self-reliant
+strong-charactered aspect that brings respect.&nbsp; It has, too,
+the most interesting and beautiful church, rich in historical,
+and richer in literary, associations.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image137" href="images/p137.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bere Regis"
+title=
+"Bere Regis"
+ src="images/p137.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Bere Regis in its decay is a storehouse of old <a
+name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 138</span>Dorset
+speech and customs.&nbsp; To its cottagers vegetables are
+&ldquo;gearden-tackle,&rdquo; sugar&mdash;at least, the moist
+variety&mdash;is &ldquo;zand,&rdquo; and garden-flowers all have
+quaint outlandish names.&nbsp; The rustic folk have a keen, if
+homely philosophy.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ef &rsquo;twarnt for the
+belly,&rdquo; said one to the present writer, in allusion to cost
+of living, &ldquo;back &rsquo;ud wear gold.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Bere,&rdquo; said another&mdash;an
+&lsquo;outlandish&rsquo; person he, who had only been settled in
+the village a decade or so and accordingly was only regarded as a
+stranger, and so indeed regarded himself&mdash;&ldquo;Bere, a
+poor dra&rsquo;lattin twankyten pleace, ten mile from anywheer,
+God help it!&rdquo; which is so very nearly true that, if you
+consult the map you will find that Dorchester is ten miles
+distant, Corfe Castle twelve, Wimborne twelve, Blandford eight,
+and Wareham, the nearest town, seven miles away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,&rdquo; as Mr. Hardy elects to
+rechristen Bere Regis, owes the ultimate limb of that compound
+name to Woodbury Hill, a lofty elevation rising like an
+exaggerated down, but partly clothed with trees, on the outskirts
+of Bere Regis.&nbsp; The novelist describes this scene of an
+ancient annual fair, now much shrunken from its olden import,
+rather as it was than as it is.&nbsp; &ldquo;Greenhill was the
+Nijni Novgorod of South Wessex; and the busiest, merriest,
+noisiest day of the whole statute number was the day of the
+sheep-fair.&nbsp; This yearly gathering was upon the summit of a
+hill, which retained in good preservation the remains of an
+ancient earthwork, consisting of a huge rampart and entrenchment
+of an oval form, encircling the top of the hill, though somewhat
+broken down here and there.&nbsp; To each of the two openings, on
+opposite sides, <a name="page139"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+139</span>a winding road ascended, and the level green space of
+twenty or thirty acres enclosed by the bank was the site of the
+fair.&nbsp; A few permanent erections dotted the spot, but the
+majority of the visitors patronised canvas alone for resting and
+feeding under during the time of their sojourn here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The place looks interesting, viewed from beneath whence two
+forlorn-looking houses are seen perched on the very ridge of the
+windy height.&nbsp; But it is always best to remain below, and so
+to keep romantic illusions; and here is no exception.&nbsp;
+Climbing to the summit, those two houses are increased to fifteen
+or seventeen red-brick, storm-beaten cottages, some thatched,
+others slated, mostly uninhabited; all commonplace.&nbsp; The
+fair is still held in September, beginning on the 18th, the
+Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.&nbsp; Formerly it lasted a
+week, and, at the rate of a hundred pounds a day in tolls to the
+Lord of the Manor, brought that fortunate person an annual
+&ldquo;unearned increment&rdquo; as the Radicals would call it,
+of &pound;700.&nbsp; Nowadays those tolls are very much of a
+negligible quantity.</p>
+<p>Here it was, during the sheep fair, that Troy, supposed to
+have long before been drowned in Lulworth Cove, but living and
+masquerading as Mr. Francis, the Great Cosmopolitan Roughrider,
+enacted the part of Dick Turpin in the canvas-covered show, and,
+looking through a hole in the tent, unobserved himself, observed
+Bathsheba, who had thought him dead.</p>
+<p>The villagers of Bere look askance upon the dwellers on this
+eyrie.&nbsp; They tell you &ldquo;they be gipsy vo&rsquo;k up
+yon,&rdquo; and hold it to be the last resort of those declining
+in worldly estate.&nbsp; Villagers <a name="page140"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 140</span>going, metaphorically, &ldquo;down
+the hill&rdquo; in the direction of outdoor relief, move to the
+less desirable cottages in the village, and then, complete penury
+at last overtaking them, continue their moral and economic
+descent by the geographical ascent of this hill of Woodbury,
+whence they are at last removed to &ldquo;The Union.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Below Woodbury Hill, on the edge of Bere Wood, the scene of an
+old Turberville attempt at illegal enclosure, is rural Bloxworth,
+whose little church contains the fine monument of Sir John
+Trenchard &ldquo;of the ancient family of the Trenchards in
+Dorsetshire,&rdquo; Sergeant-at-Law and Secretary of State in the
+reign of William and Mary.&nbsp; He died in 1695, aged 46.&nbsp;
+Ten years before, he had been an active sympathiser with the Duke
+of Monmouth, in that ill-fated rebellion, and it is told, how,
+when visiting one Mr. Speke at Ilchester, hearing that Jeffreys
+had issued a warrant for his arrest, he instantly took horse,
+rode to Poole and thence crossed to Holland, returning with the
+Prince of Orange three years later.</p>
+<p>Above all other interest at Bere is the beautiful church,
+standing a little distance below the long-drawn village street,
+and clearly from its character and details, a building cherished
+and beautified by the Abbey of Tarent, by the Turbervilles, and
+by Cardinal Archbishop Morton, native of the place.</p>
+<p>The three-staged pinnacled tower is very fine, the lower stage
+alternately of stone and flint, the three surmounting courses
+diapered: the second and third stages treated wholly in that
+chessboard fashion.&nbsp; The beautiful belfry windows, of three
+lights, divided into three stages by transoms, are <a
+name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 141</span>filled with
+pierced stonework.&nbsp; The exterior south wall of the church is
+of alternate red brick and flint, in courses of threes.&nbsp;
+There is a remarkable window in the west wall of the north aisle,
+and in the south wall the exceptionally fine and unusual
+Turberville <a name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+142</span>window, of late Gothic character and five lights,
+filled in modern times by the Erle-Drax family, of Charborough,
+with a series of stained-glass armorial shields, displaying the
+red lion of the Turbervilles, all toe-nails and whiskers, and
+ducally crowned, ramping against an ermine field, firstly by
+himself and then conjointly with the arms of the families with
+which the Turbervilles, in the course of many centuries, allied
+themselves.&nbsp; The Erle-Draxes have not, in honouring the
+extinct Turberville, forgotten themselves, for some of the
+shields display their arms and those of the Sawbridges,
+Grosvenors, Churchills, and Eggintons they married.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image141" href="images/p141.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bere Regis: Interior of Church"
+title=
+"Bere Regis: Interior of Church"
+ src="images/p141.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Entering, the building is seen to be even more beautiful than
+without.&nbsp; Its most striking and unusual
+feature&mdash;unusual in this part of the country&mdash;is the
+extraordinarily gorgeous, elaborately carved and painted timber
+roof, traditionally said to have been the gift of Cardinal
+Morton, born at Milborne Stileman, in the parish of Bere
+Regis.&nbsp; The hammer-beams are boldly carved into the shapes
+of bishops, cardinals, and pilgrims, while the bosses are worked
+into great faces that look down with a fat calm satisfaction that
+must be infinitely reassuring to the congregations.</p>
+<p>The bench ends are another interesting feature.&nbsp; Many are
+old, others are new, done in the old style when the church was
+admirably restored by Street.&nbsp; Had Sir Gilbert Scott been
+let loose upon it, it may well be supposed that the surviving
+bench-ends would have been cast out, and nice new articles by the
+hands of his pet firm of ecclesiastical furnishers put in their
+stead.&nbsp; One is dated, in <a name="page143"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 143</span>Roman numerals, MCCCCCXLVII; another
+is inscribed &ldquo;IOH. DAV. WAR. DENOF. THYS. CHARYS,&rdquo;
+and another bears a merchant&rsquo;s mark, with the initial of
+&ldquo;I. T.&rdquo;&nbsp; The Transitional Norman pillars are
+bold and virile, with humorous carvings of that period strikingly
+projecting from their capitals.&nbsp; It evidently seemed to that
+now far-away waggish fellow who sculptured them that toothache
+and headache were things worth caricaturing.&nbsp; Let us hope he
+never suffered from them, but he evidently took as models some
+who were such martyrs.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image143" href="images/p143.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Pew ends in Bere Regis Church"
+title=
+"Pew ends in Bere Regis Church"
+ src="images/p143.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>But the centre of interest to us in these pages is by the
+Turberville window in the south aisle, beneath whose gorgeous
+glass is the great ledger-stone, covering the last resting-place
+of the extinct family.&nbsp; It is boldly lettered:</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><i>Ostium sepulchri
+antiquae</i><br />
+<i>Famillae Turberville</i><br />
+<i>24 Junij 1710</i></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(<i>The door of the
+sepulchre</i><br />
+<i>of the ancient family</i><br />
+<i>of the Turbervilles</i>).</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In the wall beneath the window is a defaced Purbeck marble
+altar-tomb, and four others neighbour it.&nbsp; These are the
+tombs described in <i>Tess of the D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i> as
+&ldquo;canopied, altar-shaped, and plain; their brasses torn from
+their matrices, <a name="page144"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+144</span>the rivet-holes remaining, like marten-holes in a
+sand-cliff,&rdquo; and it was on one of those that Alec
+D&rsquo;Urberville lay prone, in pretence of being an effigy of
+one of her ancestors, when Tess was exploring the twilight
+church.</p>
+<p>The great monumental <i>History of Dorsetshire</i> tells the
+enquirer a good deal of the Turbervilles who, being themselves
+all dead and gone to their place, have, with a slight alteration
+in the spelling of their name served as a peg on which to hang
+the structure of one of the finest exercises ever made in the art
+of novel writing.&nbsp; It seems that the Turbervilles descended
+from one Sir Pagan or Payne Turberville, or de Turbida Villa, who
+is shown in the Roll of Battle Abbey&mdash;or was shown, before
+that Roll was accidentally burnt&mdash;to have come over with the
+Conqueror.&nbsp; After the Battle of Hastings he seems to have
+been one of twelve knights who helped Robert Fitz Hamon, Lord of
+Estremaville, in his unholy enterprises, and then to have
+returned to England when his over-lord was created Earl of
+Gloucester.&nbsp; He warred in that lord&rsquo;s service, in the
+Norman conquest of Glamorgan, and was rewarded with a tit-bit of
+spoil there, in the shape of the lordship of Coyty.</p>
+<p>In the reign of Henry III. a certain John de Turberville is
+found paying an annual fee or fine in respect of some land in the
+forest of Bere, which an ancestor of his had impudently
+endeavoured to enclose out of the estate of the Earl of Hereford;
+and in 1297 a member of the family is found in the neighbourhood
+of Bere Regis.&nbsp; This Brianus de Thorberville, or Bryan
+Turberville, was lord of the manor, called from its situation on
+the river Piddle, <a name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+145</span>and from himself, &ldquo;Piddle Turberville,&rdquo; and
+now represented by the little village called Bryan&rsquo;s
+Piddle.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image145" href="images/p145.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bere Regis: the Turberville Window"
+title=
+"Bere Regis: the Turberville Window"
+ src="images/p145.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>At a later period the rising fortunes of this family are
+attested by their coming into possession of half of the manor of
+Bere Regis, the other half being, as it had long been, the
+property of Tarent Abbey.&nbsp; <a name="page146"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 146</span>Still later, when at last that Abbey
+was dissolved, the Turbervilles were in the enjoyment of good
+fortune, for the other half of the manor then came to them.&nbsp;
+This period seems to have marked the summit of their advancement,
+for from that time they gradually but surely decayed, giving
+point to the old superstition which dates the decadence of many
+an old family from that day when it sacrilegiously was awarded
+the spoils of the Church.&nbsp; This fall from position began in
+the reign of Queen Elizabeth, but D&rsquo;Albigny Turberville,
+the oculist who was consulted by Pepys the diarist, and
+eventually died in 1696, as the tomb to him with the fulsome
+inscription in Salisbury Cathedral tells us, was a distinguished
+scion of the ancient race, as also was &ldquo;George Turberville,
+gentleman,&rdquo; and poet, born at Winterborne Whitchurch, and
+publishing books of poems and travels in 1570.&nbsp; These,
+doubtless, were not forms of distinction that would have
+commended themselves to those old fighting and land-snatching
+Turbervilles; but, other times, other manners.</p>
+<p>The last Turberville of Bere Regis was that Thomas Turberville
+over whom the ancient vault of his stock finally closed in
+1710.&nbsp; His twin daughters and co-heiresses, Frances and
+Elizabeth, born here in 1703, sold the property and left for
+London.&nbsp; They died at Purser&rsquo;s Cross, Fulham, near
+London, early in 1780, and were buried together at Putney.&nbsp;
+Shortly afterwards their old manor-house of Bere Regis, standing
+near the church, was allowed to lapse into ruin, and thus their
+kin became only a memory where they had ruled so long.&nbsp; Of
+the old branch of the family settled in Glamorganshire, a Colonel
+Turberville remains the representative, but <a
+name="page147"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 147</span>the
+position of the various rustics who in Dorset and Wilts bear the
+name, corrupted variously into Tollafield and Troublefield, is
+open to the suspicion that they are the descendants of
+illegitimate offspring of that race.&nbsp; There remained,
+indeed, until quite recent years a humble family of
+&ldquo;Torevilles&rdquo; in Bere Regis, one of whom persisted in
+calling himself &ldquo;Sir John.&rdquo;&nbsp; But as Mr. Hardy
+says, in the course of <i>Tess of the D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i>,
+instances of the gradual descent of legitimate scions of the old
+knightly families, down and again downwards until they have
+become mere farm-labourers, are not infrequent in Wilts and
+Dorset.&nbsp; Their high-sounding names have undergone outrageous
+perversions, as in the stated instance of courtly Paridelle into
+rustic Priddle; but, although they have inherited no worldly gear
+they own the same blood.</p>
+<h2><a name="page148"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+148</span>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">THE HEART OF THE
+HARDY COUNTRY</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Dorchester</span> is not only the capital
+of Dorset: it is also the chief town of the Hardy Country.&nbsp;
+The ancient capital of Wessex was Winchester: the chief seat of
+this literary domain is here, beside the Frome.&nbsp; Four miles
+distant from it the novelist was born, and at Max Gate,
+Fordington, looking down upon Dorchester&rsquo;s roofs, he
+resides.</p>
+<p>The old country life still closely encircles the county town,
+and on market-days takes the place by storm; so that when, by
+midday, most of the carriers from a ten or fifteen miles radius
+have deposited their country folk, and the farmers have come in
+on horseback, or driving, or perhaps by train, the slighter
+forms, less ruddy faces, and more urban dress of the townsfolk
+are lost amid the great army of occupation that from farms,
+cottages, dairies, and sheep-pastures, has for the rest of the
+day taken possession of the streets.&nbsp; The talk is all of the
+goodness or badness of the hay crop, the prospects of the
+harvest, how swedes are doing, and the condition of cows, sheep,
+and pigs; or, if it be on toward autumn, when the hiring of
+farm-labourers, shepherds, and rural servants in general for the
+next twelve months is the engrossing topic, <a
+name="page149"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 149</span>then the
+scarcity of hands and their extravagant demands are the themes of
+much animated talk.</p>
+<p>Dorchester faithfully at such times reflects the image of
+Dorset, and Dorset remains to this day, and long may it so
+remain, a great sheep-breeding and grazing county, and equally
+great as a land of rich dairies.&nbsp; From that suburb of
+Fordington, which has for so very many centuries been a suburb
+that to those who know it the name bears no suburban connotation,
+you may look down, as from a cliff-top, and see the river Frome
+winding away amid the rich grazing pastures, and with one ear
+hear the cows calling, while with the other the cries of the
+newspaper boys are heard in the streets of the town.&nbsp; The
+scent of the hay and the drowsy hum of the bees break across the
+top of the bluff, and, just as one may read, in the exquisite
+description of these things in the pages of <i>The Mayor of
+Casterbridge</i>, the dandelion <a name="page150"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 150</span>and other winged seeds float in at
+open windows.&nbsp; One may sometimes from this point, when the
+foliage of its dense screen of trees grows thin, see Stinsford,
+the &ldquo;Mellstock&rdquo; of that idyllic tale, <i>Under the
+Greenwood Tree</i>; but in general you can see nothing of that
+sequestered spot until you have reached the by-lane out of the
+main road from Dorchester, and, turning there to the right, come
+to Stinsford Church, along a way made a midday twilight by those
+trees which render the title of that story so descriptive.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image149" href="images/p149.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Stinsford Church. (Mellstock)"
+title=
+"Stinsford Church. (Mellstock)"
+ src="images/p149.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Blue wood-smoke, curling up from cottage chimneys against the
+massed woodlands that surround Kingston House, grey church,
+largely ivy-covered and plentifully endowed with grotesque
+gurgoyles&mdash;these, with school-house and scattered cottages,
+make the sum-total of Stinsford, or
+&ldquo;Mellstock.&rdquo;&nbsp; The school-house is that of the
+young school-mistress, Fancy Day, in the story; and suggests
+romance; but the sentimental pilgrim may be excused for being of
+opinion that it is all in the book, with perhaps nothing left
+over for real life.&nbsp; At any rate, passing it, as the
+scholars within are, like bees, in Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s words,
+&ldquo;humming small,&rdquo; one does not linger, but speculates
+more or less idly which was the cottage where Tranter Dewy lived,
+and which that of Geoffrey Day, the keeper of Yalbury Great
+Wood.&nbsp; There are not, after all, many cottages to choose
+from, and Mr. Hardy has so largely peopled his stories from
+Mellstock that each one might well be a literary landmark.&nbsp;
+The Fiddler of the Reels, Mop Ollamoor, a rustic Paganini, whose
+diabolical cleverness with his violin is the subject of a short
+story, lived in one of these <a name="page151"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 151</span>thatched homes of rural content, and
+in another was born unhappy Jude the Obscure.&nbsp; In each one
+of the rest you can imaginatively find the home of a member of
+that famous Mellstock choir, whose performances and enthusiasm
+sometimes rose so &ldquo;glorious grand&rdquo; that those who
+wrought with stringed instruments almost sawed through the
+strings of fiddle and double-bass, and those others whose weapons
+were of brass blew upon them until they split the seams of their
+coats and sent their waistcoat-buttons flying with the force of
+their fervid harmony, in the cumulative strains of Handel and the
+dithyrambics of Tate and Brady.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh! for such a man
+in our parish,&rdquo; was thought to be the admiratory attitude
+of the parson at the <i>fortissimo</i> outburst of a minstrel
+from a neighbouring village, who had taken a turn with the local
+choir; but the parson&rsquo;s pose was less one of admiration
+than of startled surprise.</p>
+<p>All the members of that harmonious, if at times too vigorous,
+choir are gone to the land where, let us hope, they are quiring
+in the white robes and golden crowns usually supposed to be the
+common wear &ldquo;up along&rdquo;; and their instruments are
+perished too:</p>
+<blockquote><p>The knight is dust, his sword is rust,<br />
+His soul is with the saints, we trust.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Or, as Mr. Hardy, in <i>Friends Beyond</i>, says of his own
+creations:</p>
+<blockquote><p>William Dewy, Tranter Reuben,<br />
+Farmer Ledlow late at plough,<br />
+Robert&rsquo;s kin, and John&rsquo;s, and Ned&rsquo;s,<br />
+And the Squire and Lady Susan<br />
+Lie in Mellstock churchyard now.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page152"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 152</span>The
+clergy, who were responsible for the disappearance of the old
+choirs, did not succeed at one stroke in sweeping them away, and
+in many parishes it was not until the leader had died that they
+broke up the old rustic harmony.&nbsp; &ldquo;The &lsquo;church
+singers,&rsquo; who played anthems, with selections &lsquo;from
+Handel, but mostly composed by themselves,&rsquo; had a position
+in their parish.&nbsp; They had an admiring congregation.&nbsp;
+Their afternoon anthem was the theme of conversation at the
+church porch before the service, and of enquiry and critical
+disquisition after.&nbsp; &lsquo;And did John,&rsquo; one would
+ask, &lsquo;keep to his time?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Samuel was
+crowding very fitly until his string broked.&rsquo;&nbsp; This
+was said after a performance difficult in all the categories in
+which difficulty&mdash;close up even to impossibility&mdash;may
+be found.&nbsp; And there was, I was about to say, a finale, but
+it seemed endless; it was a concluding portion, and a long one,
+of the anthem.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mary began an introductory recapitulation, in which she
+was ably followed, of the words, the subject of the composition,
+the masterpiece of one, or many, if the choir had lent a helping
+hand.&nbsp; It happened that Mary had to manage three full
+syllables, and all the cadences, and trills, and quavers
+connected therewith, as a solo.&nbsp; Then followed, through all
+the turns of the same intricate piece, Thomas, of tenor voice,
+who evolved his music, but did not advance to any elucidation of
+the subject of his concluding effort.&nbsp; He only dwelt upon
+the same syllables, at which the good minister was seen to smile
+and become restless, particularly when Jonathan took on with his
+deep bass voice, accompanied by the tones he drew from his <a
+name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+153</span>bass-viol.&nbsp; He, as best suited a bass singer,
+slowly repeated the syllables that Mary and Thomas had produced
+in so many ways, and with such a series of intonations,
+&lsquo;<span
+class="GutSmall">OUR&mdash;GREAT&mdash;SAL</span>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+May some who tittered at this canonisation of, as it were, a
+female saint, be forgiven!&rsquo;&nbsp; Had they waited a few
+minutes, the grand union of all the performers in loud chorus
+would have enlightened them to the fact that the last syllable
+was only the first of one of three ending in
+&lsquo;<i>vation</i>,&rsquo; which would be loudly repeated by
+the whole choir till they appeared fairly tired out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The very last surviving vestige of the old village choirs of
+the West of England became extinct in 1893.&nbsp; Until then the
+startled visitor from London, or indeed any other part of a
+country by that time given over to harmoniums in chapels, cheap
+and thin organs in small churches, and more full-toned ones in
+larger, would have found the village choir of Martinstown still
+bass-viol and fiddle-scraping, flute-blowing, and
+clarionet-playing, as their forefathers had been wont to
+do.&nbsp; &ldquo;Martinstown&rdquo; is the style by which Wessex
+folk, not quite equal to the constant daily repetition of the
+name of Winterborne St. Martin, know that village, a little to
+the west of Dorchester.&nbsp; It is a considerable place and by
+no means remote, and it was therefore not the general
+inaccessibility of Martinstown to modern ideas that caused this
+survival, when every other parish had put away such things.&nbsp;
+Martinstown then provided itself with an organ, as understood
+to-day; and so escaped a middle period to which many another
+parish fell a victim, between the decay of the old church music
+and <a name="page154"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 154</span>the
+adoption of the new.&nbsp; When, about the accession of Queen
+Victoria, village minstrelsy began to relax, there came in a
+fashion, or rather a scourge, of mechanical barrel-organs, fitted
+to play a dozen or fewer, sacred tunes, according to the local
+purse, or the local requirements.&nbsp; Precisely like secular
+barrel organs, save only in the matter of the tunes they were
+constructed to play, church minstrelsy with them not only became
+mechanical but singularly unvaried, for, when your dozen tunes
+were played, there was nothing for it&mdash;if, like Oliver
+Twist, the congregation called for more&mdash;but to grind the
+same things over again.&nbsp; The only variety&mdash;and that was
+one not covenanted for&mdash;was when portions of the
+melody-producing works decayed and broke off.&nbsp; A tooth
+missing from a cog-wheel, or something wrong with the barrel, was
+apt to give an ungodly twist to the Old Hundredth, calculated to
+impart a novelty to that ancient stand-by of village churches,
+and would even have made the air of &ldquo;Onward, Christian
+Soldiers!&rdquo; stream forth in spasms, as though those soldiers
+were an awkward squad learning some ecclesiastical
+goose-step.&nbsp; In short, the barrel-organs were not
+&ldquo;things seemly and of good report,&rdquo; and they
+presently died the death.</p>
+<p>Many regretted the old order of things, largely destroyed by
+the current movements in the Church.&nbsp; Reforming High
+Churchmen had seized upon the signs of weakness exhibited in the
+old choirs, and had made away with them wherever possible.&nbsp;
+The rustic music had, as we have seen, its humorous incidents,
+but it was enthusiastic and was understood and sympathised with
+by the people.&nbsp; <a name="page155"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 155</span>Surpliced choirs, and others, formed
+as they now commonly are, from classes superior to those of which
+the old instrumental and vocal choirs were composed, have not
+that hold upon congregations, who do not sing, as the Prayer-book
+and the Psalm enjoin, but listen while others do the singing for
+them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, daze my old eyes,&rdquo; said a Wessex rustic,
+reviewing the trend of modern life, &ldquo;everything&rsquo;s
+upsey-down.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis, if ye want this and if ye want
+that, put yer hand in yer pocket and goo an&rsquo; git
+some&rsquo;un to do&rsquo;t for ye, or goo to the Stowers (he
+meant the Stores) up to Do&rsquo;chester, and buy yer
+&rsquo;taters and have&rsquo;m sint home for &rsquo;ee,
+cheaper&rsquo;n ye can grow&rsquo;m, let be the
+back-breakin&rsquo; work of a hoein&rsquo; of &rsquo;em, and a
+diggin&rsquo; of &rsquo;em and a clanin&rsquo; of
+&rsquo;em.&nbsp; An&rsquo; talking of church, why bless
+&rsquo;ee, tidden no manner of good yer liftin&rsquo; up yer
+v&rsquo;ice glad-like, an&rsquo; makkin&rsquo; a cheerful noise
+onto the Lord, as we&rsquo;m bidden to do.&nbsp; Not a bit.&nbsp;
+Ef ye do&rsquo;t passon looks all of a pelt, and they boys in
+their nightshirts sets off a-sniggerin&rsquo; and they tells yer
+ye bissen much of a songster, they ses.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It has already been said that the instruments, as well as the
+old village players of them, have perished, but at least one
+specimen of that oddly named instrument, the
+&ldquo;serpent,&rdquo; frequently mentioned by Mr. Hardy, has
+survived.&nbsp; This example is in the possession of Messrs. H.
+Potter &amp; Co., of West Street, Charing Cross Road.&nbsp; The
+serpent belongs to such a past order of things that, like the
+rebecs, dulcimers, and shawms of Scriptural references, it
+requires explanation.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;serpent,&rdquo; then, it may be learned, although
+<a name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 156</span>invented
+by one Guillaume so far back as the close of the sixteenth
+century, first came into general use in the early part of the
+eighteenth.&nbsp; It was a wind instrument, the precursor of the
+bass horn, or ophicleide, which in its turn has been superseded
+by the valved bass brasses of the present day.&nbsp; The serpent
+of course owed its name to its contorted shape.&nbsp; It was
+generally made of wood, covered with leather, and stained black,
+and ranged in length from about twenty-nine to thirty-three
+inches.&nbsp; The earlier form of serpent had but six holes, but
+these were gradually increased, and keyed, until this now
+obsolete instrument, as improved by Key, of London, about the
+beginning of the nineteenth century, finally became possessed of
+seventeen keys.&nbsp; It went out of use, contemporaneously with
+the decay of the old village choirs, about 1830.</p>
+<p>The geographical area of the heart of the Hardy Country is not
+very great, but the difficulties of finding one&rsquo;s way about
+it are not small.&nbsp; The Vale of Great Dairies opens out, and
+the many runnels of the Frome make the byways so winding that to
+clearly know whither one is going demands the use of a very
+large-scale Ordnance Map.&nbsp; But to lose one&rsquo;s self here
+is no disaster.&nbsp; You will find your way out again, and in
+the meanwhile will have come into intimate touch with dairying,
+and perhaps, if it be early summer, will find the barns and the
+waterside busy with sheepshearers.&nbsp; Seeing the dexterous
+shearing, the quick, practised movements of the men and the
+panting helplessness of the sheep, one is reminded of the similar
+scene in <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>.</p>
+<p>Away across the Frome is the rustic, <a
+name="page157"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+157</span>out-of-the-way village of West Stafford, which has a
+little one-aisled church, still displaying the royal arms of the
+time of Queen Elizabeth with that sem&eacute;e of lilies, the
+empty boast of a sovereignty over France, which, to the
+contemplative and sentimental student of history is as pitiful a
+make-believe as that of penury apeing affluence.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;That glorious <i>Semper Eadem</i>,&rdquo; motto,
+&ldquo;our banner and our pride,&rdquo; as Macaulay says, looks a
+little flatulent in these circumstances of a relaxed grasp.</p>
+<p>The long rhymed inscription outside an off-licence beerhouse
+in the village, displaying the Hardyean phrase of &ldquo;a cup of
+genuine&rdquo; for a glass of ale, is a curiosity in its
+way&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>I trust no Wise Man will condemn<br />
+A Cup of Genuine now and then.<br />
+When you are faint, your spirits low,<br />
+Your string relaxed &rsquo;twill bend your Bow,<br />
+Brace your Drumhead and make you tight,<br />
+Wind up your Watch and set you right:<br />
+But then again the too much use<br />
+Of all strong liquors is the abuse.<br />
+&rsquo;Tis liquid makes the solid loose,<br />
+The Texture and whole frame Destroys,<br />
+But health lies in the Equipoise.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Resuming the north bank of the Frome, and the road to
+Tincleton, a left-hand turning is seen leading across to
+Piddletown, by way of Lower and Upper Bockhampton&mdash;hamlets
+rustic to the last degree, and, by reason of being quite remote
+from any road the casual stranger is likely to take, unknown to
+the outside world.&nbsp; Yet the second of these, the thatched
+and tree-embowered hamlet of Upper Bockhampton, has the keenest
+interest for the <a name="page158"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+158</span>explorer of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the
+rustic, thatched cottage still occupied by members of the Hardy
+family, that Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, was born, June 2nd,
+1840.&nbsp; It is a fitting spot for the birthplace of one who
+has described nature as surely it has never before been
+described, has pictured the moods of earth and sky, and has heard
+and given new significances to the voices of birds and trees, by
+the stubborn and intractable method of prose-writing.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image158" href="images/p158.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Birthplace of Thomas Hardy"
+title=
+"Birthplace of Thomas Hardy"
+ src="images/p158.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The cottage stands&mdash;its front almost hid from sight in
+the dense growths of its old garden and by the slope of the
+downs&mdash;at the extreme upper end of Upper Bockhampton, on the
+edge of the wild, <a name="page159"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+159</span>called, with a fine freedom of choice, Bockhampton or
+Piddletown Heath, and Thorneycombe or Ilsington Woods.&nbsp; You
+enter its garden up steep, rustic steps, and find its low-ceiled
+rooms stone-flagged and criss-crossed with beams.&nbsp; At the
+back, its walls, with <a name="page160"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 160</span>small latticed windows, look sheer
+upon a lane leading into the heart of the woodland; where, so
+little are strangers expected or desired that the tree-trunks
+bear notice-boards detailing what shall be done to those who
+trespass.&nbsp; Branches of these enshrining trees touch the
+thatched roof and scrape the walls, and the voices of the wind
+and of the woodlands reverberate from them; and when the sun goes
+down, the nocturnal orchestra of owls and nightingales strikes
+up.&nbsp; It is an ideal spot for the birth of one whose genius
+and bent are largely in the interpretation of nature; but it must
+not be forgotten that the chances are always against the
+observation and appreciation of scenes amidst which a child has
+been born and reared, and that only exceptional receptivity can
+throw off the usual effect of staleness and lack of interest in
+things usual and accustomed.&nbsp; It is thus in the nature of
+things that the townsman generally takes a keener interest in the
+country than those native to it, and the dweller in the mushroom
+cities of commerce finds more in a cathedral city than many of
+those living within the shadow of the Minster ever suspect.&nbsp;
+This is to say, parabolically, what we all know, that the nature
+of the seer is an exceptional nature, and rises superior to the
+dulling effects of use and wont: unaccountable as the winds that
+blow, and not to be analysed or predicated by any literary
+meteorological department.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image159" href="images/p159.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Birthplace of Thomas Hardy"
+title=
+"Birthplace of Thomas Hardy"
+ src="images/p159.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Returning through Lower Bockhampton, on the way to Tincleton,
+a ridge is presently seen on the left hand, crowned with
+fir-trees, and a little questing will reveal a rush-grown pool,
+the original of Heedless William&rsquo;s Pond, mentioned in
+<i>The Fiddler of the Reels</i>.&nbsp; <a
+name="page161"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 161</span>Beyond this
+landmark, a cottage that fills the position of
+&ldquo;Bloom&rsquo;s End&rdquo; in <i>The Return of the
+Native</i>, is seen, and on the right-hand side the farmstead of
+Norris Mill Farm, where, overlooking the Vale of Great Dairies,
+is the original of Talbothays, the dairy where Angel Clare,
+learning the business from Dairyman Crick, met Tess.&nbsp; Below
+the grassy bluff on whose sides the farm-buildings stand may be
+traced the fertilising course of the Frome, or as Mr. Hardy calls
+it, the Var:&mdash;&ldquo;The Var waters were clear as the pure
+River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a
+cloud, with pebbly shadows that prattled to the sky all day
+long.&nbsp; There the water-flower was the lily.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image161" href="images/p161.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Duck&rdquo; Inn, Original of the &ldquo;Quiet
+Woman&rdquo; Inn"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Duck&rdquo; Inn, Original of the &ldquo;Quiet
+Woman&rdquo; Inn"
+ src="images/p161.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>This land of fat kine and water-meads, to the south of the
+road, is neighboured to the northward by the outlying brown and
+purple stretches of Egdon Heath, into whose wilds we shall
+presently come.&nbsp; &ldquo;Bloom&rsquo;s End,&rdquo; or a house
+that may well <a name="page162"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+162</span>stand for it, we have noticed, and now come upon a
+humble little farm on the right hand, standing with front to the
+road and facing upon a strikingly gloomy heather-covered
+hill.&nbsp; This is the house, once the &ldquo;Duck&rdquo; inn,
+which figures in <i>The Return of the Native</i> as the
+&ldquo;Quiet Woman&rdquo; inn, kept by Damon Wildeve, who, a
+failure as an engineer, made a worse shipwreck of life
+here.&nbsp; As described in the novel, a little patch of land has
+by dint of supreme exertions been reclaimed from the grudging
+soil:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wildeve&rsquo;s Patch, as it was called, a plot of land
+redeemed from the heath, and after long and laborious years
+brought into cultivation.&nbsp; The man who had discovered that
+it could be tilled died of the labour: the man who succeeded him
+in possession ruined himself in fertilising it.&nbsp; Wildeve
+came like Amerigo Vespucci, and received the honours due to those
+who had gone before.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A casual talk with the small farmer who has taken the place
+reveals the fact that this soil is a hard taskmaster and yields a
+poor recompense.&nbsp; The heathery hill facing it is described
+exactly as it is in nature:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The front of the house was towards the heath and
+Rainbarrow, whose dark shape seemed to threaten it from the sky.
