play at Casterbridge, for yer mouth were scrimped up and yer eyes a staring out like a strangled man's - just as they be now.'
`'Tis a pity that playing the flute should make a man look such a scarecrow, observed Mr Mark Clark, with additional criticism of Gabriel's countenance, the latter person jerking out, with the ghastly grimace required by the instrument, the chorus of `Dame Durden':--
`Twas Moll' and Bet', and Doll' and Kate',
And Dorothy Drag'-gle Tail'.
`I hope you don't mind that young man's bad manners in naming your features?' whispered Joseph to Gabriel.
`Not at all,' said Mr Oak.
`For by nature ye be a very handsome man, shepherd,' continued Joseph Poorgrass with winning suavity.
`Ay, that ye be, shepherd,' said the company.
`Thank you very much,' said Oak, in the modest tone good manners demanded, thinking, however, that he would never let Bathsheba see him playing the flute; in this resolve showing a discretion equal to that related of its sagacious inventress, the divine Minerva herself.
`Ah, when I and my wife were married at Norcombe Church,' said the old maltster, not pleased at finding himself left out of the subject, `we were called the handsomest couple in the neighbourhood everybody said so.'
`Danged if ye bain't altered now, malter,' said a voice with the vigour natural to the enunciation of a remarkable evident truism. It came from the old man in the background, whose offensiveness and spiteful ways were barely atoned for by the occasional chuckle he contributed to general laughs.
`O no, no,' said Gabriel.
`Don't ye play no more, shepherd,' said Susan Tall's husband, the young married man who had spoken once before. `I must be moving, and when there's tunes going on I seem as if hung in wires. If I thought after I'd left that music was still playing, and I not there, I should be quite melancholy-like.'
`What's yer hurry then, Laban?' inquired Coggan. `You used to bide as late as the latest.'
`Well, ye see, neighbours, I was lately married to a woman, and she's my vocation now, and so ye see--' The young man halted lamely.
`New lords new laws, as the saying is, I suppose,' remarked Coggan. `Ay, 'a b'lieve - ha, ha!' said Susan Tall's husband, in a tone intended to imply his habitual reception of jokes without minding them at all. The young man then wished them good-night and withdrew.
Henery Fray was the first to follow. Then Gabriel arose and went off with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging. A few minutes later, when the remaining ones were on their legs and about to depart, Fray came back again in a hurry. Flourishing his finger ominously he threw a gaze teeming with tidings just where his eye alighted by accident, which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass's face.
`O - what's the matter, what's the matter, Henery?' said Joseph, starting back.
`What's a-brewing, Henery?' asked Jacob and Mark Clark. `Baily Pennyways - Baily Pennyways - I said so; yes, I said so!'