ally received so little in payment for their
performances that their efforts were really a labour of love. In the
parish I had in my mind when writing the present tale, the gratuities
received yearly by the musicians at Christmas were somewhat as follows:
From the manor-house ten shillings and a supper; from the vicar ten
shillings; from the farmers five shillings each; from each
cottage-household one shilling; amounting altogether to not more than ten
shillings a head annually--just enough, as an old executant told me, to
pay for their fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which they
mostly ruled themselves). Their music in those days was all in their own
manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, and their music-books were
home-bound.

It was customary to inscribe a few jigs, reels, horn-pipes, and ballads
in the same book, by beginning it at the other end, the insertions being
continued from front and back till sacred and secular met together in the
middle, often with bizarre effect, the words of some of the songs
exhibiting that ancient and broad humour which our grandfathers, and
possibly grandmothers, took delight in, and is in these days unquotable.

The aforesaid fiddle-strings, rosin, and music-paper were supplied by a
pedlar, who travelled exclusively in such wares from parish to parish,
coming to each village about every six months. Tales are told of the
consternation once caused among the church fiddlers when, on the occasion
of their producing a new Christmas anthem, he did not come to time, owing
to being snowed up on the downs, and the straits they were in through
having to make shift with whipcord and twine for strings. He was
generally a musician himself, and sometimes a composer in a small way,
bringing his own new tunes, and tempting each choir to adopt them for a
consideration. Some of these compositions which now lie before me, with
their repetitions of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their fugues and
their intermediate symphonies, are good singing still, though they would
hardly be admitted into such hymn-books as are popular in the churches of
fashionable society at the present time.

August 1896.

Under the Greenwood Tree was first brought out in the summer of 1872 in
two volumes. The name of the story was originally intended to be, more
appropriately, The Mellstock Quire, and this has been appended as a sub-
title since the early editions, it having been thought unadvi