diff --git a/quad/experimental.rkt b/quad/experimental.rkt index f7dc865b..7581616e 100644 --- a/quad/experimental.rkt +++ b/quad/experimental.rkt @@ -3,58 +3,56 @@ (require "samples.rkt" "quads.rkt" "utils.rkt") (define ti (block '(measure 54 leading 18) "Meg is " (box '(foo 42)) " ally.")) +(define tib (block '(measure 240 font "Equity Text B" leading 16 size 13.5 x-align justify x-align-last-line left) (block #f (block '(weight bold font "Equity Caps B") "Hello") (block-break) (box '(width 15))))) ;ti - -(define (tokenize-quad0 q) - (define-values (all-tokens last-tidx) - (let loop ([q q][starting-tidx 0]) - (for/fold ([token-list empty][tidx starting-tidx]) - ([item (in-list (quad-list q))]) - (cond - [(quad? item) - (define-values (sub-token-list sub-last-tidx) (loop item tidx)) - (values (cons sub-token-list token-list) sub-last-tidx)] - [(string? item) - (define atoms (regexp-match* #rx"." item)) - (values (cons atoms token-list) (+ tidx (length atoms)))] - [else (values (cons item token-list) (+ tidx 1))])))) - (values (list->vector (flatten (reverse all-tokens))) last-tidx)) - - (define (tokenize-quad quad-in) - (define-values (all-tokens all-attrs last-tidx) + (define-values (all-tokens all-attrs _) (let loop ([current-quad quad-in][attr-acc empty][starting-tidx 0]) (cond - [(empty? (quad-list current-quad)) ; no subelements, so treat this quad as single token - (values (quad (quad-name current-quad) #f empty) - (if (quad-attrs current-quad) - (cons (vector (quad-attrs current-quad) starting-tidx (add1 starting-tidx)) attr-acc) - attr-acc) - (add1 starting-tidx))] + [(empty? (quad-list current-quad)); no subelements, so treat this quad as single token + (let ([current-quad-attrs (quad-attrs current-quad)] + [ending-tidx (add1 starting-tidx)]) + (values (quad (quad-name current-quad) #f empty) + (if current-quad-attrs + (cons (vector current-quad-attrs starting-tidx ending-tidx) attr-acc) + attr-acc) + ending-tidx))] [else ; replace quad with its tokens, exploded - (define-values (tokens-from-fold subattrs-from-fold last-tidx-from-fold) + (define-values (tokens-from-fold subattrs-from-fold ending-tidx-from-fold) (for/fold ([token-acc empty][subattr-acc empty][tidx starting-tidx]) ([item (in-list (quad-list current-quad))]) (cond [(quad? item) (define-values (sub-tokens sub-attrs sub-last-tidx) (loop item attr-acc tidx)) (values (cons sub-tokens token-acc) (cons sub-attrs subattr-acc) sub-last-tidx)] - [(string? item) - (define atoms (regexp-match* #rx"." item)) - (values (cons atoms token-acc) subattr-acc (+ tidx (length atoms)))] - [else - (values (cons item token-acc) subattr-acc (+ tidx 1))]))) + [else ; item is a string of length > 0 (quad contract guarantees this) + (define-values (exploded-chars last-idx-of-exploded-chars) + (for/fold ([chars empty][last-idx #f])([(c i) (in-indexed item)]) + (values (cons c chars) i))) ; fold manually to get reversed items & length at same time + (values (cons exploded-chars token-acc) subattr-acc (+ tidx (add1 last-idx-of-exploded-chars)))]))) (values tokens-from-fold - (if (quad-attrs current-quad) - (cons (vector (quad-attrs current-quad) starting-tidx last-tidx-from-fold) subattrs-from-fold) - subattrs-from-fold) - last-tidx-from-fold)]))) - (values (list->vector (flatten (reverse all-tokens))) (flatten (reverse all-attrs)))) + (let ([current-quad-attrs (quad-attrs current-quad)]) + (if current-quad-attrs + (cons (vector current-quad-attrs starting-tidx ending-tidx-from-fold) subattrs-from-fold) + subattrs-from-fold)) + ending-tidx-from-fold)]))) + (values (list->vector (reverse (flatten all-tokens))) (flatten all-attrs))) + + +(define-values (tokens attrs) (time (tokenize-quad (ti5)))) +(define current-tokens (make-parameter tokens)) +(define current-token-attrs (make-parameter attrs)) + +;(filter (λ(idx) (box? (vector-ref tokens idx))) (range (vector-length tokens))) + +(define (attr-ref-hash a) (vector-ref a 0)) +(define (attr-ref-start a) (vector-ref a 1)) +(define (attr-ref-end a) (vector-ref a 2)) +(define (calc-attrs tref) + (map attr-ref-hash (filter (λ(attr) (<= (attr-ref-start attr) tref (sub1 (attr-ref-end attr)))) (current-token-attrs)))) -(define-values (tokens attrs) (tokenize-quad (ti2))) -tokens -attrs -(filter (λ(idx) (box? (vector-ref tokens idx))) (range (vector-length tokens))) +(vector-ref tokens 4) +(time (calc-attrs 4)) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/quad/quads.rkt b/quad/quads.rkt index 8a91aa06..32578d16 100644 --- a/quad/quads.rkt +++ b/quad/quads.rkt @@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ (define (quad-name? x) (symbol? x)) (define (hashable-list? x) (and (list? x) (even? (length x)))) (define (quad-attrs? x) (or (false? x) (hash? x))) -(define (quad-list? x) (and (list? x) (andmap (λ(xi) (or (quad? xi) (string? xi))) x))) +(define (quad-list? x) (and (list? x) (andmap (λ(xi) (or (quad? xi) (and (string? xi) (< 0 (string-length xi))))) x))) (define (quads? x) (and (list? x) (andmap quad? x))) (define (lists-of-quads? x) (and (list? x) (andmap quads? x))) diff --git a/quad/samples.rkt b/quad/samples.rkt index a62491b4..f0757800 100644 --- a/quad/samples.rkt +++ b/quad/samples.rkt @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ (define (ti4) (block '(measure 300 x-align justify x-align-last-line right leading 18) "In this Madagascarian hoo-ha, Racket isn’t exactly a language at all")) -(define (ti5) (block '(measure 240 font "Equity Text B" leading 16 size 13.5 x-align justify x-align-last-line left) (box '(width 15)) (block #f (block '(weight bold font "Equity Caps B") "Hotdogs, My Fellow Americans.") " This " (block '(no-break #t) "is some truly") " bullshit generated from my typesetting system, which is called Quad. I’m writing this in a source file in DrRacket. When I click [Run], a PDF pops out. Not bad\u200a—\u200aand no LaTeX needed. Quad, however, does use the fancy linebreaking algorithm developed for TeX. (It also includes a faster linebreaking algorithm for when speed is more important than quality.) Of course, it can also handle " (block '(font "Triplicate C4") "different fonts,") (block '(style italic) " styles, ") (word '(size 14 weight bold) "and sizes-") " within the same line. As you can see, it can also justify paragraphs." (block-break) (box '(width 15)) (block #f "“Each horizontal row represents an OS-level thread, and the colored dots represent important events in the execution of the program (they are color-coded to distinguish one event type from another). The upper-left blue dot in the timeline represents the future’s creation. The future executes for a brief period (represented by a green bar in the second line) on thread 1, and then pauses to allow the runtime thread to perform a future-unsafe operation.") (block-break) (box '(width 15))(block #f "In the Racket implementation, future-unsafe operations fall into one of two categories. A blocking operation halts the evaluation of the future, and will not allow it to continue until it is touched. After the operation completes within touch, the remainder of the future’s work will be evaluated sequentially by the runtime thread. A synchronized operation also halts the future, but the runtime thread may perform the operation at any time and, once completed, the future may continue running in parallel. Memory allocation and JIT compilation are two common examples of synchronized operations.")))) +(define (ti5) (block '(measure 240 font "Equity Text B" leading 16 size 13.5 x-align justify x-align-last-line left) (box '(width 15)) (block #f (block '(weight bold font "Equity Caps B") "Hot" (word '(size 22) "Z") "ogs, My Fellow Americans.") " This " (block '(no-break #t) "is some truly") " bullshit generated from my typesetting system, which is called Quad. I’m writing this in a source file in DrRacket. When I click [Run], a PDF pops out. Not bad\u200a—\u200aand no LaTeX