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To do things musingly, and by small degrees, seemed, indeed, to be a duty in the Egdon valleys at this transitional hour, for there was that in the condition of the heath itself which resembled protracted and halting dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose appertaining to the scene. This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but the apparent repose of incredible slowness.
"What do you want, Charley?" "Please will your grandfather lend us his fuelhouse to try over our parts in, tonight at seven o'clock?" "What, are you one of the Egdon mummers for this year?" "Yes, miss. The cap'n used to let the old mummers practise here." "I know it. Yes, you may use the fuelhouse if you like," said Eustacia languidly.
Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.
I am going from home this afternoon, unless you greatly object. There is to be a village picnic a gipsying, they call it at East Egdon, and I shall go." "To dance?" "Why not? You can sing." "Well, well, as you will. Must I come to fetch you?" "If you return soon enough from your work. But do not inconvenience yourself about it. I know the way home, and the heath has no terror for me."
Here the local barbering was always done at this hour on this day, to be followed by the great Sunday wash of the inhabitants at noon, which in its turn was followed by the great Sunday dressing an hour later. On Egdon Heath Sunday proper did not begin till dinner-time, and even then it was a somewhat battered specimen of the day.
In a neighbouring brake a finch was trying to sing; but the wind blew under his feathers till they stood on end, twisted round his little tail, and made him give up his song. Yet a few yards to Yeobright's left, on the open heath, how ineffectively gnashed the storm! Those gusts which tore the trees merely waved the furze and heather in a light caress. Egdon was made for such times as these.
"What is it?" he continued when they stood within. "I have lost my way coming from Blooms-End, and I am in a great hurry to get home. Please show me as quickly as you can! It is so silly of me not to know Egdon better, and I cannot think how I came to lose the path. Show me quickly, Diggory, please." "Yes, of course. I will go with 'ee. But you came to me before this, Mrs. Wildeve?"
There was no middle distance in her perspective romantic recollections of sunny afternoons on an esplanade, with military bands