“Don’t you be so sure o’ that.  From you nater ’tis my belief you’ve disgraced yourselves more than any o’ us, and was kings and queens outright at one time.”

Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her own mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry—­“I am afraid father won’t be able to take the journey with the beehives to-morrow so early.”

“I?  I shall be all right in an hour or two,” said Durbeyfield.

It was eleven o’clock before the family were all in bed, and two o’clock next morning was the latest hour for starting with the beehives if they were to be delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before the Saturday market began, the way thither lying by bad roads over a distance of between twenty and thirty miles, and the horse and waggon being of the slowest.  At half-past one Mrs Durbeyfield came into the large bedroom where Tess and all her little brothers and sisters slept.

“The poor man can’t go,” she said to her eldest daughter, whose great eyes had opened the moment her mother’s hand touched the door.

Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a dream and this information.

“But somebody must go,” she replied.  “It is late for the hives already.  Swarming will soon be over for the year; and it we put off taking ’em till next week’s market the call for ’em will be past, and they’ll be thrown on our hands.”

Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency.  “Some young feller, perhaps, would go?  One of them who were so much after dancing with ’ee yesterday,” she presently suggested.

“O no—­I wouldn’t have it for the world!” declared Tess proudly.  “And letting everybody know the reason—­such a thing to be ashamed of!  I think I could go if Abraham could go with me to kip me company.”

Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement.  Little Abraham was aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the same apartment, and made to put on his clothes while still mentally in the other world.  Meanwhile Tess had hastily dressed herself; and the twain, lighting a lantern, went out to the stable.  The rickety little waggon was already laden, and the girl led out the horse, Prince, only a degree less rickety than the vehicle.

The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night, at the lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not believe that at that hour, when every living thing was intended to be in shelter and at rest, he was called upon to go out and labour.  They put a stock of candle-ends into the lantern, hung the latter to the off-side of the load, and directed the horse onward, walking at his shoulder at first during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to overload an animal of so little vigour.  To cheer themselves as well as they could, they made an artificial morning with the lantern, some bread and butter, and their own conversation, the real morning being far from come.  Abraham, as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a sort of trance so far), began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head.