+. . .&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was a barrow.&nbsp; This bossy projection of earth
+above its natural level occupied the loftiest ground of the
+loneliest height that the heath contained.&nbsp; Although from
+the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its
+actual bulk was great.&nbsp; It formed the pole and axis of this
+heathery world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page163"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 163</span>The
+soil at the back of the house is better, which indeed it could
+well be without being even then particularly good.&nbsp; It
+slopes towards the river, at what is described in the book as
+&ldquo;Shadwater Weir,&rdquo; where the drowned bodies of Wildeve
+and Eustacia were found:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The garden was at the back, and behind this
+ran a still deep stream.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image163" href="images/p163.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Tincleton"
+title=
+"Tincleton"
+ src="images/p163.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The village of Tincleton, the &ldquo;Stickleford&rdquo; of
+casual mention in some of the short stories, is one of about a
+dozen cottages, clustering round a little church and school; and
+with presumably a few dozen more dwellings in the neighbourhood
+of the wide common on which Tincleton stands, to account for the
+existence of that school and that church.&nbsp; Past it and
+Pallington, whose hill and hilltop firs, known as Pallington
+Clump, are conspicuous for great distances, we turn to the left
+and explore a portion of Egdon Heath towards Bryan&rsquo;s Piddle
+and Bere Regis.&nbsp; Everywhere the wilds now stretch forth and
+seem to bid defiance to the best efforts of the cultivator, but
+down at the hamlet of Hurst, where water is plentiful, there is
+an ancient red-brick farm <a name="page164"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 164</span>of superior aspect, and yet with a
+thatched roof&mdash;an effect oddly like that which might be
+produced by a gentleman wearing a harvester&rsquo;s hat.&nbsp; It
+is obviously an old manor-house, and besides showing evidences of
+former state, has two substantial brick entrance piers surmounted
+by what country folk, in their native satire, call
+&ldquo;gentility balls.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Such gentility in the neighbourhood of wild, uncanny Egdon
+wears, as Mr. Hardy would say, &ldquo;an anomalous
+look.&rdquo;&nbsp; The heath is more akin with Adam than with his
+descendants:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;This obscure, obsolete, superseded country
+figures in Domesday.&nbsp; Its condition is recorded therein as
+that of heathy, furzy, briary
+wilderness&mdash;&lsquo;Bruaria.&rsquo;&nbsp; Then follows the
+length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty
+exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it
+appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the
+present day has but little diminished.&nbsp; &lsquo;Turbaria
+Bruaria&rsquo;&mdash;the right of cutting heath-turf&mdash;occurs
+in charters relating to the district.&nbsp; &lsquo;Overgrown with
+heth and mosse,&rsquo; says Leland of the same dark sweep of
+country.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here at least were intelligible facts regarding the
+landscape&mdash;far-reaching proofs productive of genuine
+satisfaction.&nbsp; The untamable Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon
+now was it always had been.&nbsp; Civilisation was its enemy; and
+ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same
+antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the
+particular formation.&nbsp; In its venerable one coat lay a
+certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes.&nbsp; A person
+on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less
+an anomalous <a name="page165"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+165</span>look.&nbsp; We seem to want the oldest and simplest
+human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so
+primitive.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Here, if anywhere in this poor old England of ours, generally
+over-populated and sorted over, raked about, and turned inside
+out, there is quiet and solitude.&nbsp; No recent manifestations
+of the way the world wags, no advertisement hoardings, no
+gasometers or mean suburbs intrude upon the inviolable
+heath.&nbsp; No one has yet suspected coal beneath the shaggy
+frieze coat of this remote vestige of an earlier age, and its
+vitals have therefore not been probed and dragged forth.&nbsp; A
+railway skirts it, &rsquo;tis true, but only on the way
+otherwhere, and no network of sidings has yet made a gridiron of
+its unexploited waste.&nbsp; Elsewhere trim hedges or fences of
+barbed-wire restrain the explorer, but here he is free to roam,
+and may so roam until he has fairly lost himself.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image165" href="images/p165.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"An Egdon Farmstead"
+title=
+"An Egdon Farmstead"
+ src="images/p165.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>It is a land wholly antithetic from the bubbling superficial
+feelings of cities, and has the <a name="page166"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 166</span>introspective, self-communing air of
+the solitary.&nbsp; A town-bred man,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Heart-halt and spirit-lame,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; City-opprest,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and wearied with the weariful reek of the streets, the
+jostling of the pavements, and the intolerable numbers of his
+kind, might come to a spell of recluse life in a farm on Egdon,
+and there rid him of that supersaturation of humanity; returning
+at last to his streets with a new spirit, a brisker step, and a
+revived hope in the right ordering of the world.&nbsp; So much
+Egdon can do for such an one.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image166" href="images/p166.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"A Farm on Egdon"
+title=
+"A Farm on Egdon"
+ src="images/p166.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>I know just such a farm, in the dip of the yellow road, its
+thatched roofs and the near trees taking on a homely, comfortable
+look when night <a name="page167"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+167</span>closes down upon the wild, when its windows are lit
+with a welcome ray as the sun goes down, in an angry glory in the
+west.&nbsp; This is, to me, the heart of the Hardy Country, and
+its surroundings seem most closely to fit his imaginings.&nbsp;
+The place has just that personality he gives his farmsteads, and
+the wastes near it wear sometimes just that cold indifference to
+humanity, and at others precisely that ogreish hostility, he in
+his pagan way describes.</p>
+<p>Halting here, as the sun goes down, and the landscape changes
+from its daylight browns and purples to an irradiated orange, and
+through the siennas and umbers of an etching, to the blackness of
+night, I feel that here resides the <i>genius loci</i>, the
+Spirit of the Heath.</p>
+<h2><a name="page168"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+168</span>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">DORCHESTER TO
+CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND YEOVIL</p>
+<p>A <span class="smcap">good</span> many outlying literary
+landmarks of the Wessex novels may be cleared up by leaving
+Dorchester by Charminster, and then, at a fork in the road just
+past Wolveton, taking the left-hand turning and following for
+awhile the valley road along the course of the river Frome.&nbsp;
+Not for long, however, if it is desired to keep strictly to those
+landmarks, do we pursue this easy course, for in another couple
+of miles, by Grimstone station, we shall have to bear to the
+right hand and make for what is known in Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s pages
+as &ldquo;Long Ash Lane,&rdquo; along whose almost interminable
+course Farmer Darton and his friend rode, to the wooing of Sally
+Hall, at Great Hintock, in that short story, <i>Interlopers at
+the Knap</i>.</p>
+<p>Long Ash Lane&mdash;in some editions of the novels styled
+&ldquo;Holloway Lane&rdquo;&mdash;is the middle one of three
+roads past Grimstone station.&nbsp; Those on either side lead
+severally to Maiden Newton&mdash;the &ldquo;Chalk Newton&rdquo;
+of <i>Tess of the D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i>&mdash;and to Sydling
+St. Nicholas; but this is, as described in that story, &ldquo;a
+monotonous track, without a village or hamlet for many miles, and
+with very seldom a <a name="page169"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+169</span>turning.&rdquo;&nbsp; For its own sake, it will
+therefore be easily seen, Long Ash Lane is not an altogether
+desirable route.&nbsp; It is an ancient Roman road, running
+eventually to Yeovil and Ilchester; passing near by, but not
+touching, and always out of sight of several small villages on
+its lengthy way.&nbsp; Darton and Johns found it weariful as they
+rode, the hedgerow twigs on either side &ldquo;currycombing their
+whiskers,&rdquo; as Mr. Hardy delightfully says; and wayfarers on
+foot, tired out, believe at last that it will never end:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Unapprised wayfarers, who are too old, or too young, or
+in other respects too weak for the distance to be traversed, but
+who, nevertheless, have to walk it, say, as they look wistfully
+ahead: &lsquo;Once at the top of that hill, and I must surely see
+the end of Long Ash Lane!&rsquo;&nbsp; But they reach the
+hill-top, and Long Ash Lane stretches in front mercilessly as
+before.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>After many miles this tiresome road at last comes in touch
+with modern life, for Evershot station and the hamlet of Holywell
+are placed directly beside it.&nbsp; Here we may turn right, or
+turn left, or go onward, sure in all directions of finding many
+scenes to be identified with the novels.&nbsp; Turning to the
+right, a road not altogether dissimilar in its loneliness from
+Long Ash Lane is found, but differing from it in the one
+essential respect of ascending the ridge of lofty downs
+overlooking the Vale of Blackmoor, and thus, while to the right
+hand disclosing a dull expanse of table-land, on the left opening
+out a romantic view, bounded only by distance and the
+inadequacies of human eyesight.&nbsp; This is the road along
+which Tess was <a name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+170</span>travelling&mdash;in the reverse direction&mdash;from
+Dole&rsquo;s Ash Farm at Plush, the &ldquo;Flintcombe Ash&rdquo;
+of those tragical pages, to Beaminster or
+&ldquo;Emminster,&rdquo; to visit the parents of Angel Clare, her
+husband, when she came to that ill-fated meeting with Alec
+D&rsquo;Urberville at the spot we now approach,
+Cross-in-Hand:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At length the road touched the spot called
+&lsquo;Cross-in-Hand.&rsquo;&nbsp; Of all spots on the bleached
+and desolate upland this was the most forlorn.&nbsp; It was so
+far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by
+artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a
+negative beauty of tragic tone.&nbsp; The place took its name
+from a stone pillar which stood there, a strange rude monolith,
+from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly
+carved a human hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The history and meaning of this lonely pillar on the solitary
+ridgeway road are unknown.&nbsp; Thought by some to mark the
+old-time bounds of property under the sway of the Abbot of Cerne,
+others have considered it to be the relic of a wayside cross,
+while others yet have held it to be a place of meeting of the
+tenants and feudatories of the old abbey, and the hollow in the
+stone to have been the receptacle for their tribute.&nbsp; But,
+&ldquo;whatever the origin of the relic, there was and is
+something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in the scene
+amid which it stands; something tending to impress the most
+phlegmatic passer-by.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Here it was that Tess, on her way to Flintcombe Ash, was
+surprised by the converted Alec D&rsquo;Urberville, already
+shaken in his new-found grace and preaching mission at sight of
+her, and here he made <a name="page171"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 171</span>her swear upon it never to tempt him
+by her charms or ways.&nbsp; &ldquo;This was once a Holy
+Cross,&rdquo; said he.&nbsp; &ldquo;Relics are not in my creed,
+but I fear you at moments.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was not very
+reassuring to Tess when, leaving the spot of this singular
+rencounter and asking a rustic if the stone were not a Holy
+Cross, he replied, &ldquo;Cross&mdash;no; &rsquo;twer not a
+cross!&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis a thing of ill-omen, miss.&nbsp; It was
+put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor, who was
+tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards
+hung.&nbsp; The bones lie underneath.&nbsp; They say he sold his
+soul to the devil, and that he walks at times.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image170" href="images/p170.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Cross-in-Hand"
+title=
+"Cross-in-Hand"
+ src="images/p170.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>This pillar, &ldquo;the scene of a miracle or murder, or
+both,&rdquo; stands some five feet in height, and rises from the
+unfenced grassy selvedge of the road, where the blackberry bushes
+and bracken grow, on the verge of the down that breaks
+precipitously away to the vale where Yetminster lies.&nbsp; The
+rude <a name="page172"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+172</span>bowl-shaped capital of the mystic stone has the coarse
+semblance of a hand, displayed in the manner of the Bloody Hand
+of Ulster.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image171" href="images/p171.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Batcombe"
+title=
+"Batcombe"
+ src="images/p171.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Deep down below, in midst of the narrowest lanes, lies the
+sequestered village of Batcombe, from which this down immediately
+above takes its name.&nbsp; The church stands almost in the
+shadow of the hills.&nbsp; This also is a place of marvellous
+legends, for a battered old Gothic tomb in the churchyard,
+innocent of inscription, standing near the north wall of the
+church, is, according to old tales the resting-place of one
+&ldquo;Conjuring Minterne,&rdquo; a devil-compeller and
+astrologer of sorts, who was originally buried half in and half
+out of the church, for fear his master, &ldquo;the horny
+man,&rdquo; as a character in one of Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s romances
+calls Old Nick, should have him, if buried otherwise.&nbsp; One
+would like to learn more about &ldquo;Conjuring Minterne&rdquo;
+and his strange tricks, but history is silent.</p>
+<p>Returning to Evershot, or, as it is styled in the sources of
+our pilgrimage, &ldquo;Evershead,&rdquo; we come to Melbury Park,
+the seat of the Earl of Ilchester, and the principal scene of
+that charming story, <i>The First Countess of Wessex</i>, in the
+collection of &ldquo;A Group of Noble Dames.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+great house of oddly diversified architecture, stands in the
+midst of this nobly wooded and strikingly varied domain, but can
+readily be seen, for the carriage-drive is a public right of
+way.&nbsp; This is the broad roadway through the park described
+in the passage where Tupcombe, riding towards &ldquo;King&rsquo;s
+Hintock Court&rdquo;&mdash;as Mr. Hardy disguises the identity of
+the place&mdash;from Mells, on Squire Dornell&rsquo;s errand, saw
+it stretching ahead &ldquo;like an unrolled deal
+shaving.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page173"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 173</span>Like
+most of the stories of those noble dames, this romance of Betty
+Dornell, the First Countess of Wessex, is founded upon actual
+people, and largely upon their real doings.&nbsp; Squire Dornell
+of Falls Park&mdash;really Mells Park&mdash;was in real life that
+Thomas Horner who in 1713 married Susannah Strangways, heiress of
+the Strangways family and owner of Melbury Sampford; and their
+only child was Elizabeth, born in 1723, who in 1736, in her
+thirteenth year, almost precisely as in the story, was married to
+Stephen Fox, afterwards Earl of Ilchester, who died in
+1776.&nbsp; The Countess died in 1792.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image173" href="images/p173.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Tomb of &ldquo;Conjuring Minterne&rdquo;"
+title=
+"Tomb of &ldquo;Conjuring Minterne&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p173.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 174</span>But
+this passage of family history is best set forth in the manner
+customary to genealogists:</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p174a.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Family tree of Thomas Horner of Mells"
+title=
+"Family tree of Thomas Horner of Mells"
+ src="images/p174a.jpg" />
+</a> <a name="citation174"></a><a href="#footnote174"
+class="citation">[174]</a></p>
+<p>The father of the first Countess of Wessex was, it is curious
+to know, descended from Little Jack Horner, that paragon of
+selfishness who sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie, and
+who, the familiar nursery rhyme goes on to tell us,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,<br
+/>
+And said, What a good boy am I!&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The nursery rhyme was that, and something more.&nbsp; It was,
+in fact a satire upon that John Horner who, upon the dissolution
+of the monasteries, purchased for much less than it was worth the
+confiscated Mells estate of Glastonbury Abbey.&nbsp; This prize,
+the &ldquo;plum&rdquo; of the rhyme, is said to have been worth
+&pound;10,000.&nbsp; The Horners, represented by Sir John Horner,
+espoused the side of the Parliament in the war with Charles I.
+but they have kept their plum, at every hazard and in all
+chances, and Mells Park is still in the family.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image174" href="images/p174.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Melbury House"
+title=
+"Melbury House"
+ src="images/p174.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Leland tells how the house of Melbury Park was built in the
+sixteenth century by Sir Giles Strangways, but portions of the
+great T-shaped building have at later times been added, notably
+the wing built in the time of Queen Anne.&nbsp; The whole
+heterogeneous pile, dominated by a church-like, six-sided central
+<a name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 175</span>tower,
+occupies a raised grassy site looking upon a lake on whose
+opposite shore is the little manorial church of Melbury Sampford,
+plentifully stored with monuments of Strangways and
+Fox-Strangways, and in especial notable for that to the courtly
+and equable husband of Betty Dornell.&nbsp; His epitaph, by the
+hand of his widow, describes him as the most desirable of
+husbands.</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">Near this stone is
+interred<br />
+Stephen, Earl of Ilchester,<br />
+who died at Melbury<br />
+Sept. 26, <span class="GutSmall">A.D. MDCCLXXVI.</span>, aged
+<span class="GutSmall">LXXII</span>.<br />
+He was the eighth son of Sir Stephen Fox, knight.<br />
+He married Elizabeth, only daughter of Thomas Horner,<br />
+of Mells, in the county of Somerset, esquire,<br />
+heiress-general to the family of<br />
+Strangways of Melbury, in the county of Dorset,<br />
+by whom he had Henry Thomas, his eldest son,<br />
+now Earl of Ilchester<br />
+(who succeeds him in honours and estate)<br />
+and a numerous offspring.<br />
+As a small token of her great affection<br />
+to the best of husbands, fathers, friends,<br />
+his disconsolate widow inscribes this marble,</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">Sacred to his memory.</p>
+<p>Hush&rsquo;d be the voice of bards who heroes praise,<br />
+And high o&rsquo;er glory&rsquo;s sun their p&aelig;ans raise;<br
+/>
+And let an artless Muse a friend review,<br />
+Whose tranquil Life one blameless tenour knew,<br />
+By Nature form&rsquo;d to please, of happiest mien,<br />
+Just, friendly, chearful, affable, serene;<br />
+Engaging Manners, cultivated Mind,<br />
+Adorn&rsquo;d by Letters and in Courts refin&rsquo;d,<br />
+His blooming honours long approv&rsquo;d he bore,<br />
+And added lustre to that gem he wore;<br />
+Grac&rsquo;d with all pow&rsquo;rs to shine, he left parade,<br
+/>
+And unambitious lov&rsquo;d the sylvan shade;<br />
+<a name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 176</span>The
+choice by Heav&rsquo;n applauded stood confess&rsquo;d<br />
+And all his Days with all its blessing bless&rsquo;d;<br />
+Living belov&rsquo;d, lamented in his end,<br />
+Unfading Bliss his mortal change attend.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>At the other extremity of the park is the small and secluded
+village of Melbury Osmund, the &ldquo;Little Hintock&rdquo; of
+<i>The Woodlanders</i>, &ldquo;one of those sequestered spots
+outside the gates of the world, where may usually be found more
+meditation than action, and more listlessness than
+meditation.&rdquo;&nbsp; It lies among vast hills and profound
+hollows, whose huge convexities and corresponding concavities
+render this a district to be more comfortably ridden by the
+horseman than walked, and one to be explored by the cyclist only
+with great and exhausting labour.</p>
+<p>By perspiring perseverance, however, Yeovil and Somerset, or,
+speaking by the card, &ldquo;Ivell&rdquo; and &ldquo;Outer
+Wessex&rdquo; may be reached at last, by way of the
+strangely-entitled village of Ryme Intrinsica, whose name, so
+spelled on the map, is, with considerable incertitude both as to
+spelling and meaning, said to be properly written
+&ldquo;Entrenseca&rdquo; or &ldquo;Entrensicca.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Local theories, disregarding altogether the inexplicable
+&ldquo;Ryme,&rdquo; and expending themselves upon the
+preposterous Latinity of the second part of the name, have come
+to some sort of agreement that it denotes a dry place on a ridge
+placed between two watered vales; and those curious enough to
+look for it on a large-scale map will perceive readily enough
+that, whatever the comparative dryness of the ridge it does
+occupy, it is certainly so flanked by the low-lying lands in
+which flow two tributaries of the river Yeo.</p>
+<p><a name="page177"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+177</span>Hutchins, the county historian, on the other hand,
+gives a wholly different explanation of the name.&nbsp; Spelling
+the &ldquo;Intrinseca&rdquo; with an &ldquo;e,&rdquo; instead of
+the final &ldquo;i,&rdquo; he says it is so called, Ryme
+Intrinseca, or &ldquo;In Ryme,&rdquo; in contradistinction to an
+outlying portion of the old manor, away down in the parish of
+Long Bredy, and styled Ryme Extrinsecus, or &ldquo;Out
+Ryme.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At any rate, Ryme Intrinsica looks scarcely the place to be
+dolled out in so classical a style.&nbsp; It is too Saxon, too
+rustic and homespun in all its circumstances of thatch,
+rickyards, dairies, and pigsties; and its little church is not in
+any way corroborative of this dignity.</p>
+<p>Yeovil, whose name has so bucolic a sound that it would seem
+to be, above all other places, the home most suitable for yeomen,
+is the &ldquo;Ivell&rdquo; of the Wessex novels, but finds only
+scattered allusions in them, and touches far from intimate.&nbsp;
+Cope, the curate, who in the story <i>For Conscience&rsquo;
+Sake</i> married the conscience-smitten Millborne&rsquo;s
+daughter when at last the father effaced himself, was curate at
+Ivell; and it was at the &ldquo;Castle&rdquo; inn of the same
+town that the brothers Halborough called for their drunken
+father, in the harrowing embarrassments of <i>A Tragedy of two
+Ambitions</i>, but those are the nearest approaches to be
+discovered.</p>
+<h2><a name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+178</span>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">SHERBORNE</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Much</span> remains in pleasant Sherborne
+to tell of that time when it was a cathedral city, and when,
+after it had lost that high dignity, it was of scarce less
+importance as the home of a powerful Abbey.&nbsp; It was the
+pleasing, well-watered and sheltered situation, in the vale where
+the little Yeo or Ivel runs&mdash;the stream which, passing
+through Yeovil, gives that town its name&mdash;that first
+attracted the religious in <span class="GutSmall">A.D.</span>
+705, the time of that now misty and vague monarch, King
+Ina.&nbsp; The Yeo had not yet obtained that name, and was merely
+spoken of in descriptive and admiratory phrase as the <i>Seir
+burne</i>, an Anglo-Saxon description for a bright and clear
+brook which has crystallised here and at several other places in
+the country, into a place-name.&nbsp; Even in the City of London
+there is a Sherborne Lane, where no stream now flows, the
+successor, however, of a pleasant lane, where in Anglo-Saxon
+times a tributary of the Wall Brook flowed.</p>
+<p>Not every one was satisfied with this choice for a cathedral
+site.&nbsp; William of Malmesbury wrote of it as &ldquo;pleasant
+neither by multitudes of inhabitants, nor beauty of
+position.&rdquo;&nbsp; But beauty is a matter of individual
+taste.&nbsp; &ldquo;Wonderful, almost<b> </b><a
+name="page179"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+179</span>shameful,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;was it, that a
+bishop&rsquo;s see should have remained here for so many
+years.&rdquo;&nbsp; For three hundred and three years it so
+remained, the bishop&rsquo;s seat being removed only in 1078,
+when Old Sarum, a much more inconvenient site, sterile, cramped
+and waterless&mdash;a place that to the Saxons was Searobyrig,
+the dry city&mdash;was selected, only itself to be abandoned in
+less than another hundred and fifty years.&nbsp; In the meanwhile
+no fewer than twenty-seven bishops ruled in succession at
+Sherborne and passed into the Great Beyond, leaving for the most
+part, very little evidence of their existence.&nbsp; Notable
+exceptions, however, were Adhelm, an early translator of the
+Scriptures, and Asser, whose biography of his friend and patron,
+Alfred the Great, is a monument to himself as well as to his
+subject.&nbsp; In the choir-aisles of the existing Abbey-church
+are sundry relics of those prelates, in the shape of ancient
+tombs with battered effigies, as near a likeness to them as
+possible for the sculptors to produce; and in the retro-choir are
+pointed out the spots where Kings Ethelbald and Ethelbert,
+brothers and predecessors of King Alfred, lie.</p>
+<p>After an interval of uncertainty following the removal of the
+bishopric in 1078 to Old Sarum, the cathedral here was in 1139
+made a Benedictine Abbey and rebuilt by Roger, Bishop of Sarum,
+who although he might not again remove the cathedral back to
+Sherborne, seems to have loved the place, and certainly lavished
+much care and labour upon it.</p>
+<p>Bishop Roger was a man of energy and determination.&nbsp;
+Starting in life as a poor Norman monk, <a
+name="page180"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 180</span>he owed his
+first important preferment to a curious circumstance.&nbsp; None
+could gabble through a mass more speedily than he, and he raced
+through a service before Henry I. so quickly, while the king was
+anxious to be off a-hunting, that the gratified monarch put him
+on the broad high road to advancement, along whose course Roger
+travelled far.&nbsp; But, if all had liked him as little as did
+the censorious William of Malmesbury, his journeys would have
+been short.&nbsp; To that chronicler he was &ldquo;unscrupulous,
+fierce and avaricious,&rdquo; not content to keep his own, but
+eager to grab the goods of others.&nbsp; &ldquo;Was there
+anything contiguous to his property which might be advantageous
+to him, he would directly extort it, either by entreaty or
+purchase, or, if that failed, by force.&rdquo;&nbsp; It must have
+been well, therefore, to arrange terms with this masterful
+personage while he was in the negotiating way, lest he took what
+he wanted, without so much as a
+&ldquo;by-your-leave.&rdquo;&nbsp; The great Norman structure he
+erected has largely survived, not only in its ground plan, but in
+the essential circumstances of its walling, for although it is
+outwardly a building in the Perpendicular phase of Gothic, dating
+from the second half of the fifteenth century, that
+magnificently-elaborated external show of nave and presbytery is
+but a later and more enriched surface, daringly grafted upon the
+stern and solemn Norman walls of over three hundred years&rsquo;
+earlier date.</p>
+<p>The history of the great Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne very
+clearly retells the old tale of Bury St. Edmunds, of Norwich, and
+of many another great monastic centre, by which you see that
+these <a name="page181"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+181</span>rich and powerful settlements of the religious were not
+generally at peace with the outside worldlings.&nbsp; The causes
+of quarrel were many.&nbsp; In some places the monastery was a
+harsh and exacting landlord; in others the imposts and hindrances
+placed upon the markets, whose tolls in many instances were the
+property of the Church, aroused bitter enmity and constant
+strife; and in yet more cases the maintenance of forests and game
+for the sport of the Lords Abbots gave rise to trouble.&nbsp;
+Poachers we have had always with us, and even in those times when
+to kill the stag in the Chases was a crime adjudged worthy death
+or mutilation, men for sport or sustenance illegally slew the
+game.&nbsp; &ldquo;What shall he have who killed the
+deer?&rdquo;&nbsp; Why, an ear cut off or a nose slit, at the
+very least of it.</p>
+<p>Here at Sherborne the bitterest quarrel arose from other
+causes.&nbsp; It seems that the parish church was situated at the
+west end of the Abbey, separated from it only by a door which the
+monks, exclusives always, had sought gradually to narrow, with a
+view of eventually blocking it up altogether.&nbsp; A question
+nearly allied with this was whether the children of the townsfolk
+should be baptised in the Abbey or in the parish church, and the
+disputes at last grew so raw that the Sherborne burgesses, very
+wrothy and spiteful, took to ringing their church-bells so long
+and so loudly that on account of the clamour, the monastic
+offices could not be carried on.&nbsp; In 1437 the points at
+issue were by common consent laid before the Bishop of Salisbury,
+who, siding with his own cloth, made an award in favour of the
+Abbey.&nbsp; Regarding this decision as an <a
+name="page182"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 182</span>injustice,
+the townsfolk refused to abide by it; but there were evidently
+two parties in the town, for one faction, headed by a stalwart
+butcher, broke into the parish church with some of the monks and
+reduced the font to fragments.&nbsp; Things then, naturally grew
+worse, until, as Leland puts it, &ldquo;The variance grew to a
+plain sedition, until a priest of the town church of All Hallows
+shot a shaft with fire into the top of that part of the Abbey
+Church of St. Mary that divided the east part that the monks used
+from that the townsmen used; and this partition happening at the
+time to be thatched in, the roof was set on fire, and
+consequently the whole church, the lead and bells melted, was
+defaced.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Choir was so seriously injured that it was taken down and
+rebuilt, but the rest was repaired, and still in some parts shows
+traces, in the reddened patches on the beautiful golden-yellow
+Ham Hill sandstone of the internal walls, of the
+conflagration.</p>
+<p>The townsfolk were made to contribute heavily to the cost of
+repair and rebuilding; works resulting in a more lovely interior,
+both in form and colour, than owned by any other considerable
+church in the west.&nbsp; A commonplace person, one no
+connoisseur of churches, if asked to convey a general sense of
+their interiors by the medium of temperature would reply that
+they were cold, for coldness is the effect most often
+produced&mdash;irrespective of the degrees registered by the
+thermometer&mdash;by their stonework; but here, though the
+mercury shrink down from the tube into close proximity with the
+bulb, provocative in most places of shivers, even the most
+matter-of-fact, irresponsive to the call of soaring arches, <a
+name="page183"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 183</span>painted
+windows and delicately poised fretted roof to &ldquo;lift up your
+hearts, O Zion!&rdquo; feel a grateful sensation of warmth
+pervading them, apparently radiating from these walls of richly
+hued stone, whose natural colouring seems to fully furnish the
+place and render it indifferent to the rigours of the
+season.&nbsp; It is a colour compact of all the beautiful hues of
+this country of a rich and bountiful Nature: of honey, of apples
+and pears golden and russet, of autumn leaves, and of cider and
+October ale, with a glint of the sun through it all.&nbsp; It
+gives a beautiful and cheerful tone, quick to purge melancholy
+and to make the devout happier in their hallelujahs than when in
+the cold, if chaste, companionship of Portland stone, the mild
+cream purity of the oolite of Bath, the Gregorian richness of the
+building stone of Mansfield, or the solemn satisfaction
+engendered by the deep red sandstone of Devon.</p>
+<p>The exquisite fan-vaulting of Sherborne Abbey, the finest
+example of that supremest effort of the last stage of Gothic art,
+has no superior elsewhere.&nbsp; That of Henry VII.&rsquo;s
+Chapel at Westminster, and that in St. George&rsquo;s Chapel at
+Windsor, are on a larger scale, and more daring, but, although
+generally cited as representative, are not so truly artistic.</p>
+<p>The old Pack-Monday fair, still an annual institution at
+Sherborne, is a two days&rsquo; market, originating with the
+completion of the repairs and the vaulting of the nave, under
+Abbot Peter de Ramsam, or Rampisham, in 1504.&nbsp; Tradition has
+it that, the last stone well and truly laid and the great church
+at last again in order, the masons and their <a
+name="page184"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 184</span>kind were
+paid off and bidden depart by midnight on the Sunday after Old
+Michaelmas Day.&nbsp; Accordingly, Pack-Monday fair is opened
+every year at the stroke of midnight on the Sunday succeeding
+October 10th, to the accompaniment of a din of horn-blowing and
+the uncouth banging of tin cans.</p>
+<p>Much of the beauty of the Abbey interior is due to the loving
+care of the restoration executed by the Digbys of Sherborne
+Castle, between 1848 and 1858, at a cost of over
+&pound;32,000.&nbsp; The church of All Hallows at the west end,
+which caused all the trouble, was demolished after the
+dissolution of the monastery, when the Abbey was sold to the town
+for use as a parish church and All Hallows itself thereby became
+a redundancy.&nbsp; Its situation and its ground-plan can still
+be traced on the paths and lawns and on the ragged walls and
+makeshift patchwork that serve as West Front to the Abbey.</p>
+<p>An ancestor of the restoring Digbys is commemorated by a
+pretentious mountain of marble in the south transept, with an
+epitaph, written by a bishop, setting forth with much
+antithetical rhodomontade his many virtues of activities and
+renunciations:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here Lyes John, Lord Digby, Baron Digby of Sherborne
+and Earl of Briftol.&nbsp; Titles to which ye merit of his
+Grandfather firft gave luftre And which he himfelf laid down
+unfully&rsquo;d.&nbsp; He was naturally enclined to avoid the
+Hurry of a publick Life, Yet carefull to keep up the port of his
+Quality.&nbsp; Was willing to be at eafe, but fcorned
+obfcurity.&nbsp; And therefore never made his retirement a
+pretence to draw Himfelf within a narrower <a
+name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 185</span>compafs, or
+to fhun fuch expence As Charity, Hospitality and his Honour
+call&rsquo;d for.&nbsp; His Religion was that which by <span
+class="smcap">Law</span> is Eftablisfhed, and the Conduct of his
+life fhew&rsquo;d the power of it in his Heart.&nbsp; His
+distinction from others never made him forget himfelf or
+them.&nbsp; He was kind and obliging to his Neighbours, generous
+and condefcending to his inferiours, and juft to all
+Mankind.&nbsp; Nor had the temptations of honour and pleafure in
+this world Strength enough to withdraw his Eyes from that great
+Object of his hope, which we reafonably affure ourfelves he now
+enjoys.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">MDCICVIII.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image184" href="images/p184.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Sherborne Abbey Church"
+title=
+"Sherborne Abbey Church"
+ src="images/p184.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The surroundings of the Abbey closely resemble cathedral
+precincts, and lead the well-informed stranger to remember that
+Sherborne cherishes hopes of some day being again erected into
+the head of a bishop&rsquo;s see, when that talked-of formation
+of a new diocese, carved out of the great territorial domains of