needed. Quad, however, does use the fancy linebreaking algorithm developed for TeX. (It also includes a faster linebreaking algorithm for when speed is more important than quality.) Of course, it can also handle " (block '(font "Triplicate C4") "different fonts,") (block '(style italic) " styles, ") (word '(size 14 weight bold) "and sizes-") " within the same line. As you can see, it can also justify paragraphs." (block-break) (box '(width 15)) (block #f "“Each horizontal row represents an OS-level thread, and the colored dots represent important events in the execution of the program (they are color-coded to distinguish one event type from another). The upper-left blue dot in the timeline represents the future’s creation. The future executes for a brief period (represented by a green bar in the second line) on thread 1, and then pauses to allow the runtime thread to perform a future-unsafe operation.") (block-break) (box '(width 15))(block #f "In the Racket implementation, future-unsafe operations fall into one of two categories. A blocking operation halts the evaluation of the future, and will not allow it to continue until it is touched. After the operation completes within touch, the remainder of the future’s work will be evaluated sequentially by the runtime thread. A synchronized operation also halts the future, but the runtime thread may perform the operation at any time and, once completed, the future may continue running in parallel. Memory allocation and JIT compilation are two common examples of synchronized operations.")))) (define (ti6) (block '(font "Equity Text B" measure 210 leading 14 size 20 x-align justify x-align-last-line left) "Firstlinerhere" (column-break) "Secondlinerhere" (column-break) "Thirdlinerhere")) @@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ (string-join (take lines (min line-limit (length lines))) "\n")) (file->string jude-text))) (define jude-blocks (map (λ(s) (regexp-replace* #rx"\n" s " ")) (string-split sample-string "\n\n"))) - (apply block '(font "Equity Text B" measure 360 leading 14 column-count 1 column-gutter 10 size 11.5 x-align justify x-align-last-line left) (add-between (map (λ(jb) (block #f (box '(width 10)) (optical-kern) jb)) jude-blocks) (block-break)))) + (apply block '(font "Equity Text B" measure 360 leading 14 column-count 1 column-gutter 10 size 11.5 x-align justify x-align-last-line left) (add-between (map (λ(jb) (block #f (box '(width 10)) (optical-kern) jb)) (filter (λ(jb) (< 0 (string-length jb))) jude-blocks)) (block-break)))) (define (jude) (make-sample "texts/jude.txt")) (define (jude0) (make-sample "texts/jude0.txt")) diff --git a/quad/texts/judebig.txt b/quad/texts/judebig.txt index 2595abde..12b82503 100644 --- a/quad/texts/judebig.txt +++ b/quad/texts/judebig.txt @@ -12195,15357 +12195,3 @@ graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years. - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down. - - -The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. -The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and -horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty -miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the -departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly -furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed -by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a -cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in -which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm -having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the -purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in -moving house. - -The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the -sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when -the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and -everything would be smooth again. - -The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were -standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. -The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he -should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, -the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary -lodgings just at first. - -A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the -packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he -spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a -great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve -found a place to settle in, sir.” - -“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith. - -It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an -old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till -Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started -to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy -and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. - -“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly. - -Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day -scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, -but one who had attended the night school only during the present -teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must -be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic -disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. - -The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. -Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that -he was sorry. - -“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson. - -“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy. - -“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, -Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.” - -“I think I should now, sir.” - -“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university -is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man -who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be -a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at -Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, -and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the -spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should -have elsewhere.” - -The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house -was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give -the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in -the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for -removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round. - -The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine -o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other -impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye. - -“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. -“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read -all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt -me out for old acquaintance’ sake.” - -The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner -by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge -of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help -his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip -now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he -paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, -his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the -pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was -looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present -position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining -disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. -There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the -hart’s-tongue fern. - -He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, -that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a -morning like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen -him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I -do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! -But he was