ng up old
ruins, and finding the bones o' things, and such like; and living
remains must be more interesting to 'em still, if they only knowed
of me. Would that somebody would go round and tell 'em what there
is living among 'em, and they thinking nothing of him! If Pa'son
Tringham, who discovered me, had lived, he'd ha' done it, I'm sure."

Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had
grappled with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved
by her remittances. When indoor necessities had been eased, she
turned her attention to external things. It was now the season for
planting and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers
had already received their spring tillage; but the garden and the
allotment of the Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found, to her
dismay, that this was owing to their having eaten all the seed
potatoes,--that last lapse of the improvident. At the earliest
moment she obtained what others she could procure, and in a few
days her father was well enough to see to the garden, under Tess's
persuasive efforts: while she herself undertook the allotment-plot
which they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of the
village.

She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where
she was not now required by reason of her mother's improvement.
Violent motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high,
dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,
and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the
day had ended. Digging began usually at six o'clock and extended
indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead
weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather
favouring their combustion.

One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours
till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that
divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare
of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the
allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under
the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks
of smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become
illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
another; and the meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which was a wall
by day and a light by night, could be understood.

As evening thickened, some of t