Meets Another
XXXIX. Coming Home--A Cry
XL. On Casterbridge Highway
XLI. Suspicion--Fanny Is Sent For
XLII. Joseph and His Burden--Buck's Head
XLIII. Fanny's Revenge
XLIV. Under a Tree--Reaction
XLV. Troy's Romanticism
XLVI. The Gurgoyle: Its Doings
XLVII. Adventures by the Shore
XLVIII. Doubts Arise--Doubts Linger
XLIX. Oak's Advancement--A Great Hope
L. The Sheep Fair--Troy Touches His Wife's Hand
LI. Bathsheba Talks with Her Outrider
LII. Converging Courses
LIII. Concurritur--Horae Momento
LIV. After the Shock
LV. The March Following--"Bathsheba Boldwood"
LVI. Beauty in Loneliness--After All
LVII. A Foggy Night and Morning--Conclusion

PREFACE

In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was
in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd," as they appeared
month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt
the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give
it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district
once included in that extinct kingdom. The series of novels I
projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to
require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their
scene. Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a
canvas large enough for this purpose, and that there were objections
to an invented name, I disinterred the old one. The press and the
public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly
joined me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living
under Queen Victoria;--a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post,
mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches,
labourers who could read and write, and National school children.
But I believe I am correct in stating that, until the existence of
this contemporaneous Wessex was announced in the present story, in
1874, it had never been heard of, and that the expression, "a Wessex
peasant," or "a Wessex custom," would theretofore have been taken to
refer to nothing later in date than the Norman Conquest.

I did not anticipate that this application of the word to a modern
use would extend outside the chapters of my own chronicles. But the
name was soon taken up elsewhere as a local designation. The first
to do so was the now defunct _Examiner_, which, in the impr