too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place -like this!” - -A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning -was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as -a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were -interrupted by a sudden outcry: - -“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!” - -It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the -garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly -waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort -for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his -own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started -with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well -stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet -of Marygreen. - -It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of -an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it -was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local -history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched -and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and -many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, -hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken -down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or -utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and -rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it -a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English -eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain -obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back -in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to -the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level -grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated -graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses -warranted to last five years. - - - -II - - -Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming -house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door -was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted -in yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead -panes of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were -five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow -pattern. - -While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an -animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, -the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having -seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of -the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. - -“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy -entered. - -“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since -you was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, -gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and -gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come -from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck -for ‘n, Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, -and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you -know, Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing -if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor -useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see -what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any -penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. -It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she -continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps -upon his face, moved aside. - -The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of -Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him -with her—”to kip ‘ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet -the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.” - -Miss Fawley doubted it.... “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to -take ‘ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ‘ee,” she -continued, in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a -better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our -family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but -I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this -place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her -husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for -some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go -into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ‘Tisn’t for the -Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like -a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little -maid should know such changes!” - -Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went -out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his -breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging -from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a -path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the -general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This -vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer, -and he descended into the midst of it. - -The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all -round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the -actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the -uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing -in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and -the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he -hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. - -“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. - -The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in -a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the -expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history -beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone -there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of -songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy -deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, -of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of -gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches -that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there -between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the -field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers -who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; -and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to -a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after -fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor -the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, -possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and -in the other that of a granary good to feed in. - -The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds -used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off -pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished -like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him -warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. - -He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart -grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like -himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should -he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of -gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as -being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often -told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted -anew. - -“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You SHALL have some dinner— -you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford -to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a -good meal!” - -They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude -enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his -own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much -resembled his own. - -His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean -and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself -as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow -upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his -surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence -used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed -eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham -himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the -clacker swinging in his hand. - -“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear -birdies,’ indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, -‘Eat, dear birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the -schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s -how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!” - -Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham -had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim -frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts -with the flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with -the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. - -“Don’t ‘ee, sir—please don’t ‘ee!” cried the whirling child, as -helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked -fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the -plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an -amazing circular race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good -crop in the ground—I saw ‘em sow it—and the rooks could have a -little bit for dinner—and you wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. -Phillotson said I was to be kind to ‘em—oh, oh, oh!” - -This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more -than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still -smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing -to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant -workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business -of clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new -church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which -structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for -God and man. - -Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing -the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and -gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and -never let him see him in one of those fields again. - -Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway -weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the -perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was -good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful -sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year -in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for -life. - -With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the -village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge -and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms -lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as -they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was -impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them -at each tread. - -Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not -himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of -young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and -often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next -morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, -from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up -and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his -infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested -that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before -the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that -all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe -among the earthworms, without killing a single one. - -On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a -little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do -you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?” - -“I’m turned away.” - -“What?” - -“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few -peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!” - -He threw the sixpence tragically on the table. - -“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him -a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands -doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! -don’t ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than -myself, come to that. But ‘tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are -younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have -disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my -father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ‘ee -go to work for ‘n, which I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ‘ee out of -mischty.” - -More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for -dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view, -and only secondarily from a moral one. - -“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham -planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t -go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? -But, oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy -side of the family, and never will be!” - -“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson -is gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence. - -“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a -score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever -to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.” - -“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?” - -“How can I tell?” - -“Could I go to see him?” - -“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as -that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor -folk in Christminster with we.” - -Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an -undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near -the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and -the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his -straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the -plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up -brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as -he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. -That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another -sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself -to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its -circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized -with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed -to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares -hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped -it. - -If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a -man. - -Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. -During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the -afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the -village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay. - -“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin -there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.” - -The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that -field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something -unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness -of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The -farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet -Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, -stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which -had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch -from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the -other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of -trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak -open down.