s leaped over his feet,
falling awkwardly on their backs, heads, or hips, like unskilful
acrobats, as chance might rule; or engaged themselves in noisy
flirtations under the fern-fronds with silent ones of homely hue. Huge
flies, ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage
state, buzzed about him without knowing that he was a man. In and
out of the fern-dells snakes glided in their most brilliant blue and
yellow guise, it being the season immediately following the shedding
of their old skins, when their colours are brightest. Litters of young
rabbits came out from their forms to sun themselves upon hillocks, the
hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin-fleshed
ear, and firing it to a blood-red transparency in which the veins
could be seen. None of them feared him.

The monotony of his occupation soothed him, and was in itself a
pleasure. A forced limitation of effort offered a justification of
homely courses to an unambitious man, whose conscience would hardly
have allowed him to remain in such obscurity while his powers were
unimpeded. Hence Yeobright sometimes sang to himself, and when obliged
to accompany Humphrey in search of brambles for faggot-bonds he would
amuse his companion with sketches of Parisian life and character, and
so while away the time.

On one of these warm afternoons Eustacia walked out alone in the
direction of Yeobright's place of work. He was busily chopping away
at the furze, a long row of faggots which stretched downward from his
position representing the labour of the day. He did not observe her
approach, and she stood close to him, and heard his undercurrent of
song. It shocked her. To see him there, a poor afflicted man, earning
money by the sweat of his brow, had at first moved her to tears; but
to hear him sing and not at all rebel against an occupation which,
however satisfactory to himself, was degrading to her, as an educated
lady-wife, wounded her through. Unconscious of her presence, he still
went on singing:--

"Le point du jour
A nos bosquets rend toute leur parure;
Flore est plus belle a son retour;
L'oiseau reprend doux chant d'amour;
Tout celebre dans la nature
Le point du jour.

"Le point du jour
Cause parfois, cause douleur extreme;
Que l'espace des nuits est court
Pour le berger brulant d'amour,
Force de quitter ce qu'il aime
Au point du jour!"

It was bitterly plain to