“Jown the slippery glasses,” said Grandfer Cantle.  “What’s the good of a thing that you can’t put down in the ashes to warm, hey, neighbours; that’s what I ask?”

“Right, Grandfer,” said Sam; and the mead then circulated.

“Well,” said Timothy Fairway, feeling demands upon his praise in some form or other, “’tis a worthy thing to be married, Mr. Wildeve; and the woman you’ve got is a dimant, so says I. Yes,” he continued, to Grandfer Cantle, raising his voice so as to be heard through the partition, “her father (inclining his head towards the inner room) was as good a feller as ever lived.  He always had his great indignation ready against anything underhand.”

“Is that very dangerous?” said Christian.

“And there were few in these parts that were upsides with him,” said Sam.  “Whenever a club walked he’d play the clarinet in the band that marched before ’em as if he’d never touched anything but a clarinet all his life.  And then, when they got to church door he’d throw down the clarinet, mount the gallery, snatch up the bass-viol, and rozum away as if he’d never played anything but a bass-viol.  Folk would say—­folk that knowed what a true stave was—­’Surely, surely that’s never the same man that I saw handling the clarinet so masterly by now!”

“I can mind it,” said the furze-cutter. “’Twas a wonderful thing that one body could hold it all and never mix the fingering.”

“There was Kingsbere church likewise,” Fairway recommenced, as one opening a new vein of the same mine of interest.

Wildeve breathed the breath of one intolerably bored, and glanced through the partition at the prisoners.

“He used to walk over there of a Sunday afternoon to visit his old acquaintance Andrew Brown, the first clarinet there; a good man enough, but rather screechy in his music, if you can mind?”

“’A was.”

“And neighbour Yeobright would take Andrey’s place for some part of the service, to let Andrey have a bit of a nap, as any friend would naturally do.”

“As any friend would,” said Grandfer Cantle, the other listeners expressing the same accord by the shorter way of nodding their heads.

“No sooner was Andrey asleep and the first whiff of neighbour Yeobright’s wind had got inside Andrey’s clarinet than everyone in church feeled in a moment there was a great soul among ’em.  All heads would turn, and they’d say, ’Ah, I thought ‘twas he!’ One Sunday I can well mind—­a bass-viol day that time, and Yeobright had brought his own.  ’Twas the Hundred-and-thirty-third to ‘Lydia’; and when they’d come to ’Ran down his beard and o’er his robes its costly moisture shed,’ neighbour Yeobright, who had just warmed to his work, drove his bow into them strings that glorious grand that he e’en a’most sawed the bass-viol into two pieces.  Every winder in church rattled as if ’twere a thunderstorm.  Old Pa’son Williams lifted his hands in his great holy surplice as natural as if he’d been in common clothes, and seemed to say to hisself, ‘O for such a man in our parish!’ But not a soul in Kingsbere could hold a candle to Yeobright.”