+Salisbury and of Bath and Wells, shall be an accomplished
+fact.</p>
+<p>The usual and properest way of coming to the Abbey, after you
+have glimpsed the fine picture it makes looking down Long Street,
+is past the Conduit&mdash;usually called the Monks&rsquo;
+Conduit&mdash;standing on the pavement of Cheap Street, and
+through a time-worn archway and a narrow alley of small shops and
+old houses.&nbsp; The Conduit, built about 1360, an open
+octangular building greatly resembling a market-cross, was
+originally in the centre of the cloister-garth, to the north of
+the Abbey, on a part of the site now occupied by the admirable
+Grammar School, founded by <a name="page186"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 186</span>Edward VI. from the spoils of the
+dissolved monastery, and grown in these days to be one of the
+foremost schools of the country.</p>
+<p>Cheap Street, the principal thoroughfare of Sherborne, is,
+like similar business streets in other West Country towns,
+composed of houses of many periods and all sizes.&nbsp; It is
+built generally of that sunny Ham Hill ferruginous sandstone,
+quarried for many years at Stoke-sub-Hamdon, six miles to the
+northwest of Yeovil.&nbsp; That fine old hostelry, the &ldquo;New
+Inn,&rdquo; now swept away, was built of it.&nbsp; This vanished
+house was the original of the &ldquo;Earl of Wessex,&rdquo; in
+<i>The Woodlanders</i>, in whose yard Giles Winterborne is
+observed by his old sweetheart from the balcony, while he is
+engaged with the business of cider-making:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The chief hotel at Sherton Abbas was the &ldquo;Earl of
+Wessex&rdquo;&mdash;a large stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch
+under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to back
+premises of wonderful commodiousness.&nbsp; The windows to the
+street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a
+view of the opposite houses.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The castle, some distance outside the town to east, adjoining
+the village of Castleton, was originally the combined palace and
+fortress of the Bishops of Sherborne.&nbsp; The remaining
+fragments, on their woody knoll overlooking the Yeo, in what is
+now Sherborne Park, are those of the stout keep built by that
+ambitious, and unscrupulous Bishop Roger, of Henry I.&rsquo;s
+time.&nbsp; Despite the curse, called down by the equally
+ferocious and saintly Osmund, upon any who should dare to
+alienate the castle from the bishops of Sherborne, it was wrested
+from them <a name="page187"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+187</span>on several occasions, perhaps sometimes in direct
+unbelieving challenge to that <i>quis separabit</i>; at others,
+certainly, because, in the fashion of the times, the bishops had
+taken part in the political troubles, the pitched battles and
+weary sieges of contending factions, and, having the ill-luck to
+side with the defeated party, suffered with them in body and
+estate.&nbsp; For over two hundred years, from 1139 to 1355, it
+was thus alienated, and Osmund&rsquo;s curse slept.&nbsp; Those
+who owned the castle were not executed, or imprisoned, or made to
+suffer beyond the usual medi&aelig;val average, perhaps because
+it took no account of developments arising from mitred follies
+and errors of judgment.&nbsp; At last, having been Crown property
+for many generations, the stronghold and its surrounding lands
+were granted to Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from whom, after a
+futile proposal had been made to fight him for it, in gage of
+single combat&mdash;a fourteenth-century example of
+Kingsley&rsquo;s &ldquo;muscular Christianity&rdquo;&mdash;it was
+purchased by the bishop for 2,500 marks; a cheap lot.&nbsp;
+Whether the earl, in Etonian phrase, &ldquo;funked it,&rdquo;
+imagining the bishop&rsquo;s steel would be fellow to &ldquo;the
+sword of the Lord and of Gideon,&rdquo; and as invincible, who
+shall say?&nbsp; At any rate, Bishop Wyvil, this strenuous
+champion, who feared neither the ordeal of the sword nor of the
+purse, entered into the gates of his predecessors of old time,
+and died here, after a residence of twenty years.&nbsp; The brass
+to his memory, in the north-east transept of Salisbury Cathedral,
+displays a representation of Sherborne Castle, with a figure of
+the bishop&rsquo;s champion armed with a battle axe, by which it
+will be seen that it was not scandalously, in his own proper
+person, <a name="page188"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+188</span>that the bishop was prepared to fight, but by a deputy,
+skilled in arms, and supported by the ghostly terrors of that
+ancient curse.</p>
+<p>And so, in the possession of the bishops of Salisbury who, to
+all intents and purposes, and within the meaning of old Oswald,
+were successors and representatives of the Bishops of Sherborne,
+the castle remained until 1540, when, in the dissolution of
+religious houses, it was seized and afterwards granted to the
+Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset.&nbsp; Then the curse seems
+to have come into its own again, for Somerset ended, where many
+other good and true were cut off, on Tower Hill.&nbsp; Although
+subsequently restored to the bishop of Salisbury, it was again
+alienated by Bishop Cotton to Sir Walter Raleigh, as payment for
+favours and promotion received when that hero and courtier was in
+the enjoyment of royal smiles.&nbsp; Raleigh, as every one knows,
+ended tragically, after long-drawn misery, in 1618, on the same
+spot where Somerset had suffered sixty years earlier.&nbsp; And
+well, the superstitious may think, was it that by legal quirks
+and quibbles James I. succeeded in chousing Raleigh&rsquo;s son
+out of his inheritance, for the ill-omened possession continued
+to work disaster.&nbsp; James bestowed it upon his favourite, the
+despicable Robert Carl, Earl of Somerset, who, convicted of being
+accessory to the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, was condemned to
+die, but was reprieved, and finally released by the timid James,
+to die obscurely in 1645.&nbsp; Something of a blundering curse,
+this, one may think, to miss scoring a &ldquo;bull&rdquo; on so
+admirable and easy a mark.</p>
+<p>The king then conveyed the property to Digby, <a
+name="page189"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 189</span>Earl of
+Bristol, the &ldquo;Earl of Severn&rdquo; of the slight story of
+<i>Anna</i>, <i>Lady Baxby</i>, in <i>A Group of Noble
+Dames</i>.&nbsp; When the Civil War broke out, Sherborne Castle
+was garrisoned for the king by the Marquis of Hertford, and early
+besieged by the Earl of Bedford, on behalf of the
+Parliament.&nbsp; It happened here&mdash;as so often it did in
+their internecine strife&mdash;that there were relatives engaged
+on either side in this siege.&nbsp; The Earl of Bristol&rsquo;s
+son, George, Lord Digby, was married to the Lady Anne Russell,
+sister of the Earl of Bedford.&nbsp; She it was, the &ldquo;Anna,
+Lady Baxby,&rdquo; of the story, who rode out secretly to her
+brother, and told him that if he were determined to reduce the
+castle, he &ldquo;should find his sister&rsquo;s bones buried in
+the ruins.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the investment continued until,
+finding himself weaker than he had supposed, the marquis offered
+to surrender on terms.&nbsp; If they were not accepted he
+proposed, with the Lady Anne&rsquo;s consent, and indeed at her
+wish, to station her on the battlements, and let the
+enemy&rsquo;s marksmen do their worst.&nbsp; The Earl of Bedford
+was not proof against this, and it is said, raising the siege,
+retired.</p>
+<p>But this plan would not always work.&nbsp; Three years later,
+in 1645, when Sir Lewis Dives, the Earl of Bristol&rsquo;s
+stepson, was in command, a greater than the Earl of Bedford
+appeared before Sherborne Castle, and summoned it to
+surrender.&nbsp; This was Sir Thomas Fairfax, flushed with his
+successes, and making a clean sweep of the garrisons in the west
+of England.&nbsp; For sixteen days, his forces sat down in front
+of the castle, which then surrendered, with its garrison of
+fifty-five gentlemen and six hundred soldiers.&nbsp; With that
+surrender came the final ruin, <a name="page190"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 190</span>for the castle was
+&ldquo;slighted,&rdquo; or destroyed by gunpowder, its contents
+and the spoils of &ldquo;the lodge,&rdquo; sold to the people of
+Sherborne.&nbsp; This &ldquo;Lodge&rdquo; was the mansion which
+even then had been built near by, the castle already proving too
+inconvenient for the ideas of those times.&nbsp; It is the
+so-called &ldquo;Castle&rdquo; of to-day, still the seat of
+Digbys, collateral and commoner descendants of the old
+owners.&nbsp; Sir Walter Raleigh built the centre portion of it
+in 1594, as his arms and the sculptured figures show, and Digbys
+the later wings.&nbsp; Their crest, the singular one of an
+ostrich holding a horse-shoe in its beak, is prominent over the
+entrance to the courtyard.&nbsp; In the park is still shown a
+stone seat, said to be that on which Sir Walter Raleigh was
+resting and smoking his first pipe of tobacco, when his pipe was
+dowsed and he drenched, by the pail of water thrown over him by
+his faithful retainer, who, not unnaturally, as tobacco was then
+a thing unknown, imagined his master to be on fire, and, in the
+expressive words of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade&rsquo;s
+reports, &ldquo;well alight.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Lodge, now the &ldquo;Castle,&rdquo; was a halting-place
+of the Prince of Orange on his triumphal march from Tor Bay, in
+1688.&nbsp; He slept here a night, and from a printing-press in
+the house was issued his address to the people of England.</p>
+<h2><a name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+191</span>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">SHERBORNE TO CERNE
+ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is twenty-six miles from stately
+Sherborne, the &ldquo;Sherton Abbas&rdquo; of <i>The
+Woodlanders</i>, to where Weymouth sits enthroned on the margin
+of her circular Bay, and, always supposing that no strong
+southerly gale is blowing, there is for the cyclist no easier
+route in all the Hardy Country.&nbsp; Bating the steep rise out
+of Sherborne and out of the Vale of Blackmore to the chalk
+uplands at Minterne Magna, it is a route of favourable gradients,
+with one interval of dead level.</p>
+<p>The river Yeo is a small stream, but its valley is deep and
+wide, as he who, leaving Sherborne, climbs the hills which shut
+in that valley, shall find.&nbsp; But a reward comes with the
+easy descent to the long, scattered street of rustic cottages at
+Long Burton, whence the way lies across a dead level to where,
+six miles distant from this point, rise the bastions of the
+mid-Dorset heights, seen distinctly from here: Dogbury, with his
+convex clump of cresting trees, like a blue-black wig, High Stoy,
+where the ridge runs bare, with Nettlecomb Tout and Bulbarrow in
+the hazy distance.</p>
+<p>It is a straight, and a marshy and low-lying, as well as a
+flat road to Holnest, where, beside the <a
+name="page192"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 192</span>road, is
+Holnest Lodge, belonging to the Erle-Drax family, and one of the
+seats of that eccentric person, the late J. S. W. Sawbridge
+Erle-Drax, of Charborough Park, long a member of Parliament for
+Wareham, and one of the last of the squires.&nbsp; The old time
+squires were laws to themselves, and like none others.&nbsp; The
+product of generations of other many-acred squires of great
+port-drinking propensities and unbounded local influence, whom
+all the lickings administered at Eton did not suffice to bring to
+a proper sense of their intrinsic unimportance, apart from the
+accidental circumstance that they were the lords of their manors,
+&ldquo;old Squire Drax,&rdquo; as the rustics call him now that
+he is dead, might from his high-handed ways have <a
+name="page193"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 193</span>formed an
+excellent model for a dramatist building up a melodrama of the
+old style.&nbsp; He was &ldquo;the Squire&rdquo; to the very
+<i>n</i>th degree, with so extraordinary an idea of his own
+importance that here, on the lawn fronting Holnest Lodge, he
+caused to be erected in his own lifetime a memorial to
+himself.&nbsp; An inspection of the approach to that residence
+will convince any one not only that he was very rich, but very
+mad as well.&nbsp; The sweeping drive is bordered at intervals
+with statues: Circes, Floras, Ceres, Dianas, and other classical
+deities, shining whitely and conspicuously against the grass, and
+leading the eye up to the central point where, on a tall imposing
+column, guarded by crouching lions, stands the bronze,
+frock-coated statue of Squire Drax himself.&nbsp; It is all very
+like a kind of higher-class Rosherville, and exceedingly
+curious.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image192" href="images/p192.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Long Burton"
+title=
+"Long Burton"
+ src="images/p192.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>One has not progressed far along the dead-level road before
+another evidence of the Drax swelled head comes in sight.&nbsp;
+It is a huge building in the Byzantine style, highly elaborated,
+and decorated in a costly way with polished stones.&nbsp; Its
+purpose puzzling at first, it is seen on closer approach to stand
+in a churchyard and to be a mausoleum.&nbsp; Away back from it
+stands in perspective the little church of Holnest, scarce larger
+than this gorgeous place prepared by the squire for his rest, and
+looking really smaller.&nbsp; The rustics dot the i&rsquo;s and
+cross the t&rsquo;s of his eccentricity, telling how he had his
+coffin made in his lifetime and his funeral rehearsed in front of
+the house.&nbsp; The more superstitious declare that the
+mausoleum was built so strongly and substantially in order to
+foil a certain personage whose desire is rather for the souls
+than for the <a name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+194</span>bodies of his own; and, to support their dark beliefs,
+narrate how, canvassing for votes during the progress of an
+election the squire declared he had always been a Member of
+Parliament, would always be, and would rather go to the Pit with
+the initials of M.P. attached to his name than to Heaven without
+them.&nbsp; Unfortunately, these wonder-mongers halt a little
+short of the completeness desired by dramatic requirements, and
+do not proceed to tell us how the election was secured by the
+agency of a gentlemanly stranger of persuasive manners and
+club-feet, who, upon the declaration of the poll mysteriously
+disappeared amid a strong smell of Tandstick&ouml;r matches.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image194" href="images/p194.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum"
+title=
+"Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum"
+ src="images/p194.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Advancing, we come at Middlemarsh into the <a
+name="page195"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 195</span>country of
+<i>The Woodlanders</i>, where dense woodlands now begin to cover
+the levels.&nbsp; The long ridge of the downs ahead now grows
+stern, steep, and threatening.&nbsp; To the left hand an isolated
+protuberance, covered with trees, the oddly named Dungeon Hill,
+rises, disclosing from its flanks peeps into the Vale of
+Blackmore, where the explorer can, with promptitude and thorough
+efficacy, lose himself.&nbsp; Believe one who has been along the
+sometimes devious and sometimes straight, but always lonely,
+roads of these levels.&nbsp; There, down beyond Dungeon Hill and
+Pulham, on a road flat as the alliterative flounder and empty as
+a City church, stands at King&rsquo;s Stag Bridge across the
+river Lidden an inn with the sign of the White Hart and a verse
+alluding to the origin of the name <a name="page196"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 196</span>of &ldquo;Vale of White Hart&rdquo;
+given to this part of the greater Vale of Blackmore&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;When Julius C&aelig;sar Reigned here, I was
+but then a little Deer.<br />
+When Julius C&aelig;sar Reigned King, around my Neck he put this
+Ring.<br />
+Whoever doth me overtake, Oh! spare my life, for
+C&aelig;sar&rsquo;s sake.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image195" href="images/p195.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore"
+title=
+"Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore"
+ src="images/p195.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The classic historian of Dorsetshire tells us something of the
+story thus darkly reflected.&nbsp; According to his account,
+corrected in details from other sources, it seems that King Henry
+III. hunting in what was then a forest, rounded up, among several
+other deer, a particularly beautiful white hart, whose life he
+spared for future hunting.&nbsp; Somewhat later, Sir John de la
+Lynde, Bailiff of Blackmore Forest, a neighbouring gentleman of
+ancient descent and local importance, out hunting with a party,
+roused the same animal, and, less pitiful than the king, killed
+it at the end of a long pursuit, at the spot ever after called
+King&rsquo;s Stag Bridge.&nbsp; The king, highly offended, not
+only punished Sir John de la Lynde and his companions with
+imprisonment and heavy fines, but taxed their lands severely and
+permanently, so that for many later generations the fine of White
+Hart Silver continued to be paid into the Exchequer.&nbsp;
+Another historian, the quaint and amusing Fuller, in giving his
+version, states that the whole county was laid under
+contribution.&nbsp; &ldquo;Myself,&rdquo; he says whimsically
+&ldquo;hath paid a share for the sauce who never tasted the
+meat.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is stated that &ldquo;White Hart
+Silver&rdquo; was levied until the reign of Henry VII.</p>
+<p>The road, passing a signpost weirdly directing <a
+name="page197"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 197</span>to
+&ldquo;Giant&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo; ascends a steep hill, perhaps
+the &lsquo;Rubdon Hill&rsquo; of <i>The Woodlanders</i>, and the
+Lyon&rsquo;s Gate Hill of actual fact, down which, into the vale
+on that autumnal day went Fitzpiers, the infatuated
+surgeon&mdash;a Dorsetshire Tannh&auml;user, thinking of the
+Venus who had bewitched him, and careless of the beauty of the
+season&mdash;when &ldquo;the earth was now at the supreme moment
+of her bounty.&nbsp; In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed
+with haws and blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the
+burst husks of chestnuts lay exposing their auburn contents as if
+arranged by anxious sellers for the market.&rdquo;&nbsp; Steeply
+upward continues the hill, to the ridge of the mid-Dorset
+heights, whence Blackmore Vale, of which it is very truly said
+that &ldquo;an unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather,
+is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and
+miry ways,&rdquo; is seen spreading out like an unrolled map.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which
+the fields are never brown, and the springs never dry,&rdquo; is
+bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the
+prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout,
+Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down.&nbsp; There &ldquo;in the
+valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more
+delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that
+from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green
+threads overspreading the paler green of the grass.&nbsp; The
+atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure
+that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that
+hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest
+ultramarine.&nbsp; Arable lands <a name="page198"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 198</span>are few and limited; with but slight
+exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees,
+mantling minor hills and dales within the major.&nbsp; Such is
+the Vale of Blackmore.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The village of Minterne Magna that, with its fine trees and
+the seat of Lord Digby, has so handsome a presence, is the
+&ldquo;Great Hintock&rdquo; of <i>The Woodlanders</i>.&nbsp; Poor
+loyal-hearted Giles Winterbourne, &ldquo;a good man, who did good
+things,&rdquo; was buried here, beside that ivy-covered
+church-tower overlooking the road, and now bearing the
+inscription</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;<span
+class="GutSmall">LE TEMPS PASSE</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">L&rsquo;AMITIE RESTE</span><br />
+1888<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">IN MEMORIAM&nbsp; H.R.D.</span>&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>They laid him to rest &ldquo;on the top of that hill looking
+down into the Vale,&rdquo; to whose villages he had, as autumn
+came round, been wont to descend with his portable cider-mill and
+press; and Grace rejoined her husband, and the world went on as
+usual.&nbsp; Only Marty South remembered him and treasured his
+memory.</p>
+<p>At Minterne Magna, otherwise &ldquo;Great Hintock,&rdquo;
+according to a rustic character, &ldquo;you do see the world and
+life,&rdquo; whereas, at Little Hintock, to be identified with
+Melbury Osmund, away down at Evershot, &ldquo;&rsquo;tis such a
+small place that you&rsquo;d need a candle and lantern to find
+it, if ye don&rsquo;t know where &rsquo;tis.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But, at the same time, outside the pages of novels Minterne
+Magna is not a place of stir and movement, and is great only in
+name.</p>
+<p>From just before Minterne Magna there is a <a
+name="page199"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 199</span>left-hand
+turning which affords an alternative route to Dorchester,
+avoiding Cerne Abbas, and going exposedly over the haggard
+downs.&nbsp; The two routes are locally known as the overhill and
+the underhill roads.&nbsp; The first-named is now little
+travelled, and its old house of entertainment, the Revels inn, a
+thing of the past.&nbsp; This, &ldquo;the forsaken coach-road
+running in an almost meridional line from Bristol to the south
+shore of England,&rdquo; is the route of the escaped prisoner and
+the scene of &ldquo;Higher Crowstairs&rdquo; in the intense story
+of <i>The Three Strangers</i>.&nbsp; On that route you see better
+than anywhere else, those &ldquo;calcareous downs&rdquo;
+described by the novelist, where &ldquo;the hills are open, the
+sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed
+character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low
+and splashed, the atmosphere colourless.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is, by
+the same token, of an exhausting dryness in summer, and in winter
+only to be undertaken by the most robust.</p>
+<p>By the &lsquo;underhill&rsquo; road on the other hand, the ten
+miles from Minterne to Dorchester are chiefly on a gentle
+descent.&nbsp; Presently, therefore, one reaches Cerne Abbas, the
+&ldquo;Abbot&rsquo;s Cernel&rdquo; of <i>Tess</i> and other
+stories, situated in a fine widening of the valley through which
+the river Cerne flows, with the gaunt bare shoulders of the great
+chalk downs receding far enough to lose something of their
+asperity, and to gain in distance all the atmosphere and softened
+outlines of an impressionistic picture.&nbsp; From the south,
+half a mile beyond the decayed town of Cerne, a very beautiful
+view of this nature opens out, by the roadside.&nbsp; There the
+fine tower of the church stands out against the sage-green <a
+name="page200"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 200</span>coloration
+of the hills, and with the luxuriant trees and the nestling farms
+of the valley, presents by force of contrast with the bare
+uplands a striking picture of comfort, prosperity, and
+hospitality, not perhaps warranted in every one of those respects
+by a closer acquaintance.&nbsp; For Cerne is a place very hardly
+treated by heartless circumstance.</p>
+<p>Many centuries ago, in <span class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 987
+to be exact, a Benedictine Abbey was founded here by Ethelmar,
+Earl of Devon and Cornwall, upon the site of a hermitage
+established by &AElig;dwold, brother of that East Anglican saint,
+Edmund the King and Martyr.&nbsp; It does not appear what became
+of the hermit, whether those who established the abbey bought him
+out, or threw him out; but it certainly seems to demand enquiry,
+the more especially that hermits and abbots, pious founders and
+holy monks were not altogether so unbusinesslike in their worldly
+affairs as the uninstructed might imagine.&nbsp; The hermit
+probably received due compensation for disturbance and went off
+somewhere else.&nbsp; However that may be, the abbey grew and
+flourished.&nbsp; Canute certainly despoiled it, but more than
+made amends, by large gifts and endowments of other
+people&rsquo;s property, when he had been brought to see the
+error of his ways and that plundering&mdash;plundering the
+property of the church, at least&mdash;was wrong.&nbsp; And so
+the business of the abbey progressed through the centuries, to
+the daily accompaniment of the monks chanting &ldquo;their
+wonderful piff-and-paff&rdquo; as the librettist of <i>The Golden
+Legend</i> makes the devil say of it.</p>
+<p>In 1471 Henry VI.&rsquo;s Queen, Margaret of Anjou, striving
+desperately, brave heart, on her son&rsquo;s behalf, fled for
+shelter here, up the road from Weymouth, <a
+name="page201"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 201</span>where she
+had landed from France; but, indeed, little else of history
+belongs to this sometime rich and splendid abbey in the heart of
+the hills.&nbsp; It afforded shelter and protection to the
+townlet of Cerne that had sprung up outside its precincts; and
+great therefore was the dismay when ruin overtook it in the time
+of Henry VIII.&nbsp; The abbey disestablished, the town of course
+also suffered.&nbsp; How greatly we do not know; but it plucked
+up courage again and refused to die, and when England was still
+that exceedingly uncomfortable England of coaching times,
+flourished in a modest way on the needs of travellers for succour
+and shelter on the exhausting journeys that are so romantic to
+read of in Christmas numbers, but were the terror of those who
+could not possibly stop at home.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image201" href="images/p201.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Cerne Abbas"
+title=
+"Cerne Abbas"
+ src="images/p201.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page202"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 202</span>And
+at last the coaches ceased and railways came to the country in
+general, but not to Cerne.&nbsp; It is still, to-day, remote from
+railways and is thus hit several severe, separate, and distinct
+blows by Fate, which, when travellers no longer needed its
+shelter, took away its chief reason for existence, refused it the
+reinvigorating boon of a railway, and then, in the general
+depression of agriculture, has dealt a final and staggering
+buffet.&nbsp; Cerne is dead.&nbsp; There is (assuming for the
+moment positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of
+deadness) no deader townlet in England, and it has all the
+interest, and commands all the respect due to the departed.&nbsp;
+<i>De mortuis nil nisi bonum</i>, and if there were hard things
+to be said of Cerne, they should not here be uttered.&nbsp; But
+there are no such things for utterance.&nbsp; It has all the
+romance of the bygone that appeals to the artist, and I love to
+dwell upon and in it.&nbsp; It is a place where commercialism
+has, or should have, no part, and therefore, when I pass a
+noble-looking farmhouse and a somewhat stately landlady comes out
+with a key, asking me&mdash;with an eye upon the perquisite of
+the fee exacted&mdash;if I would like to see the Abbey Gatehouse,
+I refuse; earning thereby the keen contempt shown on her
+expressive face.&nbsp; Soulless Goth, to wander about Cerne and
+not see the Gatehouse!&nbsp; Ah! my dear lady, your contempt is
+misplaced.&nbsp; I love these things better than you imagine, but
+I hate commercialism&mdash;and in such unexpected
+places&mdash;the more.&nbsp; The abbey ruins, wholly summed up in
+that Gatehouse, are at the extremity of this dead town, but there
+is a fine parish church in the centre of its streets.&nbsp; A
+noble, highly decorated tower is that <a name="page203"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 203</span>belonging to it, one of the finest
+productions of the Perpendicular period, with bold gargoyles,
+whose gaping mouths are for the most part stopped with
+birds&rsquo; nests.&nbsp; Decay and ruin squat next door, in the
+shape of one of Cerne&rsquo;s wrecked and unroofed houses, so
+long in that condition as to have become a terrace on which wild
+flowers luxuriantly grow and display themselves to passing
+admiration.&nbsp; It will be observed that there are
+shops&mdash;or things in the specious and illusory shape of
+shops&mdash;in this town of Yester-year.&nbsp; They indeed were
+so once, but the shopkeepers have long ceased from their
+shopkeeping.&nbsp; The windows, perhaps retained over against
+that time when Cerne shall be resurrected&mdash;for
+Fortune&rsquo;s wheel still spins, and will come full circle some
+day&mdash;are meanwhile excellent for displaying geraniums.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image202" href="images/p202.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey"
+title=
+"The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey"
+ src="images/p202.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>
+<a name="image203" href="images/p203.jpg">
+<img class='floatleft' alt=
+"The Cerne Giant"
+title=
+"The Cerne Giant"
+ src="images/p203.jpg" />
+</a>Prominent in most views of Cerne Abbas is that weird figure
+of a man on the hillside which gives an alternative name to
+Trendle or Giant&rsquo;s Hill.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Giant of
+Cerne&rdquo; is a big fellow, well deserving his name, for he is
+180 feet high.&nbsp; No one knows who cut him on the chalk of the
+hillside, but local tradition has long told how the figure
+commemorated the destruction of a giant who, feasting on the
+sheep of Blackmore, laid himself down here, in the sleep of
+repletion, and was then, like another Gulliver, pinioned where he
+lay by the enraged <a name="page204"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+204</span>peasantry, who killed him and immediately traced his
+dimensions for the information of posterity.&nbsp; The prominence
+of his ribs, however, says little for the result of his
+feeding.</p>
+<p>A more instructed opinion is that the figure represents Heil,
+a god of the pagan Saxons, and that it was cut before <span
+class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 600.&nbsp; Fearful legends belong to
+it: tales of horror narrating how the border enclosing the effigy
+is the ground plan of a stout wicker-work cage in which the pagan
+priests imprisoned many victims, whom they offered up as burnt
+sacrifices to their god.</p>
+<p>Looked upon with awe and wonder by the peasantry of old, who
+cleaned him once every seven years, the Giant is now regarded by
+them with indifference and left alone, and it is only the
+stranger who finds himself obsessed with a strange awe as he
+gazes upon this mystic relic of a prehistoric age.&nbsp; His
+minatory and uncouth appearance&mdash;for the relation of his
+head to his body is that of a pea to a melon&mdash;perhaps even
+more than his size, impresses the beholder.&nbsp; It should be
+said that he is merely traced in outline on the turf, in lines
+two feet broad and one foot deep, and not laid bare, a huge white
+shape, to the sky.&nbsp; The club he wields is 120 feet long, and
+from seven to twenty-four feet broad.</p>
+<h2><a name="page205"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+205</span>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">SHERBORNE TO CERNE
+ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH<br />
+(<i>continued</i>)</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Past</span> Nether Cerne and Godmanstone,
+the road leads, consistently straight and on a down gradient, to
+Charminster, where, in consonance with the place-name, a
+minster-like church stands.&nbsp; It is rich in monuments of the
+Trenchards&mdash;bearing their motto, <i>Nosce Teipsum</i>, Know
+Thyself&mdash;of the neighbouring historic mansion of Wolveton,
+one of whom&mdash;a Sir Thomas&mdash;built the tower, in or about
+the year 1500, as duly attested on the building itself, which
+displays his cypher of two T&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>Wolveton, standing in the rich level water-meadows where the
+rivers Cerne and Frome come to a confluence, is, as the Man of
+Family narrates in the story of <i>The Lady Penelope</i>, in <i>A
+Group of Noble Dames</i>, &ldquo;an ivied manor-house, flanked by
+battlemented towers, and more than usually distinguished by the
+size of its mullioned windows.&nbsp; Though still of good
+capacity, the building is much reduced from its original grand
+proportions; it has, moreover, been shorn of the fair estate
+which once appertained to its lord, with the exception of a few
+acres of park-land immediately around the mansion.&nbsp; <a
+name="page206"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 206</span>This was
+formerly the seat of the ancient and knightly Drenghards, or
+Drenkhards, now extinct in the male line, whose name, according
+to the local chronicles, was interpreted to mean <i>Strenuus
+Miles</i>, <i>vel Potator</i>, though certain members of the
+family were averse to the latter signification, and a duel was
+fought by one of them on that account, as is well
+known.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image206" href="images/p206.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Cerne Abbas"
+title=
+"Cerne Abbas"
+ src="images/p206.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The Lady Penelope, who jestingly promised to marry all three
+of her lovers in turn, and by that jest earned such misery when
+Fate ordained that her words should come true, was an actual
+living character.&nbsp; A daughter of Lord Darcy, she in turn
+married George Trenchard, Sir John Gage, and Sir William
+Hervey.&nbsp; As the story truly tells, the Drenghards, or rather
+Trenchards, are extinct in the male line.</p>
+<p>Passing by Poundbury, the &ldquo;Pummery&rdquo; of Dorset
+speech, we enter Dorchester, already described at <a
+name="page207"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+207</span>considerable length, and, passing down South Street and
+by the Amphitheatre, of gloomy associations, come out upon the
+Weymouth&mdash;or, as Mr. Hardy would say the
+&ldquo;Budmouth&rdquo;&mdash;road.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image207" href="images/p207.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Wolveton House"
+title=
+"Wolveton House"
+ src="images/p207.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>For the distance of close upon a mile this Roman road, the
+chief means of communication between their seaport station of
+Clavinium, near Weymouth, and their inland town of Durnovaria,
+runs on the level, bordered by the fine full-grown elms of one of
+Dorchester&rsquo;s many avenues.&nbsp; Then it sets out with a
+grim straightness to climb to the summit of that geological
+spine, the Ridgeway, which places so stubborn an obstacle on
+these nine miles of road that many a faint-hearted pilgrim from
+Dorchester fails to reach Weymouth, and many another from
+Weymouth gives up the task at less than half-way.</p>
+<p><a name="page208"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+208</span>Climbing here, the vast mass of Maiden Castle rises on
+the right, conferring a solemnity upon the scene, due not so much
+to the bulk given it by nature as to the amazing ditches, mounds,
+scarps, and counterscarps terraced along its mighty bosom
+by&mdash;ay, by whom?&nbsp; Many peoples had a hand in the making
+of this great fortification.&nbsp; The British Durotriges are
+said to have styled it &ldquo;Mai-Dun,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Castle
+of the great Hill,&rdquo; and to have established their capital
+here; and at a later date the Romans camped upon it and must have
+cursed the Imperialism which brought them here to wilt and wither
+in face of the bitter blasts of an inclement land.</p>
+<p>It was the Dunium of Ptolemy, and has been the wonder of many
+ages, not easily able to understand by what enormous expenditure
+of effort all these great mounds were heaped up and what enemies
+they feared who delved the ditches so deeply and ramped the
+ridges so steeply and so high.</p>
+<p>Maiden Castle is still occupied, although the last defender
+left it perhaps a thousand years ago; for as the curious
+traveller to these prehistoric earthworks climbs exhaustedly up
+the steep rises, over the short grass, he may see the rabbits
+mounting guard by thousands against the skyline, or fleeing
+panic-stricken, in admirable open order, showing myriads of white
+flags formed by their tails as they go loping away over the
+field.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image209" href="images/p209.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Weymouth and Portland, from the Ridgeway"
+title=
+"Weymouth and Portland, from the Ridgeway"
+ src="images/p209.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>As one progresses, more and more slowly with the acuter
+gradient, up the roadway, the church-tower of Winterborne
