ot yet asleep,
and set the surrounding rabbits curiously watching from hillocks at a
safe distance.

The performance was that of bringing together and building into a stack
the furze faggots which Humphrey had been cutting for the captain's
use during the foregoing fine days. The stack was at the end of the
dwelling, and the men engaged in building it were Humphrey and Sam, the
old man looking on.

It was a fine and quiet afternoon, about three o'clock; but the winter
solstice having stealthily come on, the lowness of the sun caused the
hour to seem later than it actually was, there being little here to
remind an inhabitant that he must unlearn his summer experience of the
sky as a dial. In the course of many days and weeks sunrise had advanced
its quarters from northeast to southeast, sunset had receded from
northwest to southwest; but Egdon had hardly heeded the change.

Eustacia was indoors in the dining-room, which was really more like a
kitchen, having a stone floor and a gaping chimney-corner. The air was
still, and while she lingered a moment here alone sounds of voices in
conversation came to her ears directly down the chimney. She entered
the recess, and, listening, looked up the old irregular shaft, with its
cavernous hollows, where the smoke blundered about on its way to the
square bit of sky at the top, from which the daylight struck down with a
pallid glare upon the tatters of soot draping the flue as seaweed drapes
a rocky fissure.

She remembered: the furze-stack was not far from the chimney, and the
voices were those of the workers.

Her grandfather joined in the conversation. "That lad ought never to
have left home. His father's occupation would have suited him best, and
the boy should have followed on. I don't believe in these new moves in
families. My father was a sailor, so was I, and so should my son have
been if I had had one."

"The place he's been living at is Paris," said Humphrey, "and they tell
me 'tis where the king's head was cut off years ago. My poor mother used
to tell me about that business. 'Hummy,' she used to say, 'I was a young
maid then, and as I was at home ironing Mother's caps one afternoon the
parson came in and said, "They've cut the king's head off, Jane; and
what 'twill be next God knows."'"

"A good many of us knew as well as He before long," said the captain,
chuckling. "I lived seven years under water on account of it in my
boyhood--in that damned surgery of the T