to being snowed up on the downs, and the straits they were in through
having to make shift with whipcord and twine for strings. He was
generally a musician himself, and sometimes a composer in a small way,
bringing his own new tunes, and tempting each choir to adopt them for a
consideration. Some of these compositions which now lie before me, with
their repetitions of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their fugues and
their intermediate symphonies, are good singing still, though they would
hardly be admitted into such hymn-books as are popular in the churches of
fashionable society at the present time.

August 1896.

Under the Greenwood Tree was first brought out in the summer of 1872 in
two volumes. The name of the story was originally intended to be, more
appropriately, The Mellstock Quire, and this has been appended as a sub-
title since the early editions, it having been thought unadvisable to
displace for it the title by which the book first became known.

In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the
inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun were
material for another kind of study of this little group of church
musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so lightly, even so
farcically and flippantly at times. But circumstances would have
rendered any aim at a deeper, more essential, more transcendent handling
unadvisable at the date of writing; and the exhibition of the Mellstock
Quire in the following pages must remain the only extant one, except for
the few glimpses of that perished band which I have given in verse
elsewhere.

T. H.