sable to
displace for it the title by which the book first became known.

In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the
inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun were
material for another kind of study of this little group of church
musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so lightly, even so
farcically and flippantly at times. But circumstances would have
rendered any aim at a deeper, more essential, more transcendent handling
unadvisable at the date of writing; and the exhibition of the Mellstock
Quire in the following pages must remain the only extant one, except for
the few glimpses of that perished band which I have given in verse
elsewhere.

T. H.
April 1912.

PART THE FIRST--WINTER

CHAPTER I: MELLSTOCK-LANE

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well
as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan
no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with
itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its
flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such
trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.

On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing
up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that
whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence. All the evidences of
his nature were those afforded by the spirit of his footsteps, which
succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and by the liveliness of his
voice as he sang in a rural cadence:

"With the rose and the lily
And the daffodowndilly,
The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go."

The lonely lane he was following connected one of the hamlets of
Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes,
casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with their
characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-creviced
elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the sky, wherein
the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their flickering seemed like
the flapping of wings. Within the woody pass, at a level anything lower
than the horizon, all was dark as the grave. The copse-wood forming the
sides of the bower interlaced its branches so densely, even at this
season of the year, that the draught from the north-east flew along the
channel wit