+Monkton, among its encircling barns, ricks, and cow-byres, comes
+into view, <a name="page210"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+210</span>the observer&rsquo;s eye on a higher level than the
+rooftop.&nbsp; Village there is none, and the clergyman who on
+Sundays conducts services here must do so&mdash;between the peals
+of the organ, and in midst of the quieter-spoken passages of
+morning and evening prayers&mdash;to the commentatory lowing of
+cattle or the grunts of pigs, sounding like the observations of
+grudging critics.&nbsp; There was once a saint who, like a broody
+hen that will nurse strange things, preached to the fowls of the
+air and the beasts of the field, and the spiritual shepherd of
+Winterborne Monkton not infrequently has among his congregation a
+barn owl, and a cheerful concourse of sparrows in the roof, much
+given to brawling in church.</p>
+<p>Roman directness was all very well, but later races found it
+much too trying for their horses, and thus we find, nearing the
+summit, that the straight ancient road across the ridgeway has
+long been abandoned, except by the telegraph-poles, for a cutting
+through the crest and an S curve down the southern and much
+steeper side.&nbsp; This expedient certainly eases both ascent
+and descent, but it does not suffice to render the way less than
+extremely fatiguing to climb and nerve-shaking to descend.</p>
+<p>As a view-point it has remarkable features, for the whole
+expanse of Portland Roads, the Isle of Portland, and the site on
+which Weymouth and Melcombe Regis are built are exposed to gaze,
+very much as though the spectator looking down upon them were
+bending in an examination of some modelled map of physical
+geography.&nbsp; White spires at Weymouth and equally white
+groups of houses at Portland gain striking effects from
+backgrounds of grey rock or the dark green of trees, massed by <a
+name="page211"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 211</span>distance to
+the likeness of dense forests; and the mile-lengths of harbour
+walls and breakwaters, punctuated with forts, out in the
+roadstead are shrunken by distance to the likeness of a cast
+seine-net supported by cork floats.&nbsp; On a ridge inland a row
+of circular ricks with peaked roofs showing against the sea looks
+absurdly like beehives, and down there in the middle distance is
+the curving line of embankment where the railway from Dorchester
+goes, after piercing the hill on which we stand by the Bincombe
+Tunnel.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image211" href="images/p211.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Wishing Well, Upwey"
+title=
+"The Wishing Well, Upwey"
+ src="images/p211.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page212"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+212</span>Descending the hill, we come to the valley of the
+Wey.&nbsp; The older part of the village of Upwey marks the
+source of that little stream to the right, and the newer part,
+with the village of Broadwey, are scarcely to be distinguished
+from one another, ahead.&nbsp; The original Upwey, the Upwey of
+the &ldquo;Wishing Well,&rdquo; lies under the flanks of a great
+down, where, if you climb and climb and continue climbing, you
+will presently discover the poppy-like scarlet buildings of the
+Weymouth waterworks.&nbsp; But there is no need to seek them
+while the Wishing Well, nearer to hand, calls.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Wishing Well&rdquo; is a pretty spot, overhung with
+trees and still a place resorted to by tourists, who either
+shamefacedly, with an implied half-belief in its virtues, drink
+its waters, or else with the quip and jest of unbelief, defer the
+slaking of their thirst until the nearest inn is reached, where
+liquors more palatable to the sophisticated taste&mdash;or what
+Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s rustics would term &ldquo;a cup of
+genuine&rdquo;&mdash;are obtainable.&nbsp; Once the haunt of
+gipsies, who used the well as a convenient pitch, and, when you
+crossed their palms with silver in the approved style, prophesied
+fulfilment of the nicest things you could possibly wish
+yourself&mdash;and a good many other things that would never
+occur to you at all&mdash;it is now quite unexploited, save
+perhaps by a little village girl, who, with a glass tumbler, will
+save the devotee from stooping on hands and knees and lapping up
+the magic water, like a dog.&nbsp; The gipsies have been all
+frightened away by the Vagrants Act, and no great loss to the
+community in general.&nbsp; The inquisitive stranger, curious to
+know whether the villagers themselves <a name="page213"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 213</span>resort to their famous Fount of
+Heart&rsquo;s Desire, receives a rude shock when he is told by
+one of them that, &ldquo;Bless &rsquo;ee, there baint a
+varden&rsquo;s wuth o&rsquo; good in &rsquo;en, at arl.&nbsp;
+Mebbe &rsquo;tis good ver a whist (a stye) but all them
+&rsquo;ere magicky tales be done away wi&rsquo;.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+Age of Faith is dead.</p>
+<p>And so into Weymouth, down a road lined with long rows of
+suburbs.&nbsp; Radipole is come to this complexion at last, and
+its spa is, like a service rendered and a benefit conferred, a
+thing clean forgot.</p>
+<h2><a name="page214"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+214</span>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WEYMOUTH</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Well</span>, then, here, reaching a Modern
+church with a tall spire, surrounded by suburban villas, is the
+beginning of Weymouth.&nbsp; The sea in these miles has dropped
+gradually down, out of sight as the road comes to the level, and
+at this point you might, to all intents and purposes, be at North
+Kensington, which the spot greatly resembles.&nbsp; But turning
+sharply with the road to the right the derogatory illusion is at
+once dispelled, for the sea is out there, sparkling, to the left;
+and, in the perfect segment of a circle, the Esplanade of
+Weymouth goes sweeping round to the harbour, with the Nothe Point
+fort above, and, away out in the distance, that towering knob of
+limestone, the Isle of Portland.&nbsp; It is a stimulating view,
+and has generally other and even more stimulating constituents
+than those of nature, for Weymouth and Portland are places of
+arms, and the ships of the Navy are usually represented by a
+squadron of cruisers well in shore, with a brace or two of
+battleships coming, going, or anchored easily in sight, and
+numbers of those ugly, imp-like craft, torpedo-boats, flying
+hither and thither.</p>
+<p><a name="page215"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+215</span>Weymouth styles itself&mdash;or others style
+it&mdash;&ldquo;the Naples of England,&rdquo; but no one has ever
+yet found Naples returning the compliment and calling itself
+&ldquo;the Weymouth of Italy.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is really no
+reason why Weymouth, instead of seeking some fanciful resemblance
+based solely, it may be supposed on the configuration of its
+widely curving bay, should not stand or fall by the sufficing
+attractions of its own charming self.&nbsp; For one thing, it
+would be impossible to persuade the public that Weymouth owns a
+Vesuvius somewhere away in its <i>hinterland</i>, and, although
+the country is rich in Roman camps, no antiquary has yet
+discovered a Pompeii midway between Melcombe Regis and
+Dorchester.</p>
+<p>The town is still in essentials the Weymouth of George III.,
+the &ldquo;Budmouth&rdquo; of Thomas Hardy.&nbsp; They are, it is
+true, the battleships of Edward VII. wallowing out there, like
+fat pigs, where of yore the wooden men-o&rsquo;-war swam the
+waters like swans; but the houses at least, that face the
+Esplanade in one almost unbroken row, each one like its neighbour
+and all absolutely innocent either of taste or pretension, are
+characteristically Georgian.&nbsp; Taken individually and
+examined, one might go greater lengths, and say such a house was
+more than insipid and commonplace&mdash;was, indeed, downright
+ugly&mdash;but in a long curving row the effect is a
+comprehensive one of dignified restraint.&nbsp; At any rate, they
+are constructed of good honest dull red brick, and not plastered
+and made to look like stone.&nbsp; This bluff honesty in these
+days of shams and of restless, worried-looking designs, when
+every new building must have its own ready-made picturesqueness,
+and this total absence of <a name="page216"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 216</span>anything and everything that by
+remotest chance could be thought an ornament, is grateful.</p>
+<p>We speak of this as &ldquo;Weymouth,&rdquo; but it is rather,
+to speak by the card, Melcombe Regis, and although the interests
+of both this and of Weymouth proper, on the other side of the
+narrow neck of harbour, are now pooled, it was once a sign of
+ignorance and a certain offence not to carefully distinguish
+between the two.&nbsp; Their rivalries and jealousies were of old
+so bitter that the river-mouth and harbour, long since bridged to
+make a continuous street, was like a stream set between two alien
+states.&nbsp; The passage was then &ldquo;by a bote and a rope
+bent over ye haven, so y<sup>t</sup> in ye fery bote they use no
+ores.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These disputes and contentions had risen almost to the
+condition of a smouldering petty local warfare in the time of
+Queen Elizabeth, when means were taken to put an end to it.&nbsp;
+Thus in 1571 they were compelled to unite, and in the familiar
+phrase of fairy tales have &ldquo;lived happily ever
+after.&rdquo;&nbsp; Says Camden: &ldquo;These stood both some
+time proudlie upon their owne severall priviledges, and were in
+emulation one of the other, but now, tho&rsquo; (God turne it to
+the good of both!) many, they are, by authoritie of Parliament,
+incorporated into one bodie, conjoyned by late by a bridge, and
+growne very much greater and goodlier in buildings and by sea
+adventures than heretofore.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But things widely different from trade have in later times
+made the fortune of the conjoined towns of Weymouth and Melcombe
+Regis.&nbsp; I suppose the one or the other of them was bound in
+the course of time to be &ldquo;discovered&rdquo; as a
+bathing-resort, <a name="page217"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+217</span>but it is to George III. that Weymouth owes a deep debt
+of gratitude.&nbsp; His son had already &ldquo;discovered&rdquo;
+Brighthelmstone, or rather, had placed the seal of his approval
+upon Dr. Russel&rsquo;s earlier discovery of it; and likewise
+Weymouth was already on the road to recognition when George III.
+came here first, in 1789.&nbsp; Thirty years or so earlier, when
+people had begun as a strange new experience, to bathe, the sands
+of Weymouth&mdash;or to adopt an attitude of strict correctitude,
+the sands of Melcombe Regis&mdash;were on the way to
+appreciation.&nbsp; Then greater folks lending their august
+patronage where that of meaner people had little weight, the
+place was resorted to by the famous Ralph Allen of Bath, for whom
+in 1763 the first bathing-machine was constructed, and by a
+stream of visitors gradually ascending in the social scale.&nbsp;
+The place long found favour with the Duke of Gloucester, by whose
+recommendation the king was induced to make a visit and then a
+lengthy stay, placing the apex at last upon this imposing pyramid
+of good fortune.&nbsp; It was no fleeting glimpse of royal favour
+thus accorded, for with the coming of summer the king for many
+years resided here at Gloucester Lodge, the mansion facing the
+sea built by his brother the Duke of Gloucester, and now the
+staid and grave Gloucester Hotel.&nbsp; Weymouth basked happily
+in the splendours of that time.&nbsp; They were splendours of the
+respectable domestic sort generally associated with that homely
+monarch, who bathed from his machine in full view of his loyal
+lieges and then went home to boiled mutton and turnips.&nbsp; He
+made sober holiday on the Dorset coast while his graceless son
+was on the coast of Sussex rearing a <a name="page218"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 218</span>fantastical palace and playing
+pranks fully matching it in extravagance of design and purse.</p>
+<p>Weymouth&rsquo;s return for all these favours is still to be
+seen, in the bronze group erected by the townsfolk in 1809, to
+celebrate the generally joyful occasion of his Jubilee, to
+perpetuate the especial gratitude of the people for favours
+received, and in hopes of more to come.</p>
+<p>Weymouth very closely reflects the prosperity of that great
+era, in the Georgian streets, the quaintly bowed windows of
+private houses and the now old-world shop-fronts, many of them
+exquisite examples of the restrained taste and aptitude for just
+proportion in design characteristic of that age, and only now
+beginning to be appreciated at their true worth.&nbsp; It was the
+age of the Adams brothers, of Chippendale and Sheraton; an age
+rightly come to be regarded in our time as classic in all things
+in the domain of architecture and decoration.&nbsp; In its
+unaltered purlieus Weymouth is thus singularly like the older
+parts of Brighton, but now richer in vestiges of the Georgian
+period than the larger and more changeful town.</p>
+<p>That, doubtless, was a period of inflated prices in
+Weymouth.&nbsp; King, queen, and princesses, fashionables and
+many soldiers sent up the ideas of tradesfolk just as the sun
+expands the mercury of a thermometer.&nbsp; Uncle Benjy, in
+<i>The Trumpet Major</i>, found Budmouth a place where money flew
+away doubly as quick as it did when the famous Scot visited
+London and &ldquo;hadna&rsquo; been there a day when bang went
+saxpence.&rdquo;&nbsp; At Budmouth in the time of Farmer George,
+it was a &ldquo;shilling for this and a shilling for that; if you
+only eat one egg or even a poor windfall of an apple,
+you&rsquo;ve got to pay; and <a name="page220"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 220</span>a bunch o&rsquo; radishes is a
+halfpenny, and a quart o&rsquo; cider a good tuppence
+three-farthings at lowest reckoning.&nbsp; Nothing without
+paying!&rdquo;&nbsp; Ay! but if prices were no higher than these,
+&rsquo;twas no such ruinous place, after all.&nbsp; Poor Uncle
+Benjy!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image219" href="images/p219.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Weymouth Harbour"
+title=
+"Weymouth Harbour"
+ src="images/p219.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The most striking differences in physical geography between
+the constituent parts of Weymouth are that Melcombe Regis, here
+on the shore is flat as a pancake, and Weymouth, there on
+t&rsquo;other side of the harbour, is as hilly as a
+house-roof.&nbsp; You could have no greater dissimilarity than
+that between the prudish formality which stands for the Melcombe
+front and the heaped-up terraces of houses of every description
+at Weymouth, which has no front at all; unless indeed the lowest
+tier of houses skirting the harbour and its quays, and looking
+into the back alleys and quays of Melcombe may so be
+styled.&nbsp; In those old days, to which Weymouth dates back, no
+seaside town could afford so assailable a luxury as a
+&ldquo;front,&rdquo; and the older quarters of nearly all such
+are generally found, as here, folded away under the lee of a
+bluff, or thinly lining the shores of an estuarial harbour.&nbsp;
+Here the Nothe Point, with its fort mounted with heavy guns, is
+the rocky bluff behind which the old town cowered from elemental
+and human foes, and that estuary, both by reason of its narrow
+entrance, and those great forts of the Nothe and Portland, has
+never been one sought by an enemy&rsquo;s ship.</p>
+<p>The harbour is not uninteresting: what harbour ever is?&nbsp;
+The comings and goings of ships have their own romance, and bring
+rumours of all kinds of outer worlds and strange peoples.&nbsp;
+You look across from the quays of Weymouth to the quays <a
+name="page221"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 221</span>of
+Melcombe, and there, beside the walls and the old warehouses, lie
+the ships from many home and foreign ports, their names duly to
+be read under their counters.&nbsp; Whence they individually
+come, I do not greatly care to know.&nbsp; This one may only have
+come from the Channel Islands with a consignment of early
+potatoes: and, on the other hand, it may have won home again
+after who knows what romantic doings at the Equator or within the
+Arctic Zone.&nbsp; It may have brought treasure-trove, or on the
+other hand be merely carrying ordinary commercial freights, at so
+low a figure that the owners are dissatisfied and the skipper
+gloomy.&nbsp; It is well, you see, to leave a little margin for
+fancy when the good ship has come to port once more and within
+sight and the easiest reach of those two great features of a
+Christian and a civilised land: the Church and the Public
+House.</p>
+<p>In these days the town is recovering at last from the
+undeserved neglect into which it fell after the illness and death
+of George III. and from later disasters and indifferences; and,
+what with improved railway travelling, and the added interest it
+obtains from being selected as the site of a new great national
+harbour where more than ever the ships of the Navy will come and
+go, has a great future before it.</p>
+<h2><a name="page222"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+222</span>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">THE ISLE OF
+PORTLAND</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">To</span> the generality of untravelled
+folk, Portland is nothing but a quarry and a prison.&nbsp; It is
+both and more.&nbsp; It is, for one additional thing, a fortress,
+in these times grown to a considerable strength, and, for
+another, is a singular outlying corner of England tethered to the
+mainland only by that seemingly precarious stretch of pebbles,
+the Chesil Beach.&nbsp; As Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of
+<i>The Trumpet Major</i>, so Portland, the &ldquo;Isle of
+Slingers,&rdquo; as Mr. Hardy calls it, is especially, though not
+with absolute exclusiveness, the district of <i>The Well
+Beloved</i>.</p>
+<p>There is a choice of ways to Portland.&nbsp; You may go by the
+high road&mdash;and a very steep up and down road it is,
+too&mdash;past Wyke, or may proceed by the crumbling clifflets
+past Sandsfoot Castle, one of those blockhouse coastward
+fortresses stretching from Deal and Sandown Castles, in Kent,
+along the whole of the south coast, to this point, whose building
+we owe to the panic that possessed the nation in the time of
+Henry VIII.: one of those periodic fears of a French invasion
+that from time to time have troubled the powers that be.&nbsp;
+Two of the long series were placed in this neighbourhood; <a
+name="page223"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 223</span>the
+so-styled &ldquo;Portland Castle&rdquo; at the base of the Isle
+of Portland itself, and this craggy ruin of Sandsfoot, roofless
+and rough and more cliff-like than the cliffs themselves, at the
+mainland extremity of this sheltered inlet, wherein, in days of
+yore, an enemy might conceivably have effected a lodgment.&nbsp;
+For the defence of this fort, when new-builded in the Eighth
+Harry&rsquo;s time, there were to be provided &ldquo;the nombre
+of xv hable footmen, well furneyshed for the warres, as
+appertayneth,&rdquo; together with some &ldquo;harchers&rdquo;
+duly furnished, or &ldquo;harmed&rdquo; as the summons might have
+put it, with their &ldquo;bows and harrowes.&rdquo;&nbsp; Alas!
+poor overworked letter H!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image223" href="images/p223.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Sandsfoot Castle"
+title=
+"Sandsfoot Castle"
+ src="images/p223.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page224"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 224</span>It is
+here, in the story of <i>The Well Beloved</i>, that Jocelyn
+Pierston, the weirdly constituted hero of that fantastic romance,
+elects to bid farewell to Avice Caro, and past it Anne Garland
+went on her way to Portland Bill, &ldquo;along the coast road to
+Portland.&rdquo;&nbsp; When she had reached the waters of the
+Fleet, crossed now by a bridge, she had to ferry over, and from
+thence to walk that causeway road whose mile-and-three-quarters
+of flatness, bounded sideways by the expressionless blue of the
+summer sky and the equally vacant vastnesses of the yellow
+pebbles of the Chesil Beach, seems to foot-passengers an image of
+eternity.&nbsp; It is but a flat road, less than two miles long,
+but the Isle ahead seems to keep as far off as ever, and the way
+is so bald of incident that a sea-poppy growing amid the pebbles
+is a change for the eye, a piece of driftwood a landmark, and a
+chance boat or capstan a monument.</p>
+<p>But even the Chesil Beach has an end, and at last one reaches
+Portland and Fortune&rsquo;s Well, referred to in that story of
+the Portlanders as &ldquo;the Street of Wells.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+well&mdash;a wishing well of the good, or the bad, old sort,
+where you wished for your heart&rsquo;s desire, and perhaps
+obtained the boon in the course of a lifetime&mdash;by striving
+and labouring for it&mdash;is behind that substantial inn, the
+Portland Arms, and it is a cynical commentary upon this and all
+such legends of fa&euml;ry that, while the Portlanders in
+general, and the people of Fortune&rsquo;s Well in particular,
+can one and all direct you to the inn, if so be you are bat-like
+enough not to perceive it for yourself, very few of them know
+anything at all of the magic spring, of where it is, or that the
+<a name="page225"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 225</span>place
+took its name from the existence of such a thing.</p>
+<p>One circumstance, above all other curious and interesting
+circumstances of this so-called &ldquo;Isle&rdquo; of Portland,
+is calculated to impress the stranger with astonishment.&nbsp;
+Its giant forts; its great convict establishment, &ldquo;the
+retreat, at their country&rsquo;s expense, of geniuses from a
+distance,&rdquo; the odd nexus of almost interminable pebble
+beach that tethers it to the mainland and makes the name of
+&ldquo;Isle&rdquo; a misnomer, are all fitting things for
+amazement; but no one previously uninformed on the point is at
+all likely to have any conception of its numerous villages and
+hamlets and the large populations inhabiting this grim,
+forbidding, &ldquo;solid and single block of limestone four miles
+long.&rdquo;&nbsp; Eleven thousand souls live and move and have
+their being on what the uninstructed, gazing across the Roads
+from Weymouth, might be excused for thinking a penitential rock,
+reserved for forts and garrison artillery, and for convicts and
+those whose business it is to keep them in order.&nbsp; The
+number of small villages or hamlets is itself in the nature of a
+surprise.&nbsp; Entering upon this happily styled
+&ldquo;Gibraltar of Wessex,&rdquo; there is in the foreground, by
+the railway-station, Chesilton; succeeded by Fortune&rsquo;s
+Well, Castleton to the left, Portland to the right, and, away
+ahead up to the summit of a stupendous climb on to the great
+elevated, treeless and parched stony plateau of the Isle,
+Reforne.&nbsp; Beyond the prison and the prison quarries, come
+Easton, Wakeham, Weston, and Southwell; all stony and
+hard-featured and like nothing else but each other.&nbsp; To-day
+an exploration of the Isle is easy, for a railway runs <a
+name="page226"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 226</span>from
+Weymouth along the beach to Chesilton, and another, skirting the
+cliffs, takes you out almost to the famous Bill itself; but
+otherwise, all the circumstances of the place still fully show
+how the Portlanders came to be that oddly different race from the
+mainlanders they are shown to be in the pages of <i>The Well
+Beloved</i>, and in the writings of innumerable authors.</p>
+<p>Portland was to the ancients the Isle of Vindilis, the
+&ldquo;Vindelia&rdquo; of Richard of Cirencester; and Roman roads
+are surviving on it to this day, notwithstanding the blasting and
+quarrying activities of this vast bed of building-stone, whence
+much of the material for Sir Christopher Wren&rsquo;s City of
+London churches came, and despite the business of fortification
+that has abolished many merely antiquarian interests.&nbsp; You,
+indeed, cannot get away from stone, here on Portland; physically,
+in historic allusions, and in matters of present-day
+business.&nbsp; The story of the Isle begins with it, with those
+ancient inhabitants, the <i>Baleares</i>, slingers of stones, who
+made excellent defence of their unfertile home with the
+inexhaustible natural ammunition; and quarrying is now, after the
+passing of many centuries, its one industry.&nbsp; It is to be
+supposed, without any extravagance of assumption, that the
+Portlanders of to-day are the descendants of those ancient
+Baleares, and, certainly until quite recent times, they
+maintained the aloofness and marked individuality to be expected
+from such an ancestry.&nbsp; To them the mainlanders were
+foreigners, or, as themselves would say,
+&ldquo;kimberlins&rdquo;; a flighty, mercurial and none too
+scrupulous people, calling themselves Englishmen, who lived on
+the adjacent island of Great Britain and <a
+name="page227"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 227</span>were only
+to be dealt with cautiously, and then solely on matters of
+business connected with the selling of stone, or maybe of fish,
+caught in Deadman&rsquo;s Bay.&nbsp; For the true Portlanders,
+like their home, are grey and unsmiling, and reflect their
+surroundings, even as do those inhabitants of more sheltered and
+fertile places; and still, although things be in these later days
+of railway communication and a kind of quick-change and
+&ldquo;general-post&rdquo; all over the country somewhat altered,
+a stranger, who by force of circumstances&mdash;pleasure is out
+of the question&mdash;comes to live here, will find himself as
+uncongenial as oil is to water.</p>
+<p>The outlook of the old Portlanders upon strangers was
+justified to them, in a way, when the great prison was built and
+the gangs of convicts began to be a feature of the Isle.&nbsp;
+<i>They</i>, who thus by force of circumstances over which they
+had no control, took up a hard-working and frugal existence upon
+the Isle, were specimens of the &ldquo;kimberlins&rdquo;; and the
+prejudices, if not quite the ignorance, of the islanders saw in
+them representative specimens of all
+&ldquo;Outlanders.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When you come toilsomely uphill from Fortune&rsquo;s Well, out
+upon the stony plateau that is Portland, you presently become
+conscious of the contiguity of that great convict establishment,
+in the appearance of notice-boards, warning all and sundry of the
+penalties awaiting those who aid prisoners to escape.&nbsp; Such
+an offence, you learn, &ldquo;shall be treated as a felony, not
+subject to any bail or mainprize&rdquo; (whatever that may
+be).&nbsp; But any &ldquo;free person&rdquo; finding money,
+letters, or clothing, or anything that may be supposed to have
+been left to facilitate <a name="page228"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 228</span>the escape of prisoners shall be
+rewarded, unless such person shall be proved to have entered into
+collusion, etc., etc., and so forth.</p>
+<p>What, however, one especially desires to call attention to is
+the delicious expression, &ldquo;free person.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Obviously, to the official minds ruling Portland &ldquo;free
+persons&rdquo; owe their freedom, not to any virtues they
+possess, but to their luck in not being found out.&nbsp; One,
+being a &ldquo;free person,&rdquo; has, therefore, after reading
+this notice, an uneasy suspicion that freedom is, in the eye of
+those authorities, a wholly undeserved accident, and that if
+every one&mdash;saving, of course, officials&mdash;had their
+deserts, they would be cutting and hauling stone out yonder, with
+the gangs in those yellow jackets and knickerbockers plentifully
+decorated with a pleasing design in broad arrows.</p>
+<p>Being merely a &ldquo;free person,&rdquo; without prejudice in
+one&rsquo;s favour in the eyes of the armed warders who abound
+here, it behoves one to walk circumspectly on Portland.</p>
+<p>A great deal might be said of the Convict Prison and its
+quarries.&nbsp; It is another &ldquo;sermon in stones,&rdquo;
+quite as effective as the sermons preached by those other stones
+referred to in the lines</p>
+<blockquote><p>. . . books in the running brooks,<br />
+Sermons in stones, and good in everything,</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and the text, I take it, is the amended and horribly
+sophisticated one: &ldquo;Thou shalt not steal&mdash;or, if you
+must, do it outside the cognisance of the criminal
+laws!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But this only in passing.&nbsp; Literary landmarks have
+fortunately, no points of contact with burglars, <a
+name="page229"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 229</span>fraudulent
+trustees, and swindling promoters of companies.&nbsp; We will
+make for Pennsylvania Castle, very slightly disguised in <i>The
+Well Beloved</i> as &ldquo;Sylvania Castle,&rdquo; the residence
+of Jocelyn Pierston in that story.&nbsp; Coming to it, past the
+cottage of Avice, down that street innocent of vegetation, the
+thickets of trees surrounding the Castle (which is not a castle,
+but only a castellated mansion built in 1800 by Wyatt, in true
+Wyattesque fashion, for the then Governor of the Isle) are seen,
+closing in the view.&nbsp; A tree is something more than a tree
+on stony, wind-swept Portland.&nbsp; Any tree here is a landmark,
+and a grove of trees a feature; and thus, in the thickets and
+cliffside undergrowths of &ldquo;Sylvania Castle,&rdquo; that
+justify the name and <a name="page230"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 230</span>give the lie to any who may in more
+than general terms declare Portland to be treeless, the boskage
+is therefore more than usually gracious.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image229" href="images/p229.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bow and Arrow Castle"
+title=
+"Bow and Arrow Castle"
+ src="images/p229.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Many incidents in the elfish career of Pierston are made to
+happen here.&nbsp; The first Avice was courted by him in the
+churchyard down below, where a landslip has swept away the little
+church that gave to Church Hope Cove its name, and Avice the
+third eloped with another&mdash;that Another who with that
+capital A lurks between the pages of every novel, and behind the
+scenes in most plays&mdash;down the steep lane that runs beneath
+the archways of &ldquo;Rufus&rsquo;,&rdquo; or Bow and Arrow,
+Castle on to the rocks beside the raging sea.</p>
+<p>By lengthy cliff-top ways we leave this spot and make for
+Portland Bill, whence Anne Garland tearfully watched the topsails
+and then the topgallants, and at last the admiral&rsquo;s flag of
+the <i>Victory</i> drop down towards, and into, the watery
+distance.&nbsp; Offshore is the Shambles lightship that gave a
+refuge to the fleeing Avice and Leverre.</p>
+<p>This &ldquo;wild, herbless, weatherworn promontory,&rdquo;
+called Portland Bill, with its two lighthouses looking down upon
+shoals and rapid currents of extraordinary danger to mariners,
+obtains its name from the beak-like end of the Isle which
+&ldquo;stretches out like the head of a bird into the English
+Channel.&rdquo;&nbsp; Other, and more fanciful and wonder-loving
+accounts would have us believe that it derives from this being
+the site of propitiatory Baal fires in far-off pagan times; and,
+if we like to carry on the fancy, we may draw comparisons between
+the fires of the shivering superstitious terrors of those old
+heathens, and the beneficent warning gleams maintained here <a
+name="page231"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 231</span>in modern
+times by the Trinity House, for the benefit of &ldquo;they that
+go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great
+waters.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Completing the circuit of Portland, the return to
+Fortune&rsquo;s Well and Chesilton is made chiefly along high
+ground disclosing a comprehensive and beautiful view of the whole
+westward sweep of the Dorset coast, where the many miles of the
+Chesil Beach at last lose themselves in hazy distance, and the
+heights of Stonebarrow and Golden Cap, between Bridport and Lyme
+Regis, pierce the skies.</p>
+<h2><a name="page232"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+232</span>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WEYMOUTH TO
+BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">To</span> leave Weymouth by this route is
+to obtain some initial impressions of a very striking character:
+impressions, not slight or fleeting, of hilliness and of
+Weymouth&rsquo;s modern growth.&nbsp; A specious and illusory
+flat quayside stretch of road, by the well-known swan-haunted
+Backwater, ends all too soon, and the road goes at a grievous
+inclination up through what was once the village, now the suburb,
+and a very packed and populous suburb, too, of East
+Chickerell.&nbsp; To this succeeds the Chickerell of the West;
+and so, in and out and round about, and up and down&mdash;but
+chiefly up&mdash;at last to Portisham, the first place of any
+Hardyean interest.</p>
+<p>Portisham, under the bold hills that rise to the commanding
+height of Blackdown&mdash;locally &ldquo;Black&rsquo;on,&rdquo;
+just as the name of the village is shortened to
+&ldquo;Po&rsquo;sham&rdquo;&mdash;rising eight hundred and
+seventeen feet above the sea, is notable to us both from fiction
+and in facts.&nbsp; It appears in <i>The Trumpet Major</i> as the
+village to which Bob Loveday comes to seek service under Admiral
+Hardy, and although the brave but sentimentally flighty Bob be a
+character of fiction, the admiral is that very real historical <a
+name="page233"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 233</span>personage,
+Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson&rsquo;s friend and
+comrade-in-arms, who was born here, in the house still pointed
+out, in 1769, and to whose memory the conspicuous monument on
+Blackdown is erected.&nbsp; The house is the first on the left,
+at the cross-roads as you make for <a name="page234"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 234</span>the village.&nbsp; In the garden
+belonging to it, on the opposite side of the road may still be
+seen a sundial, bearing the inscription:</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Joseph Hardy</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Esq</span>.,<br />
+Kingston Russell.&nbsp; Lat. 50&deg; 45&prime;<br />
+1767<br />
+Fugio fuge.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image233" href="images/p233.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Portisham"
+title=
+"Portisham"
+ src="images/p233.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>It is a lovely perspective along the road approaching
+Portisham, disclosing a long avenue of poplars and ashes, with
+the village church and some scattered farmsteads in the vale, and
+the tremendous sides of the rolling down, covered in patches with
+furze, filling in the background.&nbsp; The beautiful old church
+has, happily, been left very much to itself, with the
+lichen-stains of age and other marks of time not yet scraped
+off.&nbsp; A strange epitaph in the churchyard provokes
+curiosity:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;William Weare lies here in dust,<br />
+As thou and I and all men must.<br />
+Once plundered by Sabean force,<br />
+Some cald it war but others worse.<br />
+With confidence he pleads his cavse,<br />
+And Kings to be above those laws.<br />
+September&rsquo;s eygth day died hee<br />
+When neare the date of 63<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Anno domini 1670.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Those Sabines appear from the internal evidence of the epitaph
+to have been the Roundhead party, and &ldquo;rebellion,&rdquo; or
+perhaps &ldquo;robbery,&rdquo; to have been the worse thing than
+war some called it.&nbsp; The allusion is probably to some raid
+in which cows and sheep were carried off by the Puritans and were
+grudged them by the loyal Weare, who seems, <a
+name="page236"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 236</span>in the
+passage where he claims &ldquo;Kings to be above those
+laws,&rdquo; to have cheerfully borne some other foray on the
+Royalists&rsquo; behalf.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image235" href="images/p235.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The road out of Abbotsbury"
+title=
+"The road out of Abbotsbury"
+ src="images/p235.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Two miles from Portisham is the large village of Abbotsbury,
+not itself the scene of any of the Wessex romances, but
+intrinsically a very interesting place, remarkable for a hilltop
+chapel of St. Catherine anciently serving as a seamark, and for
+the remains of the Abbey; few, and chiefly worked into farmsteads
+and cottages, but including a great stone barn of the fifteenth
+century, as long as a cathedral, and very cathedral-like in its
+plan.</p>
+<p>The great barn of <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>, scene of
+the sheep-shearing, is really a description of the monastic barn
+of Abbotsbury, which, as in the story, resembles a church with
+transepts.&nbsp; &ldquo;It not only emulated the form of the
+neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity.
