Greek sculpture, and especially in the total loss of its nose. Near it
there is a little chair, and the butt end of a boy's leather long-lashed
whip.

The history of the house is plain now. It was once the residence of
a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere
spinsterhood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It
was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some
coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the
genteel streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks and warehouses
busy and resonant, the life at the Hall has changed its focus, and no
longer radiates from the parlour, but from the kitchen and the farmyard.

Plenty of life there, though this is the drowsiest time of the year,
just before hay-harvest; and it is the drowsiest time of the day too,
for it is close upon three by the sun, and it is half-past three by Mrs.
Poyser's handsome eight-day clock. But there is always a stronger sense
of life when the sun is brilliant after rain; and now he is pouring
down his beams, and making sparkles among the wet straw, and lighting
up every patch of vivid green moss on the red tiles of the cow-shed, and
turning even the muddy water that is hurrying along the channel to the
drain into a mirror for the yellow-billed ducks, who are seizing the
opportunity of getting a drink with as much body in it as possible.
There is quite a concert of noises; the great bull-dog, chained against
the stables, is thrown into furious exasperation by the unwary approach
of a cock too near the mouth of his kennel, and sends forth a thundering
bark, which is answered by two fox-hounds shut up in the opposite
cow-house; the old top-knotted hens, scratching with their chicks among
the straw, set up a sympathetic croaking as the discomfited cock joins
them; a sow with her brood, all very muddy as to the legs, and curled as