Page:Under the greenwood tree (1872 Volume 1).pdf/21

nary neck, and ordinary shoulders. What he consisted of farther down as invisible from lack of sky low enough to picture him on.

Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds were now heard, coming up the hill from the dark interior of the grove, and presently there emerged severally five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working villagers of the parish of Mellstock. They too had lost their rotundity with the daylight, and advanced against the sky in flat outlines, like some procession in Assyrian or Egyptian incised work. They represented the chief portion of Mellstock parish choir.

The first was a bowed and bent man, who carried a fiddle under his arm, and walked as if engaged in studying some subject connected with the surface of the road. He was Michael Mail, the man who had hallooed to Dick.

The next was Mr. Robert Penny, boot-