+. . .&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One could say about this barn, what <a
+name="page237"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 237</span>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 which it was still
+applied.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image236" href="images/p236.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Sheep-shearing in Wessex"
+title=
+"Sheep-shearing in Wessex"
+ src="images/p236.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Out of Abbotsbury, and down amid the waters of the West Fleet,
+is the famous Swannery, where, amid reedy lakes and marshes, some
+thousands of swans have from ancient times had a home.&nbsp; Once
+belonging to the Church, in the persons of the old abbots of the
+Benedictine abbey of Abbotsbury, the swans are now the property
+of the Earl of Ilchester, descendant of the &ldquo;First Countess
+of Wessex,&rdquo; Betty Dornell, whose romance is set forth in
+<i>A Group of Noble Dames</i>.&nbsp; Though long passed from the
+hands of any religious establishment, the ownership of the swans
+still points with the trifling alteration in the position of an
+apostrophe, to the fact that &ldquo;the earth is the Lords&rsquo;
+and the fulness thereof.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Eight miles of cliff-top roads, with magnificent views to the
+left over sea and coast, and other views equally magnificent
+inland, to the right, lead in staggering drops and rises past
+Swyre and Puncknowle down to Burton Bradstock, and thence to the
+&ldquo;unheard-of harbour&rdquo; of West Bay.</p>
+<p>West Bay, and Bridport town itself, are scenes in <i>Fellow
+Townsmen</i>, where they are called &ldquo;Port Bredy,&rdquo;
+from the little river, the Brit or Bredy, which here flows into
+the sea.&nbsp; West Bay is one of the oddest places on an odd and
+original coast.&nbsp; A mile and a half away from Bridport town,
+which is content to hide, sheltering away from the sea-breezes,
+it has always been about to become great, either as a commercial
+harbour or a seaside resort, <a name="page238"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 238</span>or both, but has ended in not
+achieving greatness of any kind.&nbsp; No one who enjoys the
+sight of a quiet and picturesque place will sorrow at that.</p>
+<p>Picturesque it is in a wholly accidental and unstudied
+way.&nbsp; It owns a little harbour, with quays and an inn or
+two, and shipping that, daring greatly, has to be warped in
+between the narrow timbered pier-heads, where a furious sea is
+for ever banging in from the unsheltered bay; and away at one
+side it is shut in from the outside coast by some saucy-looking
+cliffs of golden yellow sandstone, whose odd effect is due to
+their being the remaining part of a symmetrically rounded
+down.&nbsp; The seaward part has been shorn off, with the odd
+result that the rest looks like the quarter of some gigantic
+Dutch cheese of pantomime.&nbsp; It is an eloquent, stimulating,
+not unpleasing loneliness that characterises the shore of West
+Bay.&nbsp; A few old thatched houses, halting midway between an
+inland and a coastwise picturesqueness, and so only succeeding in
+being broken-heartedly nondescript, start out of wastes of tiny
+shingle, and are backed at a discreet distance by a long row of
+modern houses, whose architect is so often on their account
+professionally spoken of as a genius, that it becomes a duty to
+state, however convenient to the residents in them their plan may
+be, that their appearance in the view is the one pictorial
+drawback to West Bay.</p>
+<p>The microscopic shingle&mdash;for shingle it is&mdash;of West
+Bay has for centuries been the enemy of the place and has
+practically strangled it.&nbsp; There are heaped up wastes of it
+everywhere, and every visitor involuntarily carries some of it
+away, as a sample, <a name="page240"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+240</span>about his person, in his shoes or his hair, or in his
+pockets.&nbsp; The more of it removed in this, or indeed in any
+other manner, the better pleased will West Bay be, for it comes,
+unasked, into the houses; you have it for breakfast, lunch, tea,
+and supper, as an unsolicited garnish to the viands, and when at
+last you seek repose between the sheets, there it is again.&nbsp;
+These wastes are part of that natural phenomenon of the Dorset
+coast, the Chesil Beach, which runs eighteen miles from this
+point along the perfectly unbroken shores of the Bay to Chesilton
+and Portland.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Chesil&rdquo; is just the
+&ldquo;Pebble&rdquo; beach: that old word for pebbles being found
+elsewhere in Dorsetshire, and at Chislehurst, among other
+places.&nbsp; A pecularity of it is that by insensible degrees it
+grows coarser as it proceeds in a south-easterly direction,
+ending as very large pebbles at Portland.&nbsp; The fishermen of
+this lonely coast, landing on dark nights, with nothing else to
+guide them as to their whereabouts, can always readily settle the
+point by handling this shingle, and by use can tell within a mile
+of the particular spot.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image239" href="images/p239.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"West Bay, Bridport"
+title=
+"West Bay, Bridport"
+ src="images/p239.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The story of West Bay&rsquo;s struggle against this insidious
+enemy is an old one.&nbsp; In 1722 the Bridport authorities
+procured an Act of Parliament empowering them to restore and
+rebuild the haven and port, the piers and landing-places, in
+order to bring the town to that ancient and flourishing state
+whence it had declined.&nbsp; The preamble stated that by reason
+of a great sickness and other accidents, the wealthy inhabitants
+had been swept away and the haven choked.&nbsp; But although the
+Legislature had given authority for the work to be done, it did
+not indicate <a name="page241"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+241</span>whence the funds were to be obtained, and so it was not
+until 1742 that the pier, authorised twenty years before, was
+built, nor was it until another fourteen years had waned that the
+pier and harbour were enlarged.&nbsp; Mr. Hardy in <i>Fellow
+Townsmen</i> thus describes West Bay: &ldquo;A gap appeared in
+the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of
+the opening rose a vertical cliff, coloured a burning orange by
+the sunlight, the companion cliff on the right side being livid
+in shade.&nbsp; Between these cliffs, like the Libyan Bay which
+sheltered the shipwrecked Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly
+a beginning made by Nature herself of a perfect harbour, which
+appealed to the passer-by as only requiring a little human
+industry to finish it and make it famous, the ground on each
+side, as far back as the daisied slopes that bounded the interior
+valley, being a mere layer of blown sand.&nbsp; But the
+Port-Bredy burgesses a mile inland had, in the course of ten
+centuries, responded many times to that mute appeal, with the
+result that the tides had invariably choked up their works with
+sand and shingle as soon as completed.&nbsp; There were but few
+houses here: a rough pier, a few boats, some stores, an inn, a
+residence or two, a ketch unloading in the harbour, were the
+chief features of the settlement.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The harbour road, along whose mile and a half, the
+domestically unhappy Barnet went to see his Lucy at various
+intervals of time, leads into the corporate town of Bridport,
+which, after long remaining, as far as the casual eye of the
+stranger may perceive, little affected by the circumstance of
+being on a railway, is now developing a something in the nature
+of a suburb, greatly to the dismay of <a name="page242"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 242</span>neighbouring residents who, residing
+here because of its isolation on a branch railway that brings few
+passengers, and to landward of a harbour that has no commerce,
+now can glimpse at the end of a vista of years some prospect of
+the ancient peace of Bridport being genteelly disturbed.</p>
+<p>Bridport was, in those days when it remained a busy place, a
+town keenly interested in the flax, hemp, twine, and rope
+industries; and rope and twine walks, where the old methods are
+even yet in use, are still features of its less prominent lanes
+and alleys, but the unobservant and the incurious, who to be sure
+form the majority of travellers, might pass, and do pass, through
+Bridport, without thinking it any other than a quiet market town,
+dependent solely upon surrounding agricultural needs and weekly
+village shopping.</p>
+<p>When hemp was grown in the neighbourhood of Bridport, in those
+bustling days when the manufacturers of the town supplied the
+King&rsquo;s Navy with ropes, and criminals were suspended by
+this staple article of the town, the expression &ldquo;stabbed
+with a Bridport dagger,&rdquo; was a pretty, or at least a
+symbolical, way of saying that a man had been hanged.&nbsp; It
+was a figure of speech that quite escaped that matter-of-fact
+antiquary, Leland, when in the time of Henry VIII. he came to
+Bridport and stolidly noted down: &ldquo;At Bridport be made good
+daggers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>One is disposed to sympathise with Leland in that egregious
+error of his, for which he and his memory have been laughed at
+for more than three hundred and fifty years.&nbsp; How his shade
+must writhe at the shame of it!&nbsp; He was, doubtless, tired <a
+name="page243"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 243</span>and bored,
+for some reason or another, when he reached Bridport, and to his
+undoing, took things on trust.&nbsp; And nowadays, every one who
+writes the very leastest scrap on Bridport has his fling at the
+poor old fellow; and I&mdash;conscience tells
+me&mdash;insincerely do the same, under a miserably inadequate
+cloak of pretended sympathy!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image243" href="images/p243.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"High Street and Town Hall, Bridport"
+title=
+"High Street and Town Hall, Bridport"
+ src="images/p243.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Barnet, whose baulked love is the theme of <i>Fellow
+Townsmen</i>, was descended from the hemp and rope-merchants of
+Bridport, as the story, in several allusions, tells us.</p>
+<p>South Street, leading from the Harbour Road into the right and
+left course of the main street, contains most of the very few
+buildings of any great age.&nbsp; Among them is the little
+Gothic, gabled building now a workmen&rsquo;s club, but once the
+&ldquo;Castle&rdquo; inn.&nbsp; Here, too, is the church, ancient
+enough, but restored <a name="page244"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 244</span>in 1860, when the two bays were
+added to the nave; probably the incident referred to by Mr.
+Hardy: &ldquo;The church had had such a tremendous practical joke
+played upon it by some facetious restorer or other as to be
+scarce recognisable by its dearest old friends.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There is, in this otherwise rather bald interior of Bridport
+church, a curious mural tablet to the &ldquo;Memory of Edward
+Coker, Gent.&nbsp; Second son of Capt. Robert Coker of Mapowder,
+Slayne at the Bull Inn, in Bridpur<sup>t</sup>.&nbsp; June the
+14<sup>th</sup> A&ntilde;. D&otilde;. 1685, by one Venner, who
+was a Officer unde<sup>r</sup> the late Dvke of
+Mvnmovt<sup>h</sup> in that Rebellion.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Bull inn stands yet in the main street, but
+modernised.&nbsp; It is the original of the &ldquo;Black
+Bull&rdquo; in <i>Fellow Townsmen</i>.</p>
+<p>Six miles due north of Bridport lies the little town of
+Beaminster, the &ldquo;hill-surrounded little town&rdquo; of
+which Angel Clare&rsquo;s father was vicar.&nbsp; &ldquo;Sweet
+Be&rsquo;mi&rsquo;ster&rdquo; says Barnes:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Sweet Be&rsquo;mi&rsquo;ster, that bist
+abound<br />
+By green and woody hills all round,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and in truth those hills that surround it are set about this
+quiet agricultural town in a manner that fairly astounds the
+traveller.&nbsp; No railway reaches &ldquo;Emminster,&rdquo; as
+it is named in <i>Tess of the D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i>, and,
+looking upon those mighty natural turrets and domes that beset
+it, the traveller is of opinion that no railway ever will.&nbsp;
+Nearing Beaminster at cockshut time, when the birds have all gone
+to bed, when the sky is hot in the west with the burnished copper
+of the after-glow, and a <a name="page245"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 245</span>cold blue and green, with pale stars
+appearing, fills the eastern firmament, the scenery is something
+awesome and approaching an Alpine sublimity.&nbsp; Then the
+twilight streets of this quiet place in the basin-like hollow
+begin to take an hospitable look, and the tall red stone tower of
+the church, that looks so nobly aloof in day, assumes a welcoming
+paternal benignancy.&nbsp; It is a toilsome winning to
+Beaminster, but, when won, worth the trouble of it.</p>
+<h2><a name="page246"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+246</span>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WEYMOUTH TO
+LULWORTH COVE</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">You</span> cannot go far from Weymouth
+without a good deal of hill-climbing, but the longest stretch of
+level in this district, where levels are the exception and hills
+the rule, is by this route.&nbsp; It is not so very long, even
+then, for when you have passed the curving Esplanade and Lodmoor
+Marsh, and come to the foot of Jordan Hill, thought to have been
+the site of the Roman &ldquo;Clavinium,&rdquo; it is only two and
+a half miles.&nbsp; Preston stands on the top of a further hill,
+and is a place of great resort for brake-parties not greatly
+interested in literature.&nbsp; Turning to the left out of its
+street, opposite the Ship inn, we come to the pretty
+village&mdash;or hamlet, for no church is visible&mdash;of Sutton
+Poyntz, the &ldquo;Overcombe&rdquo; of <i>The Trumpet
+Major</i>.&nbsp; Its thatched stone cottages, charming
+tree-shaded stream and mill-pond, and old barns, all under the
+looming shadow of the downs, vividly recall the old-fashioned
+ways and talk, and the pleasant romance of Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s only
+semi-historical novel; and you need not see, if you do not wish,
+the flagrant Vandalism of the Weymouth waterworks, hard by, and
+can if you will, turn your back upon the inn that will be
+interesting and <a name="page247"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+247</span>picturesque some day, but now, rawly new, is an outrage
+upon, and a thing altogether out of key with, these old rustic
+surroundings.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image247" href="images/p247.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Sutton Poyntz: The &ldquo;Overcombe&rdquo; of &ldquo;The Trumpet
+Major&rdquo;"
+title=
+"Sutton Poyntz: The &ldquo;Overcombe&rdquo; of &ldquo;The Trumpet
+Major&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p247.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Squawking ducks, hurrying across the dusty road and flouncing
+noisily into the clearly running stream, rooks cawing contentedly
+from their windy see-saw in the topmost branches of tall trees;
+and tired horses coming stolidly home from plough are the chief
+features of this &ldquo;Overcombe,&rdquo; where John Loveday had
+his mill, and his sons John and Bob, and Anne Garland and
+Matilda, and all the lovable, the hateful, or the merely
+contemptible characters in that sympathetic tale came and
+went.&nbsp; The mill&mdash;I am afraid it is not <i>the</i> mill,
+but one of somewhat later date&mdash;still grinds corn, and you
+can see it, bulking <a name="page248"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 248</span>very largely between the trees,
+&ldquo;the smooth millpond, over-full, and intruding into the
+hedge and into the road,&rdquo; as mill-ponds will do, even in
+these later days of strict local government.&nbsp; But the days
+of European wars are gone.&nbsp; It is a hundred years since the
+last call of brave, tender, loyal John Loveday, the Trumpet
+Major, was silenced on a bloody battlefield in Spain, and well on
+toward the same tale of years since the press gangs, fellows to
+that which searched Overcombe Mill for Bob Loveday, impressed
+likely fellows for service on His Majesty&rsquo;s
+ships:&mdash;the characters of <i>The Trumpet Major</i> belong
+wholly to a bygone age.</p>
+<p>To the same age belonged the characters in <i>The Melancholy
+Hussar of the German Legion</i>, a short story associated with
+Bincombe, a tiny village it requires no little exertion to reach;
+but you may win this way to it as easily&mdash;or at any rate,
+not more laboriously&mdash;than by any other route.&nbsp; It
+stands up among the downs, and in what Dorset folk would call an
+&ldquo;outspan&rdquo;&mdash;that is to say a remote hollow,
+recess or shelf amid them, where their sides are so steep that
+they give the appearance of some theatrical
+&ldquo;back-cloth&rdquo; to a romantic scene.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green,
+absolutely unchanged since those eventful days.&nbsp; A plough
+has never disturbed the turf, and the sod that was uppermost then
+is uppermost now.&nbsp; Here stood the camp; here are distinct
+traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the cavalry, and
+spots where the midden heaps lay are still to be observed.&nbsp;
+At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible
+to avoid <a name="page249"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+249</span>hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the
+grass-bents and thistles, the old trumpet and bugle-calls, the
+rattle of the halters; to help seeing rows of spectral tents and
+the <i>impedimenta</i> of the soldiery.&nbsp; From within the
+canvases come guttural syllables of foreign tongues, and broken
+songs of the fatherland; for they were mainly regiments of the
+King&rsquo;s German Legion that slept round the tent-poles
+hereabout at that time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image249" href="images/p249.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bincombe"
+title=
+"Bincombe"
+ src="images/p249.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The story associated with this out-of-the-way place <a
+name="page250"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 250</span>is one in
+its chief lines true to facts, for in an unmarked grave within
+the little churchyard, lie two young German soldiers, shot for
+desertion from the York Hussars, as quoted at the end of the
+story from the register:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Matth: Tina (Corpl.) in His Majesty&rsquo;s Regiment of
+York Hussars, and shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801,
+aged 22 years.&nbsp; Born in the town of Sarrbruk,
+Germany.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Christop Bless, belonging to His Majesty&rsquo;s
+Regiment of York Hussars, who was shot for Desertion, was Buried
+June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years.&nbsp; Born at Lothaargen,
+Alsatia.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Returning from Bincombe and down again through Sutton Poyntz
+to Preston, we come to Osmington, with views down along on the
+right to Ringstead Bay; but, avoiding for the present the coast,
+strike inland, to Poxwell, the &ldquo;Oxwell Hall&rdquo; of
+<i>The Trumpet Major</i>.&nbsp; It is really three miles from
+&ldquo;Overcombe,&rdquo; and therefore not the close neighbour to
+the Lovedays it is made to be, for the purposes of the
+novel.&nbsp; The church stands beside of the road, the old
+manor-house, now a farmstead, the home of &ldquo;Uncle
+Benjy,&rdquo; miserly Squire Derriman, close by.&nbsp; In old
+days, back in 1634, when it was built, this curiously walled-in
+residence with its outer porter&rsquo;s lodge, the physical and
+visible sign of an ever-present distrust of strangers, was a seat
+of the Henning family.&nbsp; That lodge still stands, obsolete as
+an <i>avant-garde</i> and gazebo for the timely spying out of
+unwelcome visitors, but very admirable for a summer-house, if the
+farmer had leisure for such things.&nbsp; But as he has not, but
+must continually &ldquo;plough and sow, and reap and <a
+name="page251"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 251</span>mow,&rdquo;
+or see that others do so, the lodge is in every way a
+derelict.&nbsp; The farmer could perhaps add some testimony of
+his own respecting all those &ldquo;romantic excellencies and
+practical drawbacks,&rdquo; mentioned in the story, and existing
+in fact; but, farmers having a bent towards practicality,
+although they discuss, rather than practise it, it is to be
+supposed that he would place a stress upon the drawbacks, to the
+neglect of the romance.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image251" href="images/p251.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Poxwell Manor"
+title=
+"Poxwell Manor"
+ src="images/p251.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Pursuing the road onwards from Poxwell, we come, in a mile and
+a half, to the cross-roads at &ldquo;Warm&rsquo;ell Cross,&rdquo;
+<a name="page252"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 252</span>leading
+on the left to Dorchester, on the right to Wareham, and straight
+ahead across the remotenesses of &ldquo;Egdon Heath,&rdquo; to
+Moreton station.&nbsp; Here we turn to the right, and so miss the
+village of Warmwell, whence the cross roads take their
+name.&nbsp; It is not by any means, to the ordinary traveller, a
+remarkable crossing of the roads, but it has associations for the
+pilgrim stored with the literary lore of the Hardy Country, for
+it was here, in the story of <i>The Distracted Preacher</i>, that
+Mr. Stockdale, the Wesleyan minister of Nether Mynton, by the aid
+of their voices, crying &ldquo;Hoi&mdash;hoi&mdash;hoi!&nbsp;
+Help, help!&rdquo; discovered Will Latimer and the exciseman tied
+to the trees by the smuggler friends of his Lizzie.&nbsp; Turning
+here to the right, Owermoigne itself&mdash;the &ldquo;Nether
+Mynton&rdquo; of that tale of smuggled spirits and religious
+scruples&mdash;is reached in another mile; the church and its
+tiny village of thatched rusticity standing shyly, as such a
+smuggler&rsquo;s haunt should do, off the broad high road and
+down a little stumbly and rutty lane.&nbsp; The body of the
+church has been rebuilt since Lizzie Newberry and her friends
+stored &ldquo;the stuff&rdquo; in the tower and the churchyard,
+but that churchyard remains the same, as also does the tower from
+whose battlements the &ldquo;free traders&rdquo; spied upon the
+excisemen, searching for those hidden tubs.</p>
+<p>From this road there is a better distant view of the great
+equestrian effigy of George III., cut in the chalky southern
+slopes of the downs, than from any other point.&nbsp; He looks
+impressive, in the ghostly sort, seen across the bare slopes,
+where perhaps an occasional farmstead or barton, or a row of
+wheat-ricks, accentuates the solitude and at <a
+name="page253"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 253</span>the same
+time gives scale to the chalky effigies of His Majesty and that
+very elegant horse of his, showing how very large this horse and
+rider really are.&nbsp; The gallant Trumpet Major told about the
+making of this memorial, as he and Anne Garland walked among the
+flowering peas, and described what this &ldquo;huge picture of
+the king on horseback in the earth of the hill&rdquo; was to be
+like: &ldquo;The King&rsquo;s head is to be as big as our
+mill-pond, and his body as big as this garden; he and the horse
+will cover more than an acre.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And here he is to this day, very spirited and martial, with
+his cocked hat and marshal&rsquo;s baton.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image253" href="images/p253.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Owermoigne: The Smugglers&rsquo; Haunt in &ldquo;The Distracted
+Preacher&rdquo;"
+title=
+"Owermoigne: The Smugglers&rsquo; Haunt in &ldquo;The Distracted
+Preacher&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p253.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>It is, however, a weariful business to arrive in the
+neighbourhood of him, for those chalk downs are just as
+inhospitable in the sun as they are in the storms of winter, the
+only difference lying between being fried on their shelterless
+sides when the thermometer registers ninety degrees, or frozen
+when the mercury sinks towards zero.</p>
+<p><a name="page254"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 254</span>Some
+two miles of highway along the verge of Egdon Heath bring us to a
+right-hand turning, leading past Winfrith Newburgh by a somewhat
+more shaded route up over the crest of these chalky ranges, and
+then with several turnings, steeply down, and at length,
+&ldquo;by and large&rdquo;&mdash;as sailors say&mdash;to the
+village of West Lulworth, which lies at the inland end of a
+coombe, the better part of a mile from Lulworth Cove.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image254" href="images/p254.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Lulworth Cove"
+title=
+"Lulworth Cove"
+ src="images/p254.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>To Lulworth&mdash;or as he terms it, Lullstead&mdash;Cove, Mr.
+Hardy returns again and again.&nbsp; It is the &ldquo;small basin
+of sea enclosed by the cliffs&rdquo; where Troy bathed and was
+supposed to have been drowned; it is one of the spots where
+<i>The Distracted Preacher&rsquo;s</i> parishioners landed their
+smuggled spirit-tubs, and <a name="page255"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 255</span>upon its milk-white shores of
+limestone pebbles the lifeless bodies of Stephen Hardcombe and
+his companion were found.&nbsp; It was the first meeting-place of
+Cytherea Graye and Edward Springrove; and was, again, that
+&ldquo;three-quarter round Cove&rdquo; where, &ldquo;screened
+from every mortal eye,&rdquo; save his own, Solomon Selby
+observed Bonaparte questing along the darkling shore for a
+suitable place where his flotilla might land in his projected
+invasion of England.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image255" href="images/p255.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Lulworth Cove.  The coastgard station"
+title=
+"Lulworth Cove.  The coastgard station"
+ src="images/p255.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Lulworth Cove is an almost perfect circle, eaten out of the
+limestone in the long ago by the sea, in an unusually geometrical
+manner.&nbsp; Bindon Hill frowns down upon it, and in summer the
+circle of light-blue water laughs saucily back, in little
+sparkling ripples, just as though there were no storms in nature
+and no cruel rock-bound coast <a name="page256"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 256</span>outside.&nbsp; The Cove is, if you
+be classically minded, a Bath of the Naiads; and, if less
+imaginative, is at any rate a delightful spot that even in these
+tidied-up and ordered days, when every little seaside cove has
+its hair brushed and face scrubbed, and is made always to look
+its Sunday best, persists in being littered with a longshore
+fishing and boating medley of anchors and lobster-pots, ropes,
+chains and windlasses, infinitely more pleasing to right-thinking
+persons&mdash;by whom I indicate those who think with
+myself&mdash;than the neatest of promenades and seats.&nbsp;
+True, they have rebuilt or enlarged the Cove Hotel and red-brick
+manifestations of a growing favour with visitors are springing up
+beside the old thatched cottages; but Lulworth&mdash;Cove or
+village&mdash;is not spoiled yet.&nbsp; The Coastguard Station,
+perched on what looks like a hazardous pinnacle of cliff, with
+the wild chasm of Stair Hole to one side of it and the sheer drop
+into the Cove on the other, is the most striking feature, looking
+down from landward, of this curious place, which has not its
+fellow anywhere else, and is the sunniest, the ruggedest, and
+certainly the most treeless place along the Dorset coast.</p>
+<p>To those who have persevered along the roads into Lulworth,
+the prospect of again climbing those hills is perhaps a little
+grim, and they should so contrive to time their arrival and
+departure that they comfortably fit in with the return to
+Weymouth of the excursion steamer plying in the tourist season
+between the two places.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image256" href="images/p256a.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Lytchett Heath"
+title=
+"Lytchett Heath"
+ src="images/p256a.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p256b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Equestrian Effigy of George III"
+title=
+"The Equestrian Effigy of George III"
+ src="images/p256b.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p256c.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Entrance to Charborough Park"
+title=
+"Entrance to Charborough Park"
+ src="images/p256c.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2><a name="page257"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+257</span>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">BOURNEMOUTH TO
+POOLE</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Bournemouth</span>, the
+&ldquo;Sandbourne&rdquo; of <i>Tess of the
+D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i> and of minor incidents and passing
+allusions in others of Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s novels, is one of the
+principal gates of entrance to his Wessex.&nbsp; Just within the
+western borders of Hampshire, or what he would call &ldquo;Upper
+Wessex,&rdquo; the heart of his literary country is within the
+easiest reach of its pleasant districts of villa residences, by
+road or rail, or indeed by sea; for Swanage, the
+&ldquo;Swanwich&rdquo; of a Hardy gazetteer, and Lulworth Cove,
+his &ldquo;Lullstead,&rdquo; that azure pool within &ldquo;the
+two projecting spurs of rock which form the pillars of Hercules
+to this miniature Mediterranean,&rdquo; are the destinations in
+summer of many steamboat voyages.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sandbourne has become a large place, they
+say.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus Angel Clare, seeking his wife somewhere
+within its bounds.&nbsp; Large indeed, and growing yet.&nbsp;
+Census officials and other statisticians toil after its increase
+in vain.&nbsp; I find a guide-book of 1887 speaking of its
+population as &ldquo;nearly 18,000.&rdquo;&nbsp; I find another,
+of 1896, putting it at &ldquo;about 40,000,&rdquo; and then
+referring to the last census returns, discover it to have further
+risen to forty-seven <a name="page258"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 258</span>thousand souls, and a few
+over.&nbsp; By now it doubtless numbers full fifty thousand, and
+has further rubricated and underscored its description in the
+last pages of Tess: &ldquo;This fashionable watering-place with
+its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its groves of
+pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was to Angel
+Clare like a fairy place, suddenly created by the stroke of a
+wand, and allowed to get a little dusty.&nbsp; An outlying
+eastern tract of the enormous Egdon waste was close at hand, yet
+on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a
+glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring
+up.&nbsp; Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every
+irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an
+undisturbed British trackway; not a sod having been turned there
+since the days of the C&aelig;sars.&nbsp; Yet the exotic had
+grown here, suddenly as the prophet&rsquo;s gourd; and had drawn
+hither Tess.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding
+ways of this new world in an old one, and could discern between
+the trees and against the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys,
+gazebos, and towers of the numerous fanciful residences of which
+the place was composed.&nbsp; It was a city of detached mansions;
+a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel; and as
+seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it was.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it
+murmured, and he thought it was the pines, the pines murmured in
+precisely the same tones, and he thought they were the
+sea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image258" href="images/p258.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bournemouth: The Invalid&rsquo;s Walk"
+title=
+"Bournemouth: The Invalid&rsquo;s Walk"
+ src="images/p258.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>This rich and populous seaside home of wealthy valetudinarians
+was until well on into the nineteenth <a name="page259"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 259</span>century a lonely waste, whose only
+frequenters were smugglers, fishermen, rabbits, and
+seagulls.&nbsp; In the midst of its pine-woods, sands, and
+heather a little stream, the Bourne, which now gives this great
+concourse of villa paradises, palatial hotels, and fashionable
+shops its name, flowed into the sea, just where, in these days,
+tricked out with cascades, and fountains, and made to wander
+circuitously at the will of landscape-gardeners amid the neatest
+of lawns and the gayest of flower-beds, it at last trickles
+exhaustedly into the sea, under the pier.&nbsp; Its natural
+course from the neighbourhood of Kinson, down Bourne Bottom, to
+that smallest of &ldquo;mouths,&rdquo; is some six miles, but in
+these days it is made to work hard in the last stretch, through
+the public gardens, and where it once covered one mile, is now
+looped here and turned back there upon itself, and exploited
+generally, until it has become as sophisticated a stream as
+anywhere to be found.&nbsp; The Bourne is, indeed, like the
+humble parent of some overwhelming social success, made to alter
+its ways and put aside its rustic manners, to do credit to its
+offspring.</p>
+<p>The country folk who live in the background of this oft-styled
+&ldquo;City of Pines,&rdquo; still call it merely
+&ldquo;Bourne,&rdquo; as it was when, many years ago, Dr.
+Granville made the fortunes of the hamlet, frequented by a few
+invalids and others rejoicing in the spicy odours of the
+pine-woods, that had grown in a scattered and chance fashion upon
+the heath.&nbsp; &ldquo;No situation,&rdquo; said that authority
+upon spas and watering-places, &ldquo;possesses so many
+capabilities of being made the very first sea watering-place in
+England; and not only a watering-place, but what is still more <a
+name="page260"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 260</span>important,
+a winter residence for the most delicate constitutions requiring
+a warm and sheltered locality at this season of the
+year.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then follow comparisons favourable to the site
+of Bournemouth, and derogatory to other seaside resorts.</p>
+<p>Every circumstance insured attention being drawn to this
+weighty pronouncement, and advantage being taken of it.&nbsp;
+Consumptives came and found the air beneficial, and Bournemouth
+grew suddenly and astonishingly upon a lonely coastline; arising
+in that residential all-round-the-calendar character it has kept
+to this day, in spite of those holiday-folk, the excursionists
+and trippers whom its &ldquo;residential&rdquo; stratum
+discourages as much as possible.&nbsp; But when even so
+thoroughly exclusive a residential health-resort has been so
+successful, and has grown so greatly in that character as
+Bournemouth has grown, there comes inevitably a time when the
+workers and tradesfolk, ministrants to the wants of those
+residents, themselves become an important section of the
+community.&nbsp; It is a time when suburbs and quarters,
+invidiously distinguished from one another in the social scale,
+have established themselves; when, in short, from being just the
+resort of a class, a place becomes a microcosm of life, in which
+all classes and degrees are represented.&nbsp; The seal was set
+upon the arrival of that time for Bournemouth with its admission
+to the dignity of a municipal borough, fully equipped with Mayor
+and Town Council, in the summer of 1890, and again, later, with
+the opening of electric tramways.&nbsp; Railway-companies urge
+the attractions of Bournemouth upon holiday-makers, with great
+success, and nowadays one only perceives the <a
+name="page261"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 261</span>place in
+anything like its former characteristic air at such time when the
+summer has gone and the holiday-maker has returned to his own
+fireside.</p>
+<p>Bournemouth has already gathered together some odds and ends
+of sentimental associations.&nbsp; Mary Wollstonecraft, widow of
+Shelley, died here in 1853, and lies in the churchyard of St.
