st time since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent
in thought and vigorous in action to a marked extent--conditions
which, powerless without an opportunity as an opportunity without
them is barren, would have given him a sure lift upwards when the
favourable conjunction should have occurred. But this incurable
loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously. The
spring tides were going by without floating him off, and the neap
might soon come which could not.

It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season
culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being
all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was
open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice.
God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone
with the world to town. Flossy catkins of the later kinds,
fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel,
the odd cuckoo-pint,--like an apoplectic saint in a niche of
malachite,--snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating
to human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, and the black-petaled
doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of the vegetable world
in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time; and of the animal,
the metamorphosed figures of Mr. Jan Coggan, the master-shearer; the
second and third shearers, who travelled in the exercise of their
calling, and do not require definition by name; Henery Fray the
fourth shearer, Susan Tall's husband the fifth, Joseph Poorgrass
the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer, and Gabriel Oak as
general supervisor. None of these were clothed to any extent worth
mentioning, each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment the
decent mean between a high and low caste Hindoo. An angularity of
lineament, and a fixity of facial machinery in general, proclaimed
that serious work was the order of the day.

They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the
Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with
transepts. It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church
of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity. Whether the barn had
ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings nobody seemed to
be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained. The vast porches
at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest
with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches of
stone, broadly and boldly c