(By THOMAS OF WESSEX, Author of “Guess how a Murder feels,” “The Cornet Minor,” “The Horse that Cast a Shoe,” “One in a Turret,” “The Foot of Ethel hurt her,” “The Flight of the Bivalve,” “Hard on the Gadding Crowd,” “A Lay o’ Deceivers,” &c.)

["I am going to give you,” writes the Author of this book, “one of my powerful and fascinating stories of life in modern Wessex.  It is well known, of course, that although I often write agricultural novels, I invariably call a spade a spade, and not an agricultural implement.  Thus I am led to speak in plain language of women, their misdoings, and their undoings.  Unstrained dialect is a speciality.  If you want to know the extent of Wessex, consult histories of the Heptarchy with maps.”]

CHAPTER I.

In our beautiful Blackmoor or Blakemore Vale, not far from the point where the Melchester Road turns sharply towards Icenhurst on its way to Wintoncester, having on one side the hamlet of Batton, on the other the larger town of Casterbridge, stands the farmhouse wherewith in this narrative we have to deal.  There for generations had dwelt the rustic family of the PEEPS, handing down from father to son a well-stocked cow-shed and a tradition of rural virtues which yet excluded not an overgreat affection on the male side for the home-brewed ale and the homemade language in which, as is known, the Wessex peasantry delights.  On this winter morning the smoke rose thinly into the still atmosphere, and faded there as though ashamed of bringing a touch of Thermidorean warmth into a degree of temperature not far removed from the zero-mark of the local Fahrenheit.  Within, a fire of good Wessex logs crackled cheerily upon the hearth.  Old ABRAHAM PEEP sat on one side of the fireplace, his figure yet telling a tale of former vigour.  On the other sat POLLY, his wife, an aimless, neutral, slatternly peasant woman, such as in these parts a man may find with the profusion of Wessex blackberries.  An empty chair between them spoke with all an empty chair’s eloquence of an absent inmate.  A butter-churn stood in a corner next to an ancient clock that had ticked away the mortality of many a past and gone PEEP.

CHAPTER II.

[Illustration:  {Bonduca Peep.}]

“Where be BONDUCA?” said ABRAHAM, shifting his body upon his chair so as to bring his wife’s faded tints better into view.  “Like enough she’s met in with that slack-twisted ’hor’s bird of a feller, TOM TATTERS.  And she’ll let the sheep draggle round the hills.  My soul, but I’d like to baste ’en for a poor slammick of a chap.”

Mrs. PEEP smiled feebly.  She had had her troubles.  Like other realities, they took on themselves a metaphysical mantle of infallibility, sinking to minor cerebral phenomena for quiet contemplation.  She had no notion how they did this.  And, it must be added, that they might, had they felt so disposed, have stood as pressing concretions which chafe body and soul—­a most disagreeable state of things, peculiar to the miserably passive existence of a Wessex peasant woman.