+Peter&rsquo;s, beside Godwin and his wife, whose bodies were
+brought from the London churchyard of St. Pancras.&nbsp; Keble
+died here in 1866, and the present St. Peter&rsquo;s is his
+memorial.&nbsp; Robert Louis Stevenson, Bournemouth&rsquo;s most
+distinguished consumptive, resided at &ldquo;Skerryvore,&rdquo;
+in Alum Chine Road, before he took flight to the South Seas.</p>
+<p>But&mdash;singular and ungrateful omission&mdash;one looks in
+vain for a statue to Dr. Granville, who, by his powerful
+advocacy, made Bournemouth, just as Dr. Russel made Brighton a
+century earlier.&nbsp; In this it is not difficult to find
+another instance of &ldquo;benefits forgot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The juxtaposition of a place so new as Bournemouth with one so
+ancient as Poole is a piquant circumstance.&nbsp; When
+Bournemouth rose, not like Britannia, from the azure main, but
+from beside it, there was a considerable interval of open country
+between the hoary seaport and the mint-new pleasure-town.&nbsp;
+That interval has now shrunk to vanishing-point; for, what with
+Bournemouth&rsquo;s expansion, growing Parkstone&rsquo;s position
+midway, and Poole&rsquo;s own attempt to sprout in an eastwardly
+direction, to meet those manifestations, the green country has
+been abolished beneath an irruption of bricks and mortar.</p>
+<p>The piquancy of Poole&rsquo;s ancient repose being <a
+name="page262"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 262</span>neighboured
+by Bournemouth&rsquo;s wide-awake life is italicised when that
+port&mdash;the &ldquo;Havenpool&rdquo; of <i>To Please his
+Wife</i>&mdash;is entered.&nbsp; It would not be correct to say
+that the days of Poole as a port are over, but with the growth in
+size of modern ships, the shallowness of Poole Harbour in whose
+recesses it is tucked rather obscurely away, prevents any but
+vessels of slight draught coming up to its quays.&nbsp; For that
+reason, large ocean-going steamers are strangers to Poole, more
+familiar with wooden barques and brigantines and their maze of
+masts and spars, than with the capacious steamships that,
+although of much greater speed and tonnage, carry very slight and
+insignificant sticks; and were it not for the china-clay
+shipments and for that coasting trade which seems almost
+indestructible, Poole would assuredly die.</p>
+<p>But Poole, besides being ancient, has been a place to reckon
+with.&nbsp; Already, in 1220, when by a proclamation of Henry
+III. the ships of many ports were sealed up, Poole appeared among
+the number.&nbsp; In 1347 its contribution towards the siege of
+Calais was four ships and ninety-four men, and it was the base
+from which the English army in France was provisioned.&nbsp; Then
+in 1349 came that fourteenth century scourge, the Black Death,
+and Poole, among other towns, was almost depopulated, and lost
+the Parliamentary representation it had long enjoyed.&nbsp; But
+it made a good recovery, and in the time of Henry VI. regained
+its Parliamentary representation.&nbsp; Leland, writing of the
+place describes it, two hundred years later, as &ldquo;a poore
+fisshar village, much encreasid with fair building and use of
+marchaundise of old tyme.&rdquo;&nbsp; Poole, after that <a
+name="page263"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 263</span>description
+was penned, continued to recover itself, and fully regained its
+lost prosperity.&nbsp; Fifty years later it is found carrying on
+a thriving trade with Spain, and how truly it was said that its
+merchants were men of wealth and consideration may be judged from
+their large, and architecturally and decoratively fine, mansions
+still remaining, although nowadays put to all kinds of mean uses
+and often occupied as tenements.</p>
+<p>Poole, however, long enjoyed a very bad reputation, and the
+wealth of which these were some of the evidences, was not often
+come by in very reputable ways.&nbsp; When it is said that Poole
+&ldquo;enjoyed&rdquo; a bad reputation, it is said advisedly, for
+Poole was so lost to shame that it really <i>did</i> enjoy what
+should have been a source of some searchings of heart.&nbsp; It
+was a veritable nest of pirates and smugglers, and the home of
+strange and original sinfulnesses; so that at last an injurious
+rhyme that still survives was circulated about it:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;If Poole were a fish-pool, and the men of
+Poole fish,<br />
+There&rsquo;d be a pool for the devil, and fish for his
+dish.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>So early as the close of the fourteenth century, the
+buccaneers of Poole were infamous, and at their head was the
+notorious Harry Page, known to the French and the Spaniards as
+Arripay, the nearest they could frame to pronounce his
+name.&nbsp; Arripay was a very full-blooded, enterprising, and
+unscrupulous fellow; if without irreverence we may call him a
+&ldquo;fellow,&rdquo; who was the admiral of his rascally
+profession.&nbsp; There can be little doubt but that tradition
+has added not a little to the tales of his exploits, and it is
+hardly credible that he and his fellow-pirates should, on one <a
+name="page264"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 264</span>occasion,
+have brought home a hundred and twenty prizes from the coast of
+Brittany.&nbsp; His forays were made upon the shipping of the
+foreigner, and with such system that no ship, it was said, could
+successfully run the gauntlet of his lawless flotilla.&nbsp; His
+success and power were so great that they necessitated the
+sending of an expedition to sweep the seas of him.&nbsp; This was
+an allied French and Spanish force, commissioned in 1406, and
+sailing under the command of Perdo Nino, Count of Buelna.&nbsp;
+Adopting the tactics of raiders, they burnt and ravaged the
+coasts of Cornwall and Devon, and, coming to Dorset, swept into
+Arripay&rsquo;s hornets&rsquo; nest of Poole Harbour, and landing
+at Poole itself, defeated the townsmen in a pitched battle.&nbsp;
+The brother of the redoubtable Arripay was among the slain.</p>
+<p>A worthy successor of this bold spirit in the pike and cutlass
+way&mdash;although he was no pirate, but just an honest stalwart
+sailor&mdash;was that bonny fighter, Peter Jolliffe, of the hoy
+<i>Sea Adventurer</i>.&nbsp; Off Swanage in 1694, he fell in with
+a French privateer having a poor little captured Weymouth
+fishing-smack in tow, and attacked the Frenchman repeatedly, and
+at last with such success, that he not only released the smack,
+but drove the privateer ashore near Lulworth, its crew being made
+prisoners of war.&nbsp; For so signal an instance of bravery
+Jolliffe received a gold chain and medal from the hands of the
+king himself.</p>
+<p>Jolliffe&rsquo;s example fired enthusiasm, and the following
+year, William Thompson, skipper of a fishing-smack, aided only by
+his scanty crew of one man and a boy, attacked a Cherbourg
+privateer that had attempted to capture him, and actually
+succeeded in capturing it and its complement of sixteen hands, <a
+name="page265"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+265</span>instead.&nbsp; He brought his prize into Poole, and he
+too, fully deserved that gold chain and medal awarded him.</p>
+<p>In St. James&rsquo;s church itself&mdash;disclosing an
+interior not unlike that of a stern cabin of an old
+man-o&rsquo;-war, writ large&mdash;is a monument to the intrepid
+Jolliffe.&nbsp; From a reminiscence of it, no doubt, Mr. Hardy
+chose to name Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, that shipmaster engaged
+in the Newfoundland trade who is the ill-fated hero of <i>To
+Please his Wife</i>.</p>
+<p>For the rest, Poole figures so largely in the Civil War, as a
+town ardently in favour of the Parliament, that it has a long and
+stirring story of its own, in the varying fortunes of Roundheads
+and Stuarts.&nbsp; It is too lengthy a story to be told with
+advantage here.</p>
+<p>The High Street of Poole, a mile long, is busy enough to quite
+dispel any idea that Poole is not prospering; but, on the other
+hand, the many puzzling narrow streets that lead out of it are so
+rich in what have been noble residences, that they tell in
+unmistakable tones of a greater period than this of to-day.</p>
+<p>These byways lead at last past the church of St. Paul, the
+fellow to St. James&rsquo;s, with its dolphin vane, to Poole
+Quay, where the most prominent feature is an ancient Gothic
+building, looking very like some desecrated place of worship, or
+a monastic tithe-barn.&nbsp; It is, as a matter of fact, neither,
+but the &ldquo;Town Cellar,&rdquo; a relic of a past age when
+Poole was part of the manor of Canford.&nbsp; The lords of
+Canford, away back to that ubiquitous John o&rsquo; Gaunt,
+&ldquo;time-honoured Lancaster,&rdquo; who seems to have owned
+quite half of the most desirable <a name="page266"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 266</span>properties in the England of his
+time, took toll in money, when they could, and in kind when
+silver marks and golden angels were scarce; and in the
+&ldquo;Town Cellar&rdquo; were stored those bales of wool, those
+spices from Ind, and those miscellaneous goods, which were made
+in this manner to render unto the C&aelig;sars of Canford, in
+times when such things were.&nbsp; It is a picturesque old
+building, its walls oddly composed of flint intermingled with
+large squared pieces of stone that, by the look of them, would
+seem to have been plundered from some older structure.</p>
+<p>Opposite stands the Harbour Office, not altogether
+unpicturesquely provided with a loggia supported by columns, and
+still retaining the sundial erected when clocks were
+scarce.&nbsp; The Mayor of Poole, who in 1727 presided over the
+fortunes of the port, is handed down to posterity by the quaint
+tablet let into the gable wall, showing us the quarter-length
+relief portrait of a stout personage in voluminous wig and
+mayoral chain and robes, lackadaisically glancing skyward, as
+though longing to be gone to those ethereal regions where double
+chins and &ldquo;too, too solid flesh&rdquo; are not.</p>
+<p>Poole Quay&mdash;its old buildings, waterside picturesqueness,
+and the shipping lying off the walls&mdash;is an interesting
+place for the artist, who has it very much to himself; for the
+holiday-maker does not often discover it.&nbsp; But waterside
+characters are not lacking: sailors, who have got berths and are
+only waiting for the tide to serve; other sailors, who are in
+want of berths; town boys, who would dearly like to go to sea;
+and nondescript characters, who would not take a job if offered
+to them, and want nothing but a quayside bollard to sit upon,
+sunshine, a pipe of <a name="page268"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 268</span>tobacco, and the price of half a
+pint: these form the natural history of Poole Quay, which though
+it may have been&mdash;and was&mdash;one of the gateways into the
+great outer world, in the brave old days of Arripay and his merry
+men, is now something of a straitened gate, and Poole itself for
+the land voyager very much in the nature of one of those
+stop-blocks at the end of a railway siding: what a railway man
+would call a &ldquo;dead end.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image267" href="images/p267.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Poole Quay"
+title=
+"Poole Quay"
+ src="images/p267.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>For Poole is not a main road to anywhere, and when you have
+turned down into it, on those three and a half miles from
+Bournemouth, you are either compelled to return the way you came,
+or else cross a creek by the toll-bridge to Hamworthy, where
+there is nothing but a church built in 1826&mdash;and precisely
+of the nature one might expect from that date&mdash;and, a little
+way onward, a lonely railway junction in midst of sandy heaths
+and whispering pines, which, even at night, &ldquo;tell the tale
+of their species,&rdquo; as phrenologists say, &ldquo;without
+help from outline or colour,&rdquo; in &ldquo;those melancholy
+moans and sobs which give to their sound a solemn sadness
+surpassing even that of the sea.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is the district
+of <i>The Hand of Ethelberta</i>, and if we pursue it, we shall,
+as Sol says, in that novel, &ldquo;come to no place for two or
+three miles, and then only to Flychett,&rdquo; which, in everyday
+life, is Lytchett Minster, a place which, despite that grand
+name, can show nothing in the nature of a cathedral, and is, as
+Sol said, &ldquo;a trumpery small bit of a village,&rdquo; where
+possibly that wheelwright mentioned in the story still
+&ldquo;keeps a beer-house and owns two horses.&rdquo;&nbsp; That
+house is the inn oddly named the &ldquo;Peter&rsquo;s
+Finger,&rdquo; with a picture-sign standing on a post by the
+wayside, and <a name="page269"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+269</span>showing St. Peter holding up a hand with two extended
+fingers in benedictory fashion, as though blessing the
+wayfarer.&nbsp; The origin of this sign is said to be the custom,
+once usual in Roman Catholic times, of holding manorial courts on
+Lammas Day, the 1st of August, the day of St. Peter ad
+Vincula&mdash;that St. Peter-in-the-Fetters to whom the church on
+Tower Green, in the Tower of London, is so appropriately
+dedicated.&nbsp; On that day suit and service had to be performed
+by tenants for their lands, which thus obtained, in course of
+time, the corrupted title of &ldquo;Peter&rsquo;s Finger&rdquo;
+property.</p>
+<p>Around the village so slightingly characterised in <i>The Hand
+of Ethelberta</i> there is little save &ldquo;the everlasting
+heath,&rdquo; mentioned in that story, &ldquo;the black hills
+bulging against the sky, the barrows upon their round summits
+like warts on a swarthy skin.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is true the road
+leads at last to Bere Regis, but it has little individuality and
+no further Hardyesque significance, and so may be disregarded in
+these pages.</p>
+<h2><a name="page270"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+270</span>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WIMBORNE
+MINSTER</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Wimborne Minster</span> or
+&ldquo;Warborne&rdquo; in <i>Two on a Tower</i>&mdash;is, or was,
+for the Romans and their works are altogether vanished from the
+town, the <i>Vindogladia</i> of the Antonine Itinerary.&nbsp; If
+you speak of it in the curt irreverent way of railways and their
+time-tables, or in the equally curt, but only familiar, manner of
+its inhabitants, it is merely &ldquo;Wimborne.&rdquo;&nbsp; In
+their mouths, elision of the &ldquo;Minster&rdquo; merely
+connotes affection and use, as one drops the titles or the
+&ldquo;Mister&rdquo; of a friend, in speaking of him; but in the
+case of railway usage it is the offensive familiarity of the
+ill-bred, or, at the least, a derogatory saving of space and
+type.</p>
+<p>This common practice is all the more historically an outrage,
+for had there been no Minster, there would have been no town of
+Wimborne.&nbsp; It derives from an early religious settlement,
+founded in <span class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 700 near the site
+of the forgotten Roman station, by Cuthburga, one of those
+unsatisfactory princess spouses of the pietistic period of Saxon
+dominion, who, married to the King of Northumbria, refused him
+conjugal rights and finally established herself here, living a
+life of &ldquo;continual watchings and fastings,&rdquo; and
+finally dying of them.&nbsp; <a name="page271"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 271</span>We are not concerned to follow the
+mazes of the early history of town and church.&nbsp; It suffered
+the usual plunderings and burnings, the nuns were occasionally
+carried off, sometimes against their will, at other times with
+their consent, and at last, somewhere about <span
+class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 902, monks replaced them.&nbsp; The
+whole foundation was re-established by Edward the Confessor, and
+remained as a Collegiate church until 1547, when it was
+disestablished, its revenues seized, and the building wholly
+converted to the purposes of a parish church.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image270" href="images/p270a.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Sturminster Marshall"
+title=
+"Sturminster Marshall"
+ src="images/p270a.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p270b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Anthony Etricke&rsquo;s Tomb, Wimborne Minster"
+title=
+"Anthony Etricke&rsquo;s Tomb, Wimborne Minster"
+ src="images/p270b.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Wimborne Minster might be made the subject of a lengthy
+architectural disquisition.&nbsp; Its two towers, western and
+central, are themselves pointers to its history; for they show,
+not in the different periods at which they were built, but in the
+richness of the one and the comparative plainness of the other,
+the combined uses of the building in days of old.&nbsp; The
+central tower, of transitional Norman design, and remarkably like
+the towers of Exeter cathedral, was originally surmounted by a
+stone spire, which fell in 1600.&nbsp; Its elaboration is
+explained by its having been a part of the monastic church, while
+the western tower erected about 1460, belonged to the parochial
+building.</p>
+<p>The church, endowed with two&mdash;and two
+dissimilar&mdash;towers, is a splendid feature in the streets of
+the old town.&nbsp; It and the town gain dignity and interest in
+an amazing degree, and here in Wimborne the pinnacled
+battlemented outlines &ldquo;make&rdquo; both town and Minster,
+in the pictorial sense.&nbsp; They bulk darkly and largely across
+the yellow sandiness of the broad market-place, and sort
+themselves into endless and changeful combinations down the <a
+name="page272"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 272</span>narrower
+streets.&nbsp; Apart, too, from these important considerations,
+the Minster is exceptionally rich in curious features, outside
+its architectural details.</p>
+<p>Our ancestors possessed a quaint mixture of serious devotion
+and light-hearted childishness, and we are the richer for
+it.&nbsp; Thus, high up on the external wall of the western
+tower, the observant will notice the odd little effigy, carved,
+painted and gilt, resembling a grenadier of a century ago, or a
+French gendarme of a past <i>r&eacute;gime</i>: it is difficult
+to assign it with certainty, and assuredly it does not look so
+old as 1600, the date when it is stated to have been placed
+here.&nbsp; His business is that of a quarter-jack, and he
+strikes the quarters upon a bell on either side of him.&nbsp; The
+clock within, an astronomical contrivance made in 1320 by that
+same ingenious Glastonbury monk, Peter Lightfoot, who was the
+author of the famous clock of Wells Cathedral, represents the
+courses of the sun, moon, and stars.</p>
+<p>The Minster, in short, is a museum of antiquities, found
+particularly interesting by the half-day excursionists from
+Bournemouth who are its chief visitors and carry away a fine
+confused recollection of their scamper round it.&nbsp; Here, in a
+room above the vestry, is the Chained Library, a collection of
+over two hundred and forty volumes, mostly chained to iron
+rods.&nbsp; Some of the books are very early, but the collection
+was formed in 1686.&nbsp; Perhaps, for the sake of its story, the
+copy of Sir Walter Raleigh&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of the
+World&rdquo; is even more interesting than &ldquo;The Whole Duty
+of Man&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Breeches Bible,&rdquo; for it still
+displays the carefully mended hundred leaves burnt through when
+<a name="page273"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 273</span>the boy,
+afterwards poet, Prior fell asleep over his reading of it and
+upset the candle, with this result.&nbsp; Each damaged page was
+neatly mended by him and the missing letters so carefully
+restored that it is difficult, until attention is drawn to the
+repair, to detect anything exceptional.&nbsp; Prior was born at
+Wimborne in 1664, as a brass tablet in the western tower to his
+&ldquo;perennial and fragrant&rdquo; memory tells us.</p>
+<p>
+<a name="image273" href="images/p273.jpg">
+<img class='floatright' alt=
+"The Wimborne Clock-Jack"
+title=
+"The Wimborne Clock-Jack"
+ src="images/p273.jpg" />
+</a>But of paramount interest to sightseers, far transcending the
+ironbound deed-chests, some hollowed from a single trunk, and the
+tombs of the noble and knightly, is the last resting-place of
+Anthony Etricke, in the south wall of the choir aisle.&nbsp;
+Anthony Etricke was a personage of some local distinction in his
+day, for besides being a man of wealth, he was first Recorder of
+Poole.&nbsp; He has also won a little niche in the history of
+England by no effort of his own: a distinction thrust upon him by
+circumstance, and one which might have fallen upon any other
+local magistrate.&nbsp; Sentimentally speaking, it is also a
+wholly invidious and undesirable fame or notoriety, and was so
+regarded by the good folk of the town.&nbsp; Etricke, residing at
+Holt, near the spot where the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth was
+captured, was the magistrate before whom the wretched fugitive
+was brought.&nbsp; Another might possibly, greatly daring, have
+secured the escape of that romantic figure, and <a
+name="page274"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 274</span>by so doing
+at the same time have altered the course of English history and
+earned the admiration of those who admire chivalric deeds.&nbsp;
+But Etricke was not of this stamp, and was, moreover, of that old
+faith which the bigoted James was striving to reintroduce: while
+Monmouth was the Protestant champion.&nbsp; Alas! poor
+champion.&nbsp; Etricke at once performed his bounden duty as a
+magistrate, and also satisfied his own private feelings; and
+Monmouth ended miserably.</p>
+<p>Etricke never regained popularity in his district, and lived
+for eighteen years longer, a shunned and soured man.&nbsp; The
+story tells how he took what may surely be regarded as the odd
+and altogether insufficient revenge of declaring that he would be
+buried neither in the church of Wimborne nor out of it, and
+accordingly in his lifetime had a niche prepared here, in the
+wall, where the polished black slate sarcophagus, still seen
+above ground, was placed.&nbsp; He was eccentric beyond this, for
+he had conceived the date of his death and caused it to be boldly
+carved on the side, between two of the seven shields of arms that
+in braggart fashion are made to redound to the glory of the
+Etricke family.&nbsp; That year he had imagined would be 1691,
+but he actually survived until 1703, and the date was accordingly
+altered (as seen to this day) when at last, to the satisfaction
+of Wimborne, he did demise.&nbsp; For the keeping of his tomb in
+good repair he left twenty shillings annually, a sum still
+administered by the Charity Commissioners; and it certainly
+cannot be said that he does not receive value for his money,
+because his eccentric lair is maintained, heraldic cognisances
+and all, in the most perfect condition.&nbsp; <a
+name="page275"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 275</span>Any
+ill-will this solemn personage may have felt towards Wimborne is
+altogether robbed of satisfaction nowadays, and his gloomy ghost
+may, for all we know, be enraged at the thought of the attraction
+his eccentricity has for visitors and the trade in photographs it
+has provoked, much to the material well-being of the town.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image274" href="images/p274.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Wimborne Minster; The Minster and the Grammar School"
+title=
+"Wimborne Minster; The Minster and the Grammar School"
+ src="images/p274.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The pilgrim of the Hardy country, come to Wimborne&mdash;I
+should have said &ldquo;Warborne&rdquo;&mdash;to see that Grammar
+School where, to quote Haymoss Fry, &ldquo;they draw up young
+gam&rsquo;sters&rsquo; brains like rhubarb under a ninepenny pan,
+my lady, excusing my common way,&rdquo; is like to be
+disappointed, for the place where &ldquo;they hit so much larning
+into en that &rsquo;a could talk like the day of Pentecost&rdquo;
+is no longer an ancient building.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis true, the
+foundation is what the country folk might call an &ldquo;old
+arnshunt&rdquo; thing enough, being the work indeed of that very
+great founder of schools and colleges, the Lady Margaret,
+Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII.&nbsp; It was refounded
+by Queen Elizabeth, who stripped all the credit of this good deed
+in a naughty world from the memory of the pious countess, and
+willed that it should be styled &ldquo;The Grammar School of the
+Foundation of Queen Elizabeth in Wimborne Minster in the County
+of Dorset.&rdquo;&nbsp; That was pretty bad, but worse came with
+the whirling years.&nbsp; James I., like the shabby fellow he
+was, raised a question respecting the validity of its charter,
+and was only bought off with &pound;600; and Charles I., unlike
+the noble, magnanimous sovereign he is commonly thought to be,
+bled the institution to the tune of another &pound;1,000, by a
+similar dodge.&nbsp; The wonder is that it has survived <a
+name="page276"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 276</span>at all, and
+not only survived, but flourished and was able, so long ago as
+1851, to build itself that new and substantial home which is so
+scholastically useful, but at the same time disappointing to the
+literary pilgrim who, at the place where Swithin St. Cleeve was
+educated, hoped to find a picturesque building of medi&aelig;val
+age.</p>
+<h2><a name="page277"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+277</span>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WIMBORNE MINSTER TO
+SHAFTESBURY</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Wimborne</span> shall here be the
+starting-point of a twenty-eight miles route, that in its
+south-easterly to north-westerly direction, is as easy as the one
+north to south of the road between Sherborne and Weymouth.&nbsp;
+It follows the valley of the Stour the whole way, and only at its
+conclusion brings up butt against the hill on which Shaftesbury
+is built.</p>
+<p>There is at the outset from Wimborne a choice between the
+easeful and the toilsome.&nbsp; You may elect to go directly
+up-along, to the height frowned down upon by the greater height
+of Badbury Rings, or may go more circuitously but by more level
+ways, through Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall.&nbsp; On the
+first route, beautifully overhung by elms, lies Kingston Lacy,
+the old seat of the Bankes family, rebuilt by Sir Ralph Bankes in
+1663, and now a very treasure-house of art and historic
+relics.&nbsp; Here one may, greatly favoured, see and touch those
+keys of Corfe Castle, held so stoutly by the valorous Lady Bankes
+in the two sieges she withstood.</p>
+<p>A younger avenue of beeches lines the exposed road across the
+shoulders of what has been identified as <i>Mons
+Badonicus</i>&mdash;Badbury Rings&mdash;the scene of the
+overwhelming victory gained in <span class="GutSmall">A.D.</span>
+520, over <a name="page278"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+278</span>Cerdic and his Saxons by King Arthur and his
+Britons.&nbsp; In later years, when at last Saxon dominion had
+spread, and this had become Wessex, Saxons themselves encamped
+where of old they had been defeated, and after them the Danes
+occupied this inhospitable height.&nbsp; It is now tufted with a
+clump of fir-trees, and, solemn and darkly looming against a
+lowering sky, looks a fitting scene for any national portent of
+evil.</p>
+<p>They are less impressive roads that lead by the Stour to Corfe
+Mullen and Sturminster Marshall.&nbsp; There the farmer reaps his
+heavy crops of hay and cereals, and ploughs and sows and reaps
+again, and history is only a matter of comparison between this
+year of a poor harvest, when prices are high and marketable
+produce little, and last year of a bumper, when the horn of Ceres
+was full and prices low.&nbsp; No matter what the yield, there is
+ever a something to dash the farmer&rsquo;s cup from his
+expectant lips.</p>
+<p>At Bailey Corner, three miles from Wimborne, a broad main road
+branches off from our route, going to Bere Regis and
+Dorchester.&nbsp; This is the road made at the suggestion of Mr.
