was saying, the
pains she would take to make me walk on the pretty side were unending.
I warrent that whether we were going with the sun or against the sun,
uphill or downhill, in wind or in lewth, that wart of hers was always
toward the hedge, and that dimple toward me. There was I too simple to
see her wheelings and turnings; and she so artful though two years
younger, that she could lead me with a cotton thread like a blind ham;
... no, I don't think the women have got cleverer, for they was never
otherwise.'

IV

These men have sap and juice in their talk. When they think they think
clearly. When they speak they express themselves with an energy and
directness which mortify the thin speech of conventional persons. Here
is Farfrae, the young Scotchman, in the tap-room of the Three Mariners
Inn of Casterbridge, singing of his ain contree with a pathos quite
unknown in that part of the world. The worthies who frequent the place
are deeply moved. 'Danged if our country down here is worth singing
about like that,' says Billy Wills, the glazier,--while the literal
Christopher Coney inquires, 'What did ye come away from yer own
country for, young maister, if ye be so wownded about it?' Then it
occurs to him that it wasn't worth Farfrae's while to leave the fair
face and the home of which he had been singing to come among such as
they. 'We be bruckle folk here--the best o' us hardly honest
sometimes, what with hard winters, and so many mouths to fill, and
God-a'mighty sending his little taties so terrible small to fill 'em
with. We don't think about flowers and fair faces, not we--except in
the shape of cauliflowers and pigs' chaps.'

I should like to see the man who sat to Artist Hardy for the portrait
of Corporal Tullidge in _The Trumpet-Major_. This worthy, who was deaf
and talked in an uncompromisingly loud voice, had been struck in the
head by a piece of shell at Valenciennes in '93. His left arm had been
smashed. Time and Nature had done what they could, and under their
beneficent influences the arm had become a sort of anatomical
rattle-box. People interested in Corp'el Tullidge were allowed to see
his head and hear his arm. The corp'el gave these private views at any
time, and was quite willing to show off, though the exhibition was apt
to bore him a little. His fellows displayed him much as one would a
'freak' in a dime museum.

'You have got a silver plate let into yer head, haven't ye, corp'el?'
said Ant