forget this, and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any
inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside the pages of this and the
companion volumes in which they were first discovered.

Moreover, the village called Weatherbury, wherein the scenes of the
present story of the series are for the most part laid, would perhaps
be hardly discernible by the explorer, without help, in any existing
place nowadays; though at the time, comparatively recent, at which
the tale was written, a sufficient reality to meet the descriptions,
both of backgrounds and personages, might have been traced easily
enough. The church remains, by great good fortune, unrestored and
intact, and a few of the old houses; but the ancient malt-house,
which was formerly so characteristic of the parish, has been pulled
down these twenty years; also most of the thatched and dormered
cottages that were once lifeholds. The game of prisoner's base,
which not so long ago seemed to enjoy a perennial vitality in front
of the worn-out stocks, may, so far as I can say, be entirely unknown
to the rising generation of schoolboys there. The practice of
divination by Bible and key, the regarding of valentines as things of
serious import, the shearing-supper, and the harvest-home, have, too,
nearly disappeared in the wake of the old houses; and with them have
gone, it is said, much of that love of fuddling to which the village
at one time was notoriously prone. The change at the root of this
has been the recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers,
who carried on the local traditions and humours, by a population
of more or less migratory labourers, which has led to a break of
continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the
preservation of legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and
eccentric individualities. For these the indispensable conditions
of existence are attachment to the soil of one particular spot by