The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Trumpet-Major, by Thomas Hardy

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Title: The Trumpet-Major

Author: Thomas Hardy

Release Date: October 18, 2007 [eBook #2864]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRUMPET-MAJOR***

This etext was prepared by Les Bowler.

THE TRUMPET-MAJOR
JOHN LOVEDAY

A SOLDIER IN THE WAR WITH BUONAPARTE
AND
ROBERT HIS BROTHER
FIRST MATE IN THE MERCHANT SERVICE

A TALE

BY
THOMAS HARDY

WITH A MAP OF WESSEX

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1920

COPYRIGHT

_First Edition_ (3 _vols._) 1880. _New Edition_ (1 _vol._) _and
reprints_ 1881-1893
_New Edition and reprints_ 1896-1900
_First published by Macmillan and Co._, _Crown_ 8_vo_, 1903. _Reprinted_
1906, 1910, 1914
_Pocket Edition_ 1907. _Reprinted_ 1909, 1912, 1915, 1917, 1919, 1920

PREFACE

The present tale is founded more largely on testimony--oral and
written--than any other in this series. The external incidents which
direct its course are mostly an unexaggerated reproduction of the
recollections of old persons well known to the author in childhood, but
now long dead, who were eye-witnesses of those scenes. If wholly
transcribed their recollections would have filled a volume thrice the
length of 'The Trumpet-Major.'

Down to the middle of this century, and later, there were not wanting, in
the neighbourhood of the places more or less clearly indicated herein,
casual relics of the circumstances amid which the action moves--our
preparations for defence against the threatened invasion of England by
Buonaparte. An outhouse door riddled with bullet-holes, which had been
extemporized by a solitary man as a target for firelock practice when the
landing was hourly expected, a heap of bricks and clods on a beacon-hill,
which had formed the chimney and walls of the hut occupied by the beacon-
keeper, worm-eaten shafts and iron heads of pikes for the use of those
who had no better weapons, ridges on the down thrown up during the
encampment, fragments of volunteer uniform, and other such lingering
remains, brought to my imagination in early ch