“Nine folks out of ten would own ’twas going too far to dance then, I suppose?” suggested Grandfer Cantle.

“’Tis the only sort of party a staid man can feel safe at after the mug have been round a few times.”

“Well, I can’t understand a quiet lady-like little body like Tamsin Yeobright caring to be married in such a mean way,” said Susan Nunsuch, the wide woman, who preferred the original subject. “’Tis worse than the poorest do.  And I shouldn’t have cared about the man, though some may say he’s good-looking.”

“To give him his due he’s a clever, learned fellow in his way—­a’most as clever as Clym Yeobright used to be.  He was brought up to better things than keeping the Quiet Woman.  An engineer—­that’s what the man was, as we know; but he threw away his chance, and so ’a took a public house to live.  His learning was no use to him at all.”

“Very often the case,” said Olly, the besom-maker.  “And yet how people do strive after it and get it!  The class of folk that couldn’t use to make a round O to save their bones from the pit can write their names now without a sputter of the pen, oftentimes without a single blot:  what do I say?—­why, almost without a desk to lean their stomachs and elbows upon.”

“True:  ’tis amazing what a polish the world have been brought to,” said Humphrey.

“Why, afore I went a soldier in the Bang-up Locals (as we was called), in the year four,” chimed in Grandfer Cantle brightly, “I didn’t know no more what the world was like than the commonest man among ye.  And now, jown it all, I won’t say what I bain’t fit for, hey?”

“Couldst sign the book, no doubt,” said Fairway, “if wast young enough to join hands with a woman again, like Wildeve and Mis’ess Tamsin, which is more than Humph there could do, for he follows his father in learning.  Ah, Humph, well I can mind when I was married how I zid thy father’s mark staring me in the face as I went to put down my name.  He and your mother were the couple married just afore we were and there stood they father’s cross with arms stretched out like a great banging scarecrow.  What a terrible black cross that was—­thy father’s very likeness in en!  To save my soul I couldn’t help laughing when I zid en, though all the time I was as hot as dog-days, what with the marrying, and what with the woman a-hanging to me, and what with Jack Changley and a lot more chaps grinning at me through church window.  But the next moment a strawmote would have knocked me down, for I called to mind that if thy father and mother had had high words once, they’d been at it twenty times since they’d been man and wife, and I zid myself as the next poor stunpoll to get into the same mess...  Ah—­well, what a day ’twas!”

“Wildeve is older than Tamsin Yeobright by a goodfew summers.  A pretty maid too she is.  A young woman with a home must be a fool to tear her smock for a man like that.”

The speaker, a peat or turf-cutter, who had newly joined the group, carried across his shoulder the singular heart-shaped spade of large dimensions used in that species of labour; and its well-whetted edge gleamed like a silver bow in the beams of the fire.