is
was true. Anyhow, Mop had, very obviously, never bowed a note of church-
music from his birth; he never once sat in the gallery of Mellstock
church where the others had tuned their venerable psalmody so many
hundreds of times; had never, in all likelihood, entered a church at all.
All were devil's tunes in his repertory. 'He could no more play the Wold
Hundredth to his true time than he could play the brazen serpent,' the
tranter would say. (The brazen serpent was supposed in Mellstock to be a
musical instrument particularly hard to blow.)

Occasionally Mop could produce the aforesaid moving effect upon the souls
of grown-up persons, especially young women of fragile and responsive
organization. Such an one was Car'line Aspent. Though she was already
engaged to be married before she met him, Car'line, of them all, was the
most influenced by Mop Ollamoor's heart-stealing melodies, to her
discomfort, nay, positive pain and ultimate injury. She was a pretty,
invocating, weak-mouthed girl, whose chief defect as a companion with her
sex was a tendency to peevishness now and then. At this time she was not
a resident in Mellstock parish where Mop lodged, but lived some miles off
at Stickleford, farther down the river.

How and where she first made acquaintance with him and his fiddling is
not truly known, but the story was that it either began or was developed
on one spring evening, when, in passing through Lower Mellstock, she
chanced to pause on the bridge near his house to rest herself, and
languidly leaned over the parapet. Mop was standing on his door-step, as
was his custom, spinning the insidious thread of semi- and
demi-semi-quavers from the E string of his fiddle for the benefit of
passers-by, and laughing as the tears rolled down the cheeks of the
little children hanging around him. Car'line pretended to be engrossed
with the rippling of the stream under the arches, but in reality she was
listening, as he knew. Presently the aching of the heart seized her
simultaneously with a wild desire to glide airily in the mazes of an
infinite dance. To shake off the fascination she resolved to go on,
although it would be necessary to pass him as he played. On stealthily
glancing ahead at the performer, she found to her relief that his eyes
were closed in abandonment to instrumentation, and she strode on boldly.
But when closer her step grew timid, her tread convulsed itself more and
more accordantly with the tim