+Erle-Drax of Charborough Park, whose property, it may be
+supposed, gained in some way from it.&nbsp; Charborough Park is
+one of the originals whence Welland House and the tower of <i>Two
+on a Tower</i> were drawn, and therefore demands a deviation of
+two miles from our route.</p>
+<p>It is a straight road and a lonely that leads to the main
+entrance-lodge of this seat of the Erle-Drax family, past a
+long-continued brick boundary-wall that must have cost a small
+fortune, and decorated at intervals with arches surmounted by
+effigies of <a name="page279"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+279</span>stags and lions.&nbsp; Time has dealt very severely
+with some of the squire&rsquo;s stags, shorn here and there of a
+limb, and in one instance presenting a headless awfulness to the
+gaze of the pilgrim, who can scarce repress a shudder at sight of
+it, even though the destruction provides a little comedy of its
+own, in the revelation that these imposing &ldquo;stone&rdquo;
+decorations are really of plaster, and hollow.</p>
+<p>The principal entrance to Charborough Park, the one feature
+that breaks the long, straight perspective of this undeviating
+road, seems to have been erected by the squire as a species of
+permanent self-advertising hoarding, for it is boldly inscribed:
+&ldquo;This road from Wimborne to Dorchester was projected and
+completed through the instrumentality of J. S. W. Sawbridge
+Erle-Drax, Esq., M.P., in the years 1841 and 1842.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+C&aelig;sar himself could have done no more than was performed by
+this magnate of the many names, and could not with greater
+magnificence have suppressed the fact that what his Parliamentary
+influence procured, the public purse paid for.</p>
+<p>There is this essential difference between Charborough Park
+and &ldquo;Welland House.&rdquo;&nbsp; Charborough is very
+closely guarded from intrusion, and none who cannot show a real
+reason for entering is allowed through the jealously closed and
+locked gates of the lodges.</p>
+<p>The residence of Lady Constantine was, however, very readily
+accessible, and, &ldquo;as is occasionally the case with
+old-fashioned manors, possessed none of the exclusiveness found
+in some aristocratic settlements.&nbsp; The parishioners looked
+upon the park avenue as their natural thoroughfare, particularly
+for christenings, weddings, and funerals, which passed <a
+name="page280"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 280</span>the
+squire&rsquo;s mansion, with due considerations as to the scenic
+effect of the same from the manor windows.&rdquo;&nbsp; So much
+to show the composite nature of the scene drawn in <i>Two on a
+Tower</i>.</p>
+<p>The tower&mdash;the &ldquo;Rings Hill Speer&rdquo; of the
+story&mdash;stands in the park, at a considerable distance from
+the house on the other side of a gentle dip, but well within
+sight of the drawing-room windows.&nbsp; In between, across the
+turf and disappearing into the woodlands to right and left, roam
+the deer that so plentifully inhabit this beautiful domain.&nbsp;
+The tower is approached by roomy stone staircases, now overgrown
+with grass, moss, and fungi, and so far from it or its approaches
+being in &ldquo;the Tuscan order of architecture,&rdquo; they are
+designed in a most distinctive and aggressive Strawberry Hill
+Gothic manner.&nbsp; Built originally by Major Drax in 1796, and
+struck by lightning, it was rebuilt in 1839.</p>
+<p>Returning now from this interlude and regaining Bailey Corner,
+we come to Sturminster Marshall, a place that now, for all the
+dignity of its name, is just a rustic village, with only that
+name and an ancient church that was the &ldquo;Stour
+Minster&rdquo; of the Earls of Pembroke, the Earls Marshal of
+England, to affirm its vanished importance.&nbsp; Its village
+green, bordered with scattered cottages, has a maypole, painted,
+like a barber&rsquo;s pole, with vivid bands of red, white, and
+blue.</p>
+<p>An expedition from this point, across the Stour to Shapwick,
+although a roundabout pilgrimage, is not likely to be an
+unrewarded exertion, for that is a village which, although
+unknown to the greater world, has a local fame that, so long as
+<a name="page281"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 281</span>rustic
+satire lives, will assuredly not be allowed to die.</p>
+<p>
+<a name="image281" href="images/p281.jpg">
+<img class='floatright' alt=
+"The Tower, Charborough Park"
+title=
+"The Tower, Charborough Park"
+ src="images/p281.jpg" />
+</a>Shapwick is not remote from the sea, but it might be a
+midland village (and exceptionally ignorant at that) if we are to
+believe the legend which accounts for the local name of
+&ldquo;Shapwick Wheel-offs,&rdquo; by which its villagers are
+known.&nbsp; According to this injurious tale, a shepherd,
+watching his sheep on Shapwick Down at some period
+unspecified&mdash;let us call it, as the children do, &ldquo;once
+upon a time,&rdquo; or &ldquo;ever so long ago&rdquo;&mdash;found
+a live crab, or lobster, that had fallen out of an itinerant
+fishmonger&rsquo;s cart.&nbsp; He was so alarmed at the sight of
+the strange thing that he hurried into the village with the news
+of it, and brought all the people out to see.&nbsp; With them was
+the oldest inhabitant, a &ldquo;tar&rsquo;ble wold man,&rdquo;
+incapable of locomotion, brought in a wheelbarrow to pronounce,
+out of the wisdom his accumulated years gave him, what this
+unknown <a name="page282"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+282</span>monster might be.&nbsp; When his ancient eyes lighted
+upon it, or rather, in the Do&rsquo;set speech: &ldquo;When a sin
+&rsquo;en, a carled out, tar&rsquo;ble feared on &rsquo;en,
+&lsquo;wheel I off, my sonnies, wheel I off.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp;
+So they wheeled him off, accordingly, well pleased to leave that
+mysterious thing to itself.</p>
+<p>As may well be supposed, the Shapwick folk are by no means
+proud of their nickname, and it is therefore a little surprising
+to find an old and very elaborate weathervane in the village,
+surmounting the roof of a barn, and giving, in a quaintly
+silhouetted group, a pictorial representation of the scene.&nbsp;
+It seems that there were originally three more figures, behind
+the barrow, but they have disappeared.&nbsp; Perhaps this is
+evidence of attempts on the part of Shapwick folk to destroy the
+record of their shame.</p>
+<p>A succession of pretty villages&mdash;Spetisbury, Charlton
+Marshall, Blandford St. Mary&mdash;enlivens the five miles of
+road between Sturminster Marshall and Blandford; and then
+Blandford itself, already described, is entered.&nbsp; Passing
+through it, and skirting the grounds of Bryanstone, the Stour,
+more beautiful than earlier on the route, is crossed, and the
+twin villages of Durweston and Stourpaine, one on either bank,
+are glimpsed.&nbsp; Then comes the large village of
+Shillingstone, still steadfastly rural, despite its size, and
+keeping to the ancient ways more markedly than Sturminster
+Marshall, for it not only shares with that village the
+peculiarity of owning a maypole, but a maypole of exceptional
+height, and one still dressed and decorated with every
+spring.&nbsp; This tall pole, tapering like the mast of a ship,
+<a name="page283"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 283</span>is a
+hundred and ten feet in height, and most carefully guarded with
+wire stays against destruction by the stormy winds that in winter
+sweep down the valley of the Stour.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image283" href="images/p283.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Weather-Vane at Shapwick: The &ldquo;Shapwick Monster&rdquo;"
+title=
+"Weather-Vane at Shapwick: The &ldquo;Shapwick Monster&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p283.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>If we were to name the Shillingstone maypole in accordance
+with the date of its annual garlanding, it would rather be a
+&ldquo;Junepole,&rdquo; for it is on the 9th of that month that
+the pretty old ceremony and its attendant merrymakings are
+held.&nbsp; This apparently arbitrary selection of a date is
+explained by the old May Day games and rejoicings having been
+held on May 29th, in the years after the Restoration of Charles
+II. in 1660; and by the change from Old Style to New, more than a
+hundred and fifty years later.&nbsp; That change, taking away
+eleven days, converted what would have been May 29th into June
+9th; and thus by gradual change this survival of the ancient
+pagan festival <a name="page284"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+284</span>of Floralia is held when May Day has itself passed and
+become a memory.</p>
+<p>The pole has several times been restored.&nbsp; Its present
+appearance is due to the restoration of October 1868, but the
+arrow vane with which it was then surmounted appears to have been
+blown down, and its improving mottoes&mdash;&ldquo;Tanquam
+sagitta&rdquo; (Like as an arrow), and &ldquo;Sic et nos&rdquo;
+(So even we)&mdash;lost.&nbsp; Another Latin inscription is
+Englished thus:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Their maypole, decayed by age, the rector and
+inhabitants of Shillingstone, keeping their yearly May Games with
+all due observance, have carefully restored it on the ninth day
+of June 1850:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The fading garland mourns how short
+life&rsquo;s day,<br />
+The towering maypole heavenward points the way.<br />
+Read thou the lesson&mdash;seek to gather now<br />
+Undying wreaths to twine a deathless brow.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>All very pious and proper, no doubt, but wofully lacking in
+the May Day spirit of the joy of life, and more fitting to the
+&ldquo;Memento mori&rdquo; fashion of the neighbouring
+churchyard.</p>
+<p>In this old church of Shillingstone&mdash;or
+&ldquo;Shilling-Okeford,&rdquo; as from the old manorial lords it
+was once named&mdash;the pilgrim may see by the evidence of an
+old tablet how a certain William Keen, a merchant of London,
+fleeing terror-struck from the Great Plague, was overtaken by it
+and died here in 1666.</p>
+<p>The reader, versed in the oddities of place-names, will
+perhaps not require the assurance that the name of Shillingstone
+has nothing whatever to do with shillings; but if he doubts, let
+it at once be said that it was so called long before that coin
+was known.&nbsp; It was originally &ldquo;Oakford&rdquo; and <a
+name="page285"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 285</span>became
+&ldquo;Schelin&rsquo;s Oakford,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Schelin&rsquo;s
+Town,&rdquo; when the manor was in Norman times given to an
+ancestor of those who for centuries later continued to hold it
+and in more elaborate fashion styled themselves Eschellings.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image285" href="images/p285.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Maypole, Shillingstone"
+title=
+"The Maypole, Shillingstone"
+ src="images/p285.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Down over intervening hills the road, for a little space
+forsaking its character of a valley route, comes beside the
+stream again at Piddleford&mdash;or, as the Post Office
+authorities prefer to call it &ldquo;Fiddleford&rdquo;&mdash;on
+the way to Sturminster Newton, the &ldquo;Stourcastle&rdquo; of
+<i>Tess</i>.&nbsp; This is the place mentioned at the opening of
+the story, to which Tess was driving the load of beehives from
+Marnhull at night, <a name="page286"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+286</span>when the lantern went out and the mailcart dashing into
+the trap, killed the horse, Prince; thus starting the tragical
+chain of events that led at last to Winchester gaol.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image286" href="images/p286.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn"
+title=
+"Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn"
+ src="images/p286.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Of Sturminster Newton, impressively styled on ordnance maps
+&ldquo;Sturminster Newton Castle,&rdquo; Leland says: &ldquo;The
+townlette is no greate thing, and the building of it is
+mene,&rdquo; and, although it would not occur to a modern writer
+to adopt that term, certainly there is little that is notable
+about it.&nbsp; There is no &ldquo;minster,&rdquo; no
+&ldquo;castle,&rdquo; and no &ldquo;new town,&rdquo; and little
+to say, save that an ancient six-arched bridge crosses the weedy
+Stour and that the battered stump of the market cross in the main
+street seems in its decay to typify the history of the <a
+name="page287"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 287</span>market
+itself.&nbsp; As the church has been rebuilt, and as the castle
+on the outskirts is now little more than a memory, the only
+resort is to turn for some point of interest to that quaintly
+thatched old inn, the White Hart, very much older than the
+tablet, &ldquo;W. M. P. 1708,&rdquo; on its front would lead many
+to suppose.&nbsp; It was probably restored at that date, after
+those troublous times had passed in which the cross, just
+opposite, lost its shaft, and when, in the fighting in the
+streets between the Parliamentary dragoons and the associated
+clubmen of the west, this house and others were fired and
+Sturminster Newton very generally given over to the horrors of a
+brutal conflict between troops trained to arms and a peasantry
+unskilled in the use of the weapons with which they had hastily
+equipped themselves.&nbsp; But, unprofessional soldiers though
+they were, the clubmen at Sturminster gave an excellent account
+of themselves, killing and wounding a number of the dragoons, and
+taking sixteen others prisoners.</p>
+<h2><a name="page288"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+288</span>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WIMBORNE MINSTER TO
+SHAFTESBURY<br />
+(<i>continued</i>)</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Onwards</span> from Sturminster Newton the
+road comes into the rich Vale of Blackmore and traverses levels
+watered by the Lidden, in addition to the Stour.&nbsp; Turning
+here to the right-hand and avoiding the way to Stalbridge, we
+follow the steps of Tess to her home at &ldquo;Marlott,&rdquo; a
+village to be identified with Marnhull.</p>
+<p>Could we associate any cottage here with the birthplace of
+Tess, how interesting a landmark that would be!&nbsp; But it is
+not to be done.&nbsp; &ldquo;Rolliver&rsquo;s,&rdquo; the
+&ldquo;Pure Drop&rdquo; inn, may be the &ldquo;Crown,&rdquo; but
+you who call there to wet a particularly dry whistle on a
+scorching day will not find the name of Rolliver over the door,
+either of this house or of another, with the picture-sign of a
+dashing hussar outside.&nbsp; As to whether either or both of
+them keep &ldquo;a pretty brew,&rdquo; as we are told
+Rolliver&rsquo;s did, I cannot tell you, for when dry, I drink
+ginger-beer if it is to be got, and, if it isn&rsquo;t, go
+thirsty, refusing alike malt-liquors and the abominable gaseous
+compounds made cheaply of harmful materials, sold expensively,
+and rather thirst-provoking than quenching.</p>
+<p><a name="page289"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+289</span>Marnhull is not precisely the type of village the
+readers of <i>Tess</i> would picture as the home of a heroine
+whose adventures have so constant a background of dairying.&nbsp;
+It is, or was, a quarry-village, and the shallow pits that
+supplied for stone the church and the cottages are still
+prominent in a field to the left of the road to
+Shaftesbury.&nbsp; Thus Marnhull is somewhat formal and prim, and
+instead of the abundant thatch noticeable in the typical villages
+of dairy farms, its houses are roofed with slates and tiles.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image289" href="images/p289.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Marnhull"
+title=
+"Marnhull"
+ src="images/p289.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The church of Marnhull has a singularly fine tower, which,
+although the details of its Perpendicular design are largely
+intermingled with Renaissance ornament, is in general outline a
+beautiful and imposing specimen of Gothic, built in that
+period&mdash;the early eighteenth century&mdash;generally thought
+impossible for Gothic art.&nbsp; It was in <a
+name="page290"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 290</span>1718 that
+this fine work arose out of the heap of ruins into which the old
+tower had suddenly fallen, but it has almost every appearance of
+being three hundred years older, and it seems likely that, as it
+now stands, it was a free copy of its predecessor.</p>
+<p>The body of the church is of much earlier date, and well
+supplied with medi&aelig;val effigies and finely carved capitals
+to its pillars.&nbsp; But it is not without amusement that one
+reads the flamboyant epitaph to the Reverend Mr. Conyers Place,
+M.A.,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;the youngeft son of an ancient and
+reputable family in the County of York, who, after he had been
+liberally educated at Trinity College, in Cambridge, was invited
+to the Mafter-fhip of the Grammar School in Dorchester, which he
+governed many years with great succefs and applaufe till, weary
+of the fatigue of it, he chofe to refign it.&nbsp; He was endowed
+with many excellent talents, both natural and acquired: a lively
+wit, a sound judgement, with solid and extenfive learning: he was
+eminently Studious, yet remarkably facetious: attached to no
+party, nor addicted to any caufe but that of Truth and Religion,
+in the defence of whofe Doctrines he wrote many learned and
+ingenious Treatifes; while he was efteemed by all worthy of the
+greateft Preferments, he lived content with the praife of
+deferving without enjoying any but the small Rectory of Poxwell,
+in this County, which he held two years, and in the Pofsefsion of
+which he died.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Shaftesbury, six miles onward from Marnhull, is soon seen,
+standing as it does majestically upon a commanding hill.&nbsp; It
+looks perhaps best from the point where the old farmstead of
+Blynfield <a name="page291"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+291</span>stands, at the foot of the long and winding ascent,
+whence you see the hillside common stretching up to the very edge
+of the town.&nbsp; From distant points such as this,
+&ldquo;Shaston,&rdquo; as Mr. Hardy, the milestones, and old
+chroniclers agree to call it, wears the look of another Jerusalem
+the Golden, and any who, thus looking upon this town of old
+romance, should chance to come no nearer, might well carry away
+an impression of a fairy city whose architecture was equal to
+both its half-legendary history and its natural
+surroundings.&nbsp; If such a traveller there be, let him rest
+assured that nothing in Shaftesbury, saving only the view over
+limitless miles of Vale, stretching away into the distance, is
+worth the climbing up to it, and that to make its near and
+intimate acquaintance is only to dispel that distant dream of an
+unearthly beauty which afar off seems to belong to it.</p>
+<p>Shaftesbury&rsquo;s streets are in fact more than ordinarily
+commonplace, and its houses grossly tasteless.&nbsp; It is as
+though, despairing of ever bringing Shaftesbury back to a shadow
+of the magnificence of history and architecture it once enjoyed,
+the builders of the modern town built houses as plastiferously
+ugly as they could.&nbsp; &ldquo;Shaston&rdquo; is described with
+a wonderful sympathy and lightness of touch by Mr.
+Hardy:&mdash;&ldquo;The ancient British Palladour was, and is, in
+itself the city of a dream.&nbsp; Vague imaginings of its castle,
+its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey, the chief glory
+of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries,
+hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions&mdash;all now ruthlessly
+swept away&mdash;throw the visitor, even against his will, into a
+pensive melancholy, <a name="page292"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 292</span>which the stimulating atmosphere and
+limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel.&nbsp; The
+spot was the burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and
+abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and squires.&nbsp; The
+bones of King Edward &lsquo;the Martyr,&rsquo; carefully removed
+thither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which
+made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and
+enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English
+shores.&nbsp; To this fair creation of the great Middle Ages the
+Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death-knell.&nbsp;
+With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place
+collapsed in a general ruin; the martyr&rsquo;s bones met with
+the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is
+now left to tell where they lie.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town
+still remain; but, strange to say, these qualities, which were
+noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to have
+been unappreciated, are passed over in this, and one of the
+queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually
+unvisited to-day.&nbsp; It has a unique position on the summit of
+an almost perpendicular scarp, rising on the north, south and
+west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of
+Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over three counties of
+verdant pasture&mdash;South, Mid, and Nether Wessex&mdash;being
+as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller&rsquo;s eyes as
+the medicinal air is to his lungs.&nbsp; Impossible by a railway,
+it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and
+it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the
+north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on
+that <a name="page293"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+293</span>side.&nbsp; Such is, and such was, the now-forgotten
+Shaston or Palladour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That finely inaccurate chronicler, or rather romancer,
+Geoffrey of Monmouth, who never lacked &ldquo;historical&rdquo;
+details while his imagination remained in good preservation, has
+some picturesque &ldquo;facts&rdquo; to narrate of
+Shaftesbury.&nbsp; It was founded, says he, by Hudibras,
+grandfather of King Lear, a trifle of 950 years before the
+Christian era.&nbsp; Between that shamelessly absurd origin and
+the earliest known mention of the place, in <span
+class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 880, when Alfred the Great founded a
+nunnery here, there is thus a gulf&mdash;a very yawning gulf,
+too&mdash;of one thousand, eight hundred and thirty years.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Caer Palladour,&rdquo; as it had been in early British
+times, became &ldquo;Edwardstow&rdquo; when, in the year 979, the
+body of the young king &ldquo;martyred&rdquo; at Corfe Castle was
+translated from its resting-place at Wareham, but although his
+shrine was the scene of many miracles and greatly resorted to, we
+do not find that change of name so greatly favoured as was the
+like change made in East Anglia, when, early in the eleventh
+century, the town that had been Beodric&rsquo;s Weorth became,
+with the miracle-mongering of St. Edmund&rsquo;s shrine, that
+town of St. Edmundsbury which we know as Bury St. Edmunds.&nbsp;
+No: as the expressive modern slang would phrase it, the name of
+&ldquo;Edwardstow&rdquo; never really &ldquo;caught on,&rdquo;
+and Caer Palladour, which had in the beginning of Saxon rule
+become &ldquo;Shaftesbyrig,&rdquo; has so remained.</p>
+<p>Nowadays the only vestiges of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury
+are the fragments of encaustic tiles and carved stones, rarely
+and with difficulty brought to light by antiquarian societies,
+painfully digging <a name="page294"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+294</span>on the spot once occupied by it; and the great abbey
+estates, the booty at the Dissolution seized by, or granted to,
+Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, now belong to the Duke of
+Westminster, whose Grosvenor crest of a wheatsheaf is prominent
+in the town.</p>
+<p>There are three parish churches at Shaftesbury; St.
+James&rsquo;s, as you climb upwards towards the town, and Holy
+Trinity and St. Peter&rsquo;s in the town itself.&nbsp; It is St.
+Peter&rsquo;s which is seen in the illustration of Gold Hill, by
+whose incredibly steep ascent the pilgrim takes his way up from
+the deep recesses of the Vale.&nbsp; This is the most difficult
+approach, paved with granite setts divided off into broad steps,
+so that in wet weather the hillside shall not slip away into
+those depths; and with the craggy sides shored up by ancient
+stone buttresses of prodigious bulk.&nbsp; The building that
+closes in the view next the church tower, leaving but a narrow
+entrance alley into the town, is the Town Hall and Market
+House.</p>
+<p>There are, of course, wider and less steep entrances to
+Shaftesbury, but this shows it on its most characteristic
+side.</p>
+<p>Shaftesbury is chiefly associated in the pages of the Wessex
+novels with <i>Jude the Obscure</i>, for here it was that the
+long-suffering and inoffensive Phillotson&mdash;who (why?) always
+reminds me of Wordsworth&mdash;obtained the school, which he and
+the distracting Sue were to jointly keep.&nbsp; Their house,
+&ldquo;Old Grove&rsquo;s Place,&rdquo; is easily
+recognisable.&nbsp; You come to it past Bimport, near the fork of
+the roads that run severally to Motcombe and to East Stower, on
+the edge of the plateau.&nbsp; It is an old house with projecting
+porch and mullioned windows <a name="page295"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 295</span>through which it would be quite
+easy, as in the story, to see the movements of any one inside;
+and the upper room over the entrance is not too high above the
+pavement for any one who, like Sue, leaped from the window, to
+alight without injury.&nbsp; <a name="page296"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 296</span>Those people are probably few who
+feel an oppressiveness in old houses such as that which worried
+the highly strung and neurotic Sue Bridehead: &ldquo;We
+don&rsquo;t live in the school, you know,&rdquo; said she,
+&ldquo;but in that ancient dwelling across the way called Old
+Grove&rsquo;s Place.&nbsp; It is so antique and dismal that it
+depresses me dreadfully.&nbsp; Such houses are very well to
+visit, but not to live in.&nbsp; I feel crushed into the earth by
+the weight of so many previous lives there spent.&nbsp; In a new
+place like these schools, there is only your own life to
+support.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image295" href="images/p295.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Gold Hill, Shaftesbury"
+title=
+"Gold Hill, Shaftesbury"
+ src="images/p295.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Close by are the schools.&nbsp; Looking upon them the more
+than usually sentimental pilgrim, with, it may be, some ancient
+tender passages of his own, stored up in the inviolate strong-box
+of his memory, to be unlocked and drawn forth at odd times, may
+think he identifies that window whence Sue, safely out of reach,
+spoke with Jude, standing down on the footpath, and said,
+&ldquo;Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you&rsquo;ll suffer
+yet!&rdquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page297"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+297</span>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">WIMBORNE MINSTER TO
+HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is by the direct road to
+Cranborne, and past the Gate Inn at Clapgate, that one reaches
+Horton, where, at the intersection of the two broad main roads
+from Wimborne to Cranborne, and from Shaftesbury to Ringwood,
+stands Horton Inn, a fine, substantial old house, once depending
+upon a great coaching and posting traffic, and even now that only
+an occasional cyclist stays the night, dispensing good,
+old-fashioned, solid comforts in its cosy and comfortable
+rooms.&nbsp; When Horton Inn was built, let us say somewhere
+about the time of Queen Anne (who, poor soul! is dead), those who
+designed it, disregarding any temptations to be picturesque,
+devoted their energies to good, honest workmanship, with the
+result that nowadays one sees a building certainly lacking in
+imagination, with windows equidistant and each the counterpart of
+its fellow, but disclosing in every quoin and keystone, and in
+each well and truly laid course of brickwork, the justness and
+thoroughness of its design and execution.&nbsp; Within doors it
+is the same: unobtrusive but excellent workmanship characterises
+panelling and window-sashes, doors and handrails, <a
+name="page298"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 298</span>with the
+result that in its old age Horton Inn has an air of distinction
+and dignity strongly marked to those who take an interest in
+technical details, and attracting the notice of even the least
+observant, who from its superior air generally conceive it to be
+an old mansion converted to its present use.&nbsp; It is the
+subject of an allusion in the tale of <i>Barbara of the House of
+Grebe</i>: the &ldquo;Lornton Inn&rdquo; whence Barbara eloped
+with the handsome Willowes, and where she was to meet her
+disfigured husband, posting along the road from Southampton, on
+his return from foreign parts.</p>
+<p>The village of Horton, down the road, at some little distance
+from the inn, has an oddly German-looking tower to its church,
+containing the monument of &ldquo;Squire Hastings&rdquo; of
+Woodlands, who died, aged 99 years, in 1650.</p>
+<p>On an eerie hillside near by, in what of old was Horton Park,
+but sold by the Sturts in 1793 to the Earl of Shaftesbury, and
+disparked, stands the many-storied tower of what was once an
+observatory built by Humphry Sturt.&nbsp; It is now an empty
+shell, through whose ruined windows the wind sighs mournfully at
+night, and the moonlight gleams ghostlike.&nbsp; It is an ugly
+enough place in daylight, but should you particularly desire to
+know what the creepy, uncanny feeling of being haunted is like,
+why then, walk up on a windy night to &ldquo;The Folly,&rdquo; as
+the villagers call it, and stand in it, listening to the wind
+howling, grumbling or whispering in and out of the long,
+shaft-like building, and nocturnal birds fluttering and squeaking
+on the upper ledges.&nbsp; It is not a little gruesome.</p>
+<p>This is one of the originals whence Mr. Hardy <a
+name="page299"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 299</span>drew his
+idea of the tower in <i>Two on a Tower</i>, and is certainly the
+most impressive of them.&nbsp; Very many years have passed since
+the old tower was used, and since the park in which it stands was
+converted into a farm.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image298" href="images/p298.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Observatory, Horton"
+title=
+"The Observatory, Horton"
+ src="images/p298.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The Woodlands estate, on the broad acres belonging to the Earl
+of Shaftesbury, is a sandy, heathy district of furze and
+pine-trees, with a conspicuous ridge in the midst, shaped in a
+semicircle and crested with those sombre trees.&nbsp; Here is
+Shag Heath and the cultivated oasis called &ldquo;The
+Island&rdquo; where on July 8th, 1685, the unfortunate Duke of
+Monmouth was captured, hiding amid the bracken and undergrowth,
+beneath an ash-tree.&nbsp; He might possibly have succeeded in
+stealing away to the coast and so escaping, despite the
+thoroughness of the search made by the Sussex Militia, spurred to
+it by the reward of &pound;5,000, offered for the capture of the
+fugitive, had it not been for the information given by an old
+woman who lived in a cottage <a name="page300"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 300</span>near at hand.&nbsp; She had seen
+him, disguised as a shepherd, threading his way cautiously
+through the heath, and he was accordingly discovered near the
+spot she had indicated by a militiaman named Parkin.&nbsp; The
+Duke, half-starved and unkempt from his hunted wanderings since
+the fatal Sedgemoor fight of three days earlier, was found in
+possession of his badge of the George, a pocket-book and several
+guineas.&nbsp; In his pockets were a number of peas, the remains
+of a quantity he had plucked, to stave off his hunger.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image299" href="images/p299.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Horton Inn: the &ldquo;Lornton Inn&rdquo; of &ldquo;Barbara of
+the House of Grebe&rdquo;"
+title=
+"Horton Inn: the &ldquo;Lornton Inn&rdquo; of &ldquo;Barbara of
+the House of Grebe&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p299.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image300" href="images/p300.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Monmouth Ash"
+title=
+"Monmouth Ash"
+ src="images/p300.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>A total of &pound;5,500 was divided among Lord Lumley, the
+officers, militiamen, and others concerned in the capture.&nbsp;
+Among these was Amy Farant, <a name="page301"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 301</span>whose information had directly led
+to it, and she received a sum of fifty pounds.</p>
+<p>Local tradition points out the spot on the hillside where this
+woman&rsquo;s cottage formerly stood, overlooking the field
+called &ldquo;Monmouth Close&rdquo; and the horror always felt by
+the rustics at the taking of what they still call the
+&ldquo;blood-money&rdquo; is seen in the story told of her
+after-years.&nbsp; The price of blood brought a curse with
+it.&nbsp; She fell upon evil times, and at last lived and died in
+a state of rags and dirt, shunned by all.&nbsp; After her death,
+the cottage itself speedily earned a sinister reputation, and was
+at length either pulled down, or allowed to decay.&nbsp; The spot
+is still called locally Louse, or more genteelly Slough,
+Lane.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Monmouth Ash&rdquo;&mdash;or &ldquo;Aish,&rdquo; in
+the country speech&mdash;still survives, with a difference.&nbsp;
+Those who, looking upon the present tree and thinking, despite
+its decrepit and propped-up condition, that it cannot be over two
+hundred years old&mdash;and therefore that this cannot be the
+precise spot&mdash;may, with the reservation already made, be
+reassured of its absolute genuineness.&nbsp; The original trunk
+grew decayed in the long ago, and was blown down, but the present
+tree is a growth from the &ldquo;stool,&rdquo; or root, of that
+under which the unhappy Protestant Champion was discovered.</p>
+<h2><a name="page302"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+302</span>CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center" class="gutsumm">OVER THE HILLS,
+BEYOND THE RAINBOW</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Beyond</span> the rainbow is Fairyland,
+but no one has ever penetrated to that country, save in dreams,
+to which nothing is impossible.&nbsp; There is also a
+Rainbow-land in Dorsetshire, certainly not impossible of
+achievement, but still a district of which no one knows anything,
+saving only those who live in it, and those sturdy fellows, the
+carriers, the Marco Polos and Livingstones of this age and
+country, who every week or so travel from it to the nearest
+market-town, and back again.&nbsp; The carriers are men of
+strange speech and dress.&nbsp; Although sturdy, they move slowly
+both in body and mind; and their tilt-carts are as slow as
+themselves, and as dusty and travel-worn as the caravans of any
+African expedition.&nbsp; The Rainbow country of Dorset is, in
+fact, a country innocent of railways.&nbsp; It is comprised
+within a rough circle made by tracing a course from Bere Regis to
+Piddletrenthide, Cerne Abbas, Minterne Magna, Holnest, Sherborne,
+Milborne Port, Stalbridge, Sturminster Newton, and Blandford, and
+is not only in parts extremely hilly, but includes Bulbarrow, one
+of the highest hills in Dorsetshire, 927 feet above sea-level,
+and Nettlecombe Tout; among a fine diversified array <a
+name="page303"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 303</span>of lesser
+eminences.&nbsp; There is thus some considerable difficulty in
+travelling out of it, and a very widespread disinclination to
+penetrate into what may, not without considerable warranty, be
+termed its &ldquo;wilds.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image303" href="images/p303.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe"
+title=
+"Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe"
+ src="images/p303.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Wise men, who study maps, and from the tracks of watercourses
+deduce easier, or at any rate, rather less arduous, routes, may
+find a means of winning to this Rainbow country by turning off
+the Piddletown and Bere Regis road at Burlestone, and thence
+making along the slight valley of the Chesil Bourne or Divelish
+stream.&nbsp; The small village of Dewlish on the map points to
+the amazing colonial energy <a name="page304"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 304</span>of the Roman, for here, in a
+district that even we moderns are accustomed to think remote, was
+found a fine Roman pavement, many years ago.&nbsp; In another two
+miles and a half the valley closes in, and the neighbourhood of
+those big brothers, Bulbarrow and Nettlecombe Tout, is evident
+from their smaller kindred, on either hand.</p>
+<p>Here, under the shelter of the everlasting hills, and in a
+&ldquo;lew&rdquo; warm hollow surrounded by benignant trees that
+lovingly shut it in, is Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe.&nbsp; A little
+pebbly brook, the Chesil Bourne, prattles down the combe,
+sheep-bells sound from the hillsides, cattle low in the meadows,
+and rooks scold and gibber, or lazily caw, in over-arching elms;
+otherwise, all is still, for much more than even the rustic
+scenes of Mr. Hardy&rsquo;s especially farming story,
+Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe is &ldquo;far from the madding
+crowd,&rdquo; and there is nothing of it but a farmstead, the
+tiny church, and the little gem of an ancient manor-house.&nbsp;
+For all that Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe is so insignificant, it has
+sent out at least one distinguished man.&nbsp; Fluellen boasted
+that there were &ldquo;good men porn at Monmouth,&rdquo; and here
+was born that Sir Richard Bingham who earns the praise of Fuller,
+as being &ldquo;a brave soldier and <i>fortis et felix</i> in all
+his undertakings.&rdquo;&nbsp; He lies, as a brave soldier
+should, but all brave soldiers cannot, in Westminster
+Abbey.&nbsp; The Binghams of Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe came from a
+younger son of the Binghams of Sutton Bingham in Somersetshire,
+and early allied themselves with prominent families.&nbsp; The
+ducally crowned lion rampant of the Turbervilles quartered on
+their ancestral shield owes its place there to the marriage <a
+name="page305"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 305</span>of Robert
+Bingham, about the reign of Henry III., or Edward I., with the
+daughter and heiress of Robert Turberville.</p>
+<p>These long-descended Binghams maintained their hold upon this
+lovely old home of theirs from the middle of the thirteenth
+century until recently.&nbsp; Now it has passed into other
+hands.&nbsp; A member of the family, Canon Bingham, was the
+original of the &ldquo;Parson Tringham,&rdquo; the learned
+antiquary, who, in the opening pages of <i>Tess of the
+D&rsquo;Urbervilles</i>, so indiscreetly informs old John
+Durbeyfield, the haggler, of his distinguished ancestry.</p>
+<p>The manor-house of Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe, within its
+courtyard, is a perfect example of a sixteenth-century country
+residence.&nbsp; The courtyard, entered by a gatehouse, discloses
+stone-gabled buildings at the sides, with the highly carved and
+decorated projecting gable of the hall in front; displaying with
+a wealth of mantling the Bingham coat of arms, the whole
+overgrown with trailing roses.</p>
+<p>A wild, chalky country, very knobbly and with constant hills
+and dales, leads away to westward, past Melcombe Horsey, to the
+hamlet and starved hillside farms of Plush, where flints abound,
+water is scarce, and farmers are obliged to depend largely upon
+the &ldquo;dew-ponds&rdquo; made on the arid downs.&nbsp; Here is
+Dole&rsquo;s Ash farm, the original of &ldquo;Flintcomb
+Ash,&rdquo; the &ldquo;starve-acre place&rdquo; where Tess toiled
+among the other weariful hands in the great swede-fields,
+&ldquo;a hundred odd acres in one patch,&rdquo; with not a tree
+in sight: Rainbow-land is not all fertile and roseate.&nbsp; The
+farm, as Mr. Hardy describes it, is situated &ldquo;above stony
+<a name="page306"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+306</span>lanchets&mdash;the outcrop of siliceous veins in the
+chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in
+bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes,&rdquo; and is at the other
+extreme from the fertility and sheltered beauty of the Valley of
+the Frome, the &ldquo;Vale of Great Dairies.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Very different from the forbidding westerly range from
+Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe is the country immediately to the
+east.&nbsp; There the village of Milton Abbas lies enfolded
+between the richly wooded hills, where the little Mill Bourne
+rises, at the foot of an alarming but wonderfully picturesque
+descent; and the woodland shade comes to the back door of every
+cottage.</p>
+<p>Milton Abbas is a remarkable place, and owes its long lines of
+regularly spaced cottages, all of the same design, to the
+autocratic whim of Joseph Damer, Baron Milton and first Earl of
+Dorchester, who (then a commoner) purchased the large and
+beautiful estate in 1752, and, demolishing the old village, which
+rose humbly on the outskirts of the magnificent abbey, rebuilt
+it, a mile away, in 1786.&nbsp; Milton Abbas is, indeed, the
+precursor of many recent &ldquo;model&rdquo; villages, and
+typical of the highhanded ways of the eighteenth-century landed
+gentry, who could not endure the sight of a cottage from the
+windows of their mansions; and so forthwith, in the manner of
+Eastern potentates, whisked whole villages and populations away
+from between the wind and their gentility.&nbsp; Each cottage is
+built four-square, with thatched roof and equidistant doors and
+windows, all in the Doll&rsquo;s House or Noah&rsquo;s Ark order
+of architecture, and there is scarce a pin to choose between any
+of them.&nbsp; Half-way down <a name="page307"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 307</span>the street is the almshouse, and
+opposite is the church, and from their presence it will be seen
+that Lord Dorchester&rsquo;s village-transplanting was complete
+and highly methodical.&nbsp; Now that time has weathered his
+model village, and the chestnut trees planted between the
+cottages have grown up, Milton Abbas is a not unpleasing
+curiosity.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image306" href="images/p306.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Milton Abbas"
+title=
+"Milton Abbas"
+ src="images/p306.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>But Milton Park, beyond the village, contains the greatest
+surprise, in the almost perfect condition of the surviving abbey
+church, rising in all the stately bulk and beautiful elaboration
+of a cathedral; beside the great mansion built for Lord
+Dorchester in 1771 by Sir William Chambers, familiar to Londoners
+as the architect of Somerset House.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image307" href="images/p307.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Milton Abbas, an early &ldquo;Model&rdquo; Village"
+title=
+"Milton Abbas, an early &ldquo;Model&rdquo; Village"
+ src="images/p307.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>That explorer of this Wessex unknown country, this Land Beyond
+the Rainbow, who, setting forth uninstructed in what he shall
+find, comes all unwittingly upon this generally unheard-of abbey,
+is greatly to be envied, for it is to him as much of a surprise
+as though its existence had never been <a
+name="page308"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 308</span>breathed
+beyond the rim of the hills down in whose hollows it lies hid;
+and to him falls the exquisite pleasure of what is nothing less
+than a discovery.&nbsp; Coming into the park, all unsuspectingly,
+the abbey church is disclosed against a wooded background of
+hills, strikingly like the first glimpse of Wells Cathedral,
+underneath the Mendips.</p>
+<p>Milton Abbey, the &ldquo;Middleton Abbey&rdquo; of <i>The
+Woodlanders</i>, was founded so early as <span
+class="GutSmall">A.D.</span> 933, by Athelstan, and in thirty
+years from that date became a Benedictine monastery.&nbsp;
+Nothing, however, of that early time has survived, and the great
+building we now see belongs to the period between 1322 and 1492,
+when it was gradually rebuilt, after having been struck by
+lightning and wholly destroyed in 1309.&nbsp; But the noble
+building rising so beautifully from the gravel drives and trim
+lawns of this park is but a completed portion of an intended
+design.&nbsp; It consists of choir, tower, and north and south
+transepts, and extends a total length of 132 feet.&nbsp; Had not
+the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 put an end to this
+lovely retreat of the Benedictine fraternity, a nave would have
+been added.&nbsp; To Sir John Tregonwell, King&rsquo;s Proctor in
+the divorce of Henry VIII. and Katherine of Aragon, fell what may
+reasonably be called this fine piece of &ldquo;spoil&rdquo;; for
+the price of one thousand pounds at which he bought the monkish
+estates of Milton Abbas can scarce be regarded as adequate
+purchase money.&nbsp; Coming at last into the hands of Joseph
+Damer, the domestic offices of the monastery, which had until
+then survived in almost perfect condition, were with one
+exception utterly destroyed, and the existing mansion built in a
+<a name="page309"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 309</span>bastard
+&ldquo;Gothic&rdquo; style, as understood by Chambers.&nbsp; The
+sole exception is the grand Abbot&rsquo;s Hall, enshrined within
+that eighteenth-century building, and entered from the farther
+side of the great quadrangle.&nbsp; Now in use as a drawing-room,
+there is probably no more stately room of that description in
+existence.&nbsp; It has the combined interest and beauty of size,
+loftiness and exquisite workmanship in stone and carved wood,
+with antiquity.</p>
+<p>
+<a name="image309" href="images/p309.jpg">
+<img class='floatleft' alt=
+"Abbot Milton&rsquo;s Rebus, Milton Abbey"
+title=
+"Abbot Milton&rsquo;s Rebus, Milton Abbey"
+ src="images/p309.jpg" />
+</a>The abbey church stands immediately to the south of the
+mansion, separated from it only by lawns and a drive, and is used
+as a chapel by the present owner of the estate, a nephew of the
+late Baron Hambro, who restored it at great cost under the
+professional advice of that arch-restorer, Sir Gilbert
+Scott.&nbsp; The solitude, the size and beauty of the interior,
+are very impressive.&nbsp; Here is a place of worship like a
+cathedral, used for the prayers of a private household, and if
+you can by any means manage to forget the grotesque <a
+name="page310"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+310</span>disproportion of ancient size and magnificence to
+modern use, you will feel very reverent indeed.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image310" href="images/p310.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Milton Abbey"
+title=
+"Milton Abbey"
+ src="images/p310.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>There is a monument here to that fortunate and successful
+time-server, Sir John Tregonwell, who so neatly trimmed the sails
+of his public conduct in those times of quick-change, between the
+reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, that, although a Roman
+Catholic, he managed to enrich himself at the expense of the old
+religion&rsquo;s misfortunes, and to die at peace with all men,
+although in the possession of property belonging to others.&nbsp;
+There is also a most exquisitely sculptured marble monument by
+Carlini to Lady Milton, who died in 1775.&nbsp; It represents her
+in the costume of that period, with her husband bending anxiously
+over her.&nbsp; A quaint little piece of Gothic fancy will be
+seen on one of the walls, in the shape of the sculptured rebus of
+one Abbot William Middleton, with the Arabic date, 1514, and the
+device of a mill on a tun, or barrel.&nbsp; Thus did the
+strenuous minds of the Middle Ages unbend to childish fancies and
+puns in stone.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page311"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 311</span>
+<a name="image311" href="images/p311.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Turnworth House"
+title=
+"Turnworth House"
+ src="images/p311.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>A sign of the times may be noted, in the restoration and
+re-dedication of the long-desecrated Chapel of St. Catherine, on
+the hilltop to the east of the abbey.&nbsp; When the monastery
+was dissolved, the chapel of course fell out of use, and so
+remained until recently.&nbsp; It had in turn been used as a
+pigeon-house, a labourer&rsquo;s cottage, a carpenter&rsquo;s
+shop, and a lumber-room, and was falling into complete decay when
+Mr. Everard Hambro in 1903 <a name="page312"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 312</span>decided to restore it.&nbsp; The
+varied Saxon, Norman, and Perpendicular architecture was
+accordingly repaired, and the building reconsecrated on St.
