l,
blushed a little. Clym saw nothing of this, and added good-humouredly--

"What shall we have to frighten Thomasin's baby with, now you have
become a human being again?"

"Sit down, Diggory," said Thomasin, "and stay to tea."

Venn moved as if he would retire to the kitchen, when Thomasin said with
pleasant pertness as she went on with some sewing, "Of course you must
sit down here. And where does your fifty-cow dairy lie, Mr. Venn?"

"At Stickleford--about two miles to the right of Alderworth, ma'am,
where the meads begin. I have thought that if Mr. Yeobright would like
to pay me a visit sometimes he shouldn't stay away for want of asking.
I'll not bide to tea this afternoon, thank'ee, for I've got something on
hand that must be settled. 'Tis Maypole-day tomorrow, and the Shadwater
folk have clubbed with a few of your neighbours here to have a pole just
outside your palings in the heath, as it is a nice green place." Venn
waved his elbow towards the patch in front of the house. "I have been
talking to Fairway about it," he continued, "and I said to him that
before we put up the pole it would be as well to ask Mrs. Wildeve."

"I can say nothing against it," she answered. "Our property does not
reach an inch further than the white palings."

"But you might not like to see a lot of folk going crazy round a stick,
under your very nose?"

"I shall have no objection at all."

Venn soon after went away, and in the evening Yeobright strolled as far
as Fairway's cottage. It was a lovely May sunset, and the birch trees
which grew on this margin of the vast Egdon wilderness had put on their
new leaves, delicate as butterflies' wings, and diaphanous as amber.
Beside Fairway's dwelling was an open space recessed from the road, and
here were now collected all the young people from within a radius of a
couple of miles. The pole lay with one end supported on a trestle,
and women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with
wild-flowers. The instincts of merry England lingered on here with
exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has
attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed,
the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still--in these
spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of
Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way
or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.

Yeobright did not interrupt t