+Catherine&rsquo;s night of the same year.</p>
+<p>Through Winterborne Houghton, and Winterborne Stickland, two
+of the eleven Dorsetshire Winterbornes, named from a chalk stream
+that flows into the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, we come to
+another <i>Woodlanders</i> landmark, Turnworth House, the
+&ldquo;Great Hintock House,&rdquo; where Mrs. Charmond,
+fascinator of the surgeon Fitzpiers, lived.&nbsp; It is situated
+just as in the tale, in a deep and lonely dell:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;To describe it as standing in a hollow
+would not express the situation of the manor-house; it stood in a
+hole.&nbsp; But the hole was full of beauty.&nbsp; From the spot
+which Grace had reached a stone could easily have been thrown
+over or into the birds&rsquo;-nested chimneys of the
+mansion.&nbsp; Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented
+parapet; but the grey lead roofs were quite visible behind it,
+with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights. . . .&nbsp; The
+front of the house was an ordinary manorial presentation of
+Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich
+snuff-coloured freestone from local quarries. . . .&nbsp; Above
+the house was a dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were
+above the level of the chimneys.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>From Turnworth the way out of Rainbow-land by way of
+Durweston, Stourpaine, and Blandford is easy: a <i>facilis
+descensus</i>, as well in spirit as in the matter of gradients,
+for thus you come out of the untravelled and the unknown into the
+well-worn tracks and intimate life of every day.</p>
+<h2><a name="page313"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+313</span>INDEX.</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Abbot&rsquo;s Ann</span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page23">23</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Abbot&rsquo;s Cernel,&rdquo; Cerne Abbas, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>&ndash;38,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page199">199</a></span>&ndash;203, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page206">206</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Abbotsbury, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page84">84</a></span>, <span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image235">235</a></span>, <span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image236">236</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aldbrickham,&rdquo; Reading, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Aldershot, &ldquo;Quartershot,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Alfredston,&rdquo; Wantage, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Andover, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page23">23</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Anglebury,&rdquo; Wareham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page86">86</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span>&ndash;122, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page192">192</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Anna</i>, <i>Lady Baxby</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page189">189</a></span></p>
+<p>Anton, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page23">23</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page24">24</a></span></p>
+<p>Athelhampton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page54">54</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Bankes Family</span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page37">37</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page106">106</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page108">108</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Barbara of the House of Grebe</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page43">43</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page298">298</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page299">299</a></span></p>
+<p>Barnes, Reverend William, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p>Basingstoke, &ldquo;Stoke-Barehills,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page3">3</a></span></p>
+<p>Batcombe, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p>Bathsheba&rsquo;s Farm, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span>&ndash;59</p>
+<p>Beaminster, &ldquo;Emminster,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page244">244</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page245">245</a></span></p>
+<p>Bere Heath, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page128">128</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page130">130</a></span></p>
+<p>Bere Regis, &ldquo;Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page54">54</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page126">126</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page127">127</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page132">132</a></span>&ndash;146,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page163">163</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Berkshire, &ldquo;North Wessex,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Bincombe, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page211">211</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page248">248</a></span>&ndash;250</p>
+<p>Bindon Abbey, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page122">122</a></span></p>
+<p>Bindon Abbey Mill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span></p>
+<p>Bingham&rsquo;s Melcombe, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page303">303</a></span>&ndash;306</p>
+<p>Blackmore, or Blackmoor, Vale of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page36">36</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page169">169</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page195">195</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page197">197</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page198">198</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page288">288</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page291">291</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page292">292</a></span></p>
+<p>Blandford Forum, &ldquo;Shottsford Forum,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page42">42</a></span>&ndash;47,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page282">282</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Bloody Assize, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page83">83</a></span></p>
+<p>Bloxworth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span></p>
+<p>Bockhampton, Lower, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page160">160</a></span></p>
+<p>Bockhampton, Upper, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span>&ndash;160</p>
+<p>Boscastle, &ldquo;Castle Boterel,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page7">7</a></span></p>
+<p>Bourne, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+<p>Bournemouth, &ldquo;Sandborne,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page88">88</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span>&ndash;262</p>
+<p>Bow and Arrow Castle, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page229">229</a></span></p>
+<p>Bredy, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page237">237</a></span></p>
+<p>Bridport, &ldquo;Port Bredy,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page82">82</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page231">231</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page237">237</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page240">240</a></span>&ndash;244</p>
+<p>Brit, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page237">237</a></span></p>
+<p>Broadwey, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span></p>
+<p>Browning, Robert, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page37">37</a></span>,</p>
+<p>Bryan&rsquo;s Piddle, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page145">145</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page163">163</a></span></p>
+<p>Bryanstone, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page46">46</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Budmouth,&rdquo; Weymouth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page71">71</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page200">200</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span>, <span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image209">209</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span>&ndash;221, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page225">225</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page226">226</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page232">232</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page246">246</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Casterbridge</span>,&rdquo;
+Dorchester, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page47">47</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page58">58</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page61">61</a></span>&ndash;83, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page148">148</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page149">149</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page153">153</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page168">168</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page199">199</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page206">206</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page207">207</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page215">215</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Castle Boterel,&rdquo; Boscastle, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page7">7</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page314"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+314</span>&ldquo;Castle Royal,&rdquo; Windsor, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Castleton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span></p>
+<p>Cerne Abbas, &ldquo;Abbot&rsquo;s Cernel,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page199">199</a></span>&ndash;203,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page206">206</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Cerne, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Chalk Newton,&rdquo; Maiden Newton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page168">168</a></span></p>
+<p>Chamberlain&rsquo;s Bridge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page130">130</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Charborough Park, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page192">192</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page279">279</a></span></p>
+<p>Charminster, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page168">168</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Chesil Beach, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page224">224</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page240">240</a></span></p>
+<p>Chesil Bourn, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page304">304</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Christminster,&rdquo; Oxford, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page3">3</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page5">5</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Clavinium</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cliff without a Name,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page8">8</a></span></p>
+<p>Colyton House, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page78">78</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Conjuring Minterne,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p>Coombe Bissett, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page40">40</a></span></p>
+<p>Corfe Castle, &ldquo;Corvsgate Castle,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page87">87</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page92">92</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page93">93</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page97">97</a></span>&ndash;113,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page121">121</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page133">133</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page277">277</a></span></p>
+<p>Corfe Mullen, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page277">277</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span></p>
+<p>Cornwall, &ldquo;Nether Wessex,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page292">292</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Corvsgate Castle,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page93">93</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page97">97</a></span>&ndash;113, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page121">121</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page133">133</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page277">277</a></span></p>
+<p>Cranborne Chase, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span></p>
+<p>Cross-in-Hand, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><i>Desperate Remedies</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page60">60</a></span></p>
+<p>Devonshire, &ldquo;Lower Wessex,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Distracted Preacher</i>, <i>The</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page252">252</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page254">254</a></span></p>
+<p>Dogbury, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page197">197</a></span></p>
+<p>Dole&rsquo;s Ash Farm, &ldquo;Flintcomb Ash,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page305">305</a></span></p>
+<p>Dorchester, &ldquo;Casterbridge,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page26">26</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page47">47</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page58">58</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page61">61</a></span>&ndash;83,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page148">148</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page149">149</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page153">153</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page168">168</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page199">199</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page206">206</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page207">207</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page215">215</a></span></p>
+<p>Dorsetshire, &ldquo;South Wessex,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page44">44</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page134">134</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page135">135</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page149">149</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page291">291</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page292">292</a></span></p>
+<p>Drax family, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page194">194</a></span></p>
+<p>Dungeon Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page195">195</a></span></p>
+<p>D&rsquo;Urbervilles, the, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page37">37</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span> <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Durnovaria</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page62">62</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Durnover,&rdquo; Fordington, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page61">61</a></span>&ndash;63,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page148">148</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page149">149</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">East Stoke</span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page122">122</a></span></p>
+<p>Eastbury Park, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page40">40</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Egdon Heath,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page128">128</a></span>&ndash;130, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page132">132</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span>&ndash;167,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page254">254</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page258">258</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Emminster,&rdquo; Beaminster, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page244">244</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page245">245</a></span></p>
+<p>Encombe, &ldquo;Enkworth Court,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span>&ndash;96</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Endelstow,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page8">8</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Enkworth Court,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page94">94</a></span>&ndash;96</p>
+<p>Erle-Drax, J. S. W. Sawbridge, Esq., M.P. <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page192">192</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page278">278</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page279">279</a></span></p>
+<p>Evershot, &ldquo;Evershead,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page169">169</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page172">172</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page198">198</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Falls Park</span>,&rdquo; <span
+class="smcap">Mells Park</span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span>&ndash;175</p>
+<p><i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page43">43</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page48">48</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page53">53</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page56">56</a></span>&ndash;59,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page156">156</a></span>,
+<span class="imageref"><a href="#image236">236</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page254">254</a></span></p>
+<p>Fawley Magna, &ldquo;Marygreen,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Fellow Townsmen</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page237">237</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page241">241</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page244">244</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Fiddler of the Reels</i>, <i>The</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page150">150</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p><i>First Countess of Wessex</i>, <i>The</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page172">172</a></span>&ndash;175,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page237">237</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Flintcomb Ash,&rdquo; Dole&rsquo;s Ash Farm, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page305">305</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Flychett,&rdquo; Lytchett Minster, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+<p><i>For Conscience&rsquo; Sake</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page177">177</a></span></p>
+<p>Fordington, &ldquo;Durnover,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page61">61</a></span>&ndash;63,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page148">148</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page149">149</a></span></p>
+<p>Fortune&rsquo;s Well, &ldquo;Street of Wells,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page224">224</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page225">225</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page227">227</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+<p>Frome, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page62">62</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page115">115</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page118">118</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page156">156</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page163">163</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page306">306</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Gaymead</span>,&rdquo; Theale,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Giant of Cerne,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page203">203</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page315"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+315</span>Glydepath Lane, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page76">76</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page78">78</a></span></p>
+<p>Goathorn, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page114">114</a></span></p>
+<p>Godmanstone, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gray&rsquo;s Bridge,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page70">70</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Great Hintock,&rdquo; Minterne Magna, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page168">168</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page191">191</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page198">198</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Great Hintock House,&rdquo; Turnworth House, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page311">311</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page312">312</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Group of Noble Dames</i>, <i>A</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page14">14</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page43">43</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page172">172</a></span>&ndash;176,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page189">189</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page237">237</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page297">297</a></span>&ndash;299</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Hampshire</span>, &ldquo;Upper
+Wessex,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span></p>
+<p>Hamworthy, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Hand of Ethelberta</i>, <i>The</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page86">86</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page90">90</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page93">93</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page98">98</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page268">268</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page269">269</a></span></p>
+<p>Hangman&rsquo;s Cottage, Dorchester, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page76">76</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page77">77</a></span></p>
+<p>Hardy, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page66">66</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page232">232</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page233">233</a></span></p>
+<p>Hardy, Thomas, birthplace of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page158">158</a></span>&ndash;160</p>
+<p>Hardy, Thomas, residence of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page148">148</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Havenpool,&rdquo; Poole, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page88">88</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page107">107</a></span>&ndash;109, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page111">111</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page140">140</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page261">261</a></span>&ndash;268</p>
+<p><i>Hearts Insurgent</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page4">4</a></span></p>
+<p>Heedless William&rsquo;s Pond, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page160">160</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;High Place Hall,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page78">78</a></span></p>
+<p>High Stoy, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page197">197</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Higher Crowstairs,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page75">75</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page199">199</a></span></p>
+<p>Holnest, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span>&ndash;194, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Horner family, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>&ndash;175</p>
+<p>Horton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page298">298</a></span></p>
+<p>Horton Inn, &ldquo;Lornton Inn,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page297">297</a></span>&ndash;299</p>
+<p>Hurst, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page163">163</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ilchester</span>, Earls of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span>&ndash;175</p>
+<p>Ilsington Woods, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page159">159</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Interlopers at the Knap</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page168">168</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ivell,&rdquo; Yeovil, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page169">169</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span>&ndash;178</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Jordan Hill</span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page246">246</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Jude the Obscure</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page5">5</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page29">29</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page151">151</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page294">294</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page295">295</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Kennetbridge</span>,&rdquo; <span
+class="smcap">Newbury</span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;King&rsquo;s Hintock Court,&rdquo; Melbury Park, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span>&ndash;176</p>
+<p>King&rsquo;s Stag Bridge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page195">195</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,&rdquo; Bere Regis, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page54">54</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page126">126</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page127">127</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page132">132</a></span>&ndash;146,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page163">163</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Kingston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page93">93</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page94">94</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page97">97</a></span></p>
+<p>Kingston House, &ldquo;Knapwater House,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page60">60</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page150">150</a></span></p>
+<p>Kingston Lacy, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Knapwater House,&rdquo; Kingston House, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page60">60</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page150">150</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Knollsea,&rdquo; Swanage, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page84">84</a></span>&ndash;92, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page97">97</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page111">111</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page257">257</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page264">264</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><i>Lady Mottisfont</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Lady Penelope</i>, <i>The</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Lainston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page19">19</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page20">20</a></span></p>
+<p>Langton Matravers, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span></p>
+<p>Launceston, &ldquo;St. Launce&rsquo;s,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page8">8</a></span></p>
+<p>Lidden, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page195">195</a></span></p>
+<p>Little Ann, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page23">23</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Little Hintock,&rdquo; Melbury Osmund, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page176">176</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page198">198</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Little Jack Horner,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page174">174</a></span></p>
+<p>Lobcombe Corner, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span></p>
+<p>Lodmoor Marsh, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Long Ash Lane,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page168">168</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page169">169</a></span></p>
+<p>Long Burton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page192">192</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Long Piddle,&rdquo; Piddletrenthide, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page57">57</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lornton Inn,&rdquo; Horton Inn, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page297">297</a></span>&ndash;299</p>
+<p>Lower Walterstone Farm, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span>&ndash;59</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lucetta&rsquo;s house,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page78">78</a></span></p>
+<p>Lulworth Cove, &ldquo;Lullstead,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page139">139</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page254">254</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page255">255</a></span>&ndash;257</p>
+<p>Lulworth West, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page254">254</a></span></p>
+<p>Lytchett Minster, &ldquo;Flychett,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Maiden Castle</span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p>Maiden Newton, &ldquo;Chalk Newton,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page168">168</a></span></p>
+<p>Marnhull, &ldquo;Marlott,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page36">36</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page285">285</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page288">288</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page290">290</a></span></p>
+<p>Martinstown, or Winterborne St. Martin, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page153">153</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page316"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+316</span>&ldquo;Marygreen,&rdquo; Fawley Magna, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span></p>
+<p>Maumbury, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page71">71</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page72">72</a></span></p>
+<p>Max Gate, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page63">63</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page148">148</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Mayor of Casterbridge</i>, <i>The</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page23">23</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page25">25</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page26">26</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page63">63</a></span>&ndash;80,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page149">149</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion</i>, <i>The</i>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page248">248</a></span>&ndash;250,</p>
+<p>Melbury Osmund, &ldquo;Little Hintock,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page176">176</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page198">198</a></span></p>
+<p>Melbury Park, &ldquo;King&rsquo;s Hintock Court,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span>&ndash;176</p>
+<p>Melbury Sampford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span>&ndash;176</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Melchester,&rdquo; Salisbury, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page26">26</a></span>&ndash;28,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page36">36</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page187">187</a></span></p>
+<p>Melcombe Regis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page66">66</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page215">215</a></span>&ndash;217, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page220">220</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page221">221</a></span></p>
+<p>Mells Park, &ldquo;Falls Park,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span>&ndash;175</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mellstock,&rdquo; Stinsford, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page61">61</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page149">149</a></span>&ndash;151</p>
+<p>Middlemarsh, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page194">194</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Middleton Abbey,&rdquo; Milton Abbas, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page306">306</a></span>&ndash;311</p>
+<p>Milborne Port, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Milborne St. Andrew, &ldquo;Millpond St. Jude&rsquo;s,&rdquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page48">48</a></span>&ndash;50</p>
+<p>Milton Abbas, &ldquo;Middleton Abbey,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page306">306</a></span>&ndash;311</p>
+<p>Minterne Magna, &ldquo;Great Hintock,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page168">168</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page191">191</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page198">198</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Monmouth Ash,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span>&ndash;301</p>
+<p>Monmouth, Duke of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page83">83</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span>&ndash;301</p>
+<p><i>Mottisfont</i>, <i>Lady</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Nether Cerne</span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nether Mynton,&rdquo; Owermoigne, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page252">252</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page253">253</a></span></p>
+<p>Newbury, &ldquo;Kennetbridge,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Observatory</span>, The, Horton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page298">298</a></span></p>
+<p>Old Sarum, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page21">21</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page28">28</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page179">179</a></span></p>
+<p><i>On the Western Circuit</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page29">29</a></span></p>
+<p>Osmington, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Overcombe,&rdquo; Sutton Poyntz, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page246">246</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page247">247</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+<p>Owermoigne, &ldquo;Nether Mynton,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page252">252</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page253">253</a></span></p>
+<p>Oxford, &ldquo;Christminster,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page3">3</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page5">5</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oxwell Hall,&rdquo; Poxwell Manor, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page250">250</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page251">251</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><i>Pair of Blue Eyes</i>, <i>A</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page7">7</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page8">8</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Penelope</i>, <i>The Lady</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Pennsylvania Castle, &ldquo;Sylvania Castle,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page229">229</a></span></p>
+<p>Pentridge, &ldquo;Trantridge,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page36">36</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page37">37</a></span></p>
+<p>Piddle, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page54">54</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page144">144</a></span></p>
+<p>Piddleford, or Fiddleford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page285">285</a></span></p>
+<p>Piddletown, &ldquo;Weatherbury,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page53">53</a></span>&ndash;58,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Piddletrenthide, &ldquo;Long Piddle,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page57">57</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Plush, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+<p>Poole, &ldquo;Havenpool,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page88">88</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page107">107</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page261">261</a></span>&ndash;268</p>
+<p>Poole Harbour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page114">114</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page131">131</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Port Bredy,&rdquo; Bridport, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page82">82</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page231">231</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page237">237</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page240">240</a></span>&ndash;244</p>
+<p>Portisham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span>&ndash;234</p>
+<p>Portland Bill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page224">224</a></span></p>
+<p>Portland, Isle of, &ldquo;Isle of Slingers,&rdquo; <span
+class="imageref"><a href="#image209">209</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page210">210</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page214">214</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page222">222</a></span>&ndash;231,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page240">240</a></span></p>
+<p>Poundbury, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page206">206</a></span></p>
+<p>Poxwell, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page290">290</a></span></p>
+<p>Poxwell Manor, &ldquo;Oxwell Hall,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page250">250</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page251">251</a></span></p>
+<p>Preston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+<p>Pulham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page195">195</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pummery,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page206">206</a></span></p>
+<p>Purbeck, Isle of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page85">85</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span>&ndash;89, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page97">97</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page115">115</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Quartershot</span>,&rdquo;
+Aldershot, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Radipole</span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page213">213</a></span></p>
+<p>Reading, &ldquo;Aldbrickham,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Return of the Native</i>, <i>The</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page114">114</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page128">128</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page129">129</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p>Revels Inn, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page199">199</a></span></p>
+<p>Rye Hill, Bere Regis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page131">131</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Ryme Intrinseca, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page177">177</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><a name="page317"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 317</span><span
+class="smcap">St. Juliot&rsquo;s</span>, &ldquo;<span
+class="smcap">Endelstow</span>,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page8">8</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;St. Launce&rsquo;s,&rdquo; Launceston, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page8">8</a></span></p>
+<p>Salisbury, &ldquo;Melchester,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page26">26</a></span>&ndash;28,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page36">36</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page187">187</a></span></p>
+<p>Salisbury Plain, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sandbourne,&rdquo; Bournemouth, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page88">88</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span>&ndash;262</p>
+<p>Sandsfoot Castle, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page222">222</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page223">223</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Serpent,&rdquo; The, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page155">155</a></span></p>
+<p>Shaftesbury, &ldquo;Shaston,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page277">277</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page290">290</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page291">291</a></span>&ndash;296</p>
+<p>Shapwick, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page280">280</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page281">281</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page282">282</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page283">283</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shapwick Wheeloffs,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page281">281</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shaston,&rdquo; Shaftesbury, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page277">277</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page290">290</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page291">291</a></span>&ndash;296</p>
+<p>Sherborne, &ldquo;Sherton Abbas,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span>&ndash;191</p>
+<p>Sherborne Castle, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span>&ndash;190</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sherton Abbas,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span>&ndash;191</p>
+<p>Shillingstone, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page282">282</a></span>&ndash;285</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shottsford Forum,&rdquo; Blandford Forum, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page42">42</a></span>&ndash;47,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page75">75</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page282">282</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Slingers, Isle of,&rdquo; Isle of Portland, <span
+class="imageref"><a href="#image209">209</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page210">210</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page214">214</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page221">221</a></span>&ndash;231,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page240">240</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Some Crusted Characters</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page70">70</a></span></p>
+<p>Somersetshire, &ldquo;Outer Wessex,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>Sparsholt, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page20">20</a></span></p>
+<p>Stalbridge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stickleford,&rdquo; Tincleton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page160">160</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page163">163</a></span></p>
+<p>Stinsford, &ldquo;Mellstock,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page61">61</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page149">149</a></span>&ndash;151</p>
+<p>Stoborough, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page115">115</a></span></p>
+<p>Stockbridge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page21">21</a></span>&ndash;23, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page26">26</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stoke-Barehills,&rdquo; Basingstoke, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page3">3</a></span></p>
+<p>Stonehenge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span>&ndash;34</p>
+<p>Stour, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page277">277</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page280">280</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page282">282</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page283">283</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page288">288</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stourcastle,&rdquo; Sturminster Newton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span>&ndash;288</p>
+<p>Strangways family, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>&ndash;175</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Street of Wells,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page224">224</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page225">225</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page227">227</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+<p>Sturminster Marshall, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page277">277</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page280">280</a></span></p>
+<p>Sturminster Newton, &ldquo;Stourcastle,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span>&ndash;288</p>
+<p>Sutton Poyntz, &ldquo;Overcombe,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page246">246</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page247">247</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+<p>Swanage, &ldquo;Knollsea,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page84">84</a></span>&ndash;92, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page97">97</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page111">111</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page257">257</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page264">264</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sylvania Castle,&rdquo; Pennsylvania Castle, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page229">229</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Tarent Abbey</span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page134">134</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page145">145</a></span></p>
+<p>Tarrant Hinton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page40">40</a></span></p>
+<p>Templecombe, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span></p>
+<p>Ten Hatches, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page70">70</a></span></p>
+<p>Tess of the D&rsquo;Urbervilles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page12">12</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page17">17</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page32">32</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page36">36</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page122">122</a></span>&ndash;126, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page143">143</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page147">147</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page168">168</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page199">199</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page244">244</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page257">257</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page258">258</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page285">285</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page288">288</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page289">289</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page305">305</a></span></p>
+<p>Theale, &ldquo;Gaymead,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Three Strangers</i>, <i>The</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page75">75</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page199">199</a></span></p>
+<p>Tincleton, &ldquo;Stickleford,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page160">160</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page163">163</a></span></p>
+<p><i>To Please his Wife</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page262">262</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page265">265</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Tragedy of Two Ambitions</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page177">177</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Trantridge,&rdquo; Pentridge, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page36">36</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page37">37</a></span></p>
+<p>Trebarrow Sands, &ldquo;Trebarwith Strand,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page7">7</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Troy Town,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page59">59</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Trumpet Major</i>, <i>The</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page70">70</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page218">218</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page222">222</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page230">230</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span>&ndash;248, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page250">250</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page253">253</a></span></p>
+<p>Turberville, Dr. D&rsquo;Albigny, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page146">146</a></span></p>
+<p>Turberville, George, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page48">48</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page146">146</a></span></p>
+<p>Turberville, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span></p>
+<p>Turberville, Thomas, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page146">146</a></span></p>
+<p>Turberville, family, The, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page134">134</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span>&ndash;144, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page146">146</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page304">304</a></span></p>
+<p>Turnworth House, &ldquo;Great Hintock House,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page311">311</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page312">312</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Two on a Tower</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page49">49</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page53">53</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page115">115</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page275">275</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page280">280</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page298">298</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><i>Under the Greenwood Tree</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page59">59</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page149">149</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page150">150</a></span></p>
+<p>Upper Bockhampton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page63">63</a></span></p>
+<p>Upwey, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page211">211</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><a name="page318"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+318</span>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Vale of Great
+Dairies</span>,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page156">156</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page306">306</a></span></p>
+<p>Vale of Little Dairies, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Vale of White Hart,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page196">196</a></span></p>
+<p>Village Choirs, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page151">151</a></span>&ndash;155</p>
+<p><i>Vindogladia</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">Wallop</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Little</span> (<span class="smcap">or
+Middle</span>), <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span></p>
+<p>Wantage, &ldquo;Alfredston,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Warborne,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>Wareham, &ldquo;Anglebury,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page86">86</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span>&ndash;122, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page192">192</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Warm&rsquo;ell Cross,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page252">252</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Weatherbury,&rdquo; Piddletown, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page53">53</a></span>&ndash;58,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Weatherbury Castle, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image51">51</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span></p>
+<p>Weeke, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page18">18</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Well Beloved</i>, <i>The</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page224">224</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page226">226</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page229">229</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page230">230</a></span></p>
+<p>Welland House, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page279">279</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wellbridge,&rdquo; Woolbridge, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page124">124</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page127">127</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wells, the Street of,&rdquo; Fortune&rsquo;s Well,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page224">224</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page225">225</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page227">227</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+<p>Wessex, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page9">9</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page21">21</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page148">148</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page253">253</a></span></p>
+<p>Wessex, Lower, Devonshire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span></p>
+<p>Wessex, Mid, Wiltshire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page292">292</a></span></p>
+<p>Wessex, Nether, Cornwall, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page292">292</a></span></p>
+<p>Wessex, North, Berkshire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Wessex, Outer, Somersetshire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>Wessex, South, Dorsetshire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page44">44</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page134">134</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page135">135</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page249">249</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page291">291</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page292">292</a></span></p>
+<p>Wessex, Upper, Hampshire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span></p>
+<p>West Bay, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page237">237</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page238">238</a></span>, <span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image239">239</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page241">241</a></span></p>
+<p>West Stafford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Wey, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span></p>
+<p>Weyhill, &ldquo;Weydon Priors,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page23">23</a></span>&ndash;25</p>
+<p>Weyhill Fair, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page24">24</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Weydon Priors,&rdquo; Weyhill, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page23">23</a></span>&ndash;25</p>
+<p>Weymouth, &ldquo;Budmouth,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page71">71</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page200">200</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span>, <span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image209">209</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page221">221</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page225">225</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page226">226</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span></p>
+<p>Whitcomb, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p>Willapark Point, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page8">8</a></span></p>
+<p>Wilts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Wimborne Minster, &ldquo;Warborne,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page106">106</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span>&ndash;276</p>
+<p>Wincanton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span></p>
+<p>Winchester, &ldquo;Wintoncester,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page9">9</a></span>&ndash;17, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page21">21</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page148">148</a></span></p>
+<p>Windsor &ldquo;Castle Royal,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Winterborne Came, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p>Winterborne Monkton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span></p>
+<p>Winterborne St. Martin, or Martinstown, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page153">153</a></span></p>
+<p>Winterborne Whitchurch, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page47">47</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page48">48</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page146">146</a></span></p>
+<p>Winterslow, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Winterslow Hut,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page27">27</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wintoncester,&rdquo; Winchester, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page9">9</a></span>&ndash;17, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page21">21</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page148">148</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wishing Well,&rdquo; Upwey, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page211">211</a></span>&ndash;213</p>
+<p><i>Withered Arm</i>, <i>The</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page74">74</a></span></p>
+<p>Wolveton House, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page168">168</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span></p>
+<p>Woodbury Hill, Bere Regis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page138">138</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Woodlanders</i>, <i>The</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page43">43</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page195">195</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page197">197</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page198">198</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page308">308</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page312">312</a></span></p>
+<p>Woodlands, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page298">298</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span></p>
+<p>Woodyates Inn, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page36">36</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page40">40</a></span></p>
+<p>Wool, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page130">130</a></span></p>
+<p>Woolbridge, &ldquo;Wellbridge,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page124">124</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page127">127</a></span></p>
+<p>Woolbridge House, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page122">122</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span>, <span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image125">125</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Yalbury Hill</span>,&rdquo; <span
+class="smcap">Yellowham Hill</span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page59">59</a></span></p>
+<p>Yellowham Woods, &ldquo;Yalbury Great Wood,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page59">59</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page150">150</a></span></p>
+<p>Yeo, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span></p>
+<p>Yeovil, &ldquo;Ivell,&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page169">169</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span>&ndash;178</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+
+<div class="gapmediumline">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>Printed by Hazell</i>, <i>Watson
+&amp; Viney</i>, <i>Ld.</i>, <i>London and Aylesbury</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote174"></a><a href="#citation174"
+class="footnote">[174]</a>&nbsp; In text the genealogy is: Thomas
+Horner of Mells <i>m.</i> 1713 Susannah, daughter of Thomas
+Strangeways, of Melbury, co. Dorset, born 1690, died 1758: they
+had issue Elizabeth Horner (born 1723, died 1792).</p>
+<p>Elizabeth Horner <i>m.</i> 1736 Sir Stephen Fox, afterwards
+1st Earl of Ilchester, etc.&nbsp; Born 1706, Died
+1776.&mdash;DP.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HARDY COUNTRY***</p>
+<pre>
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diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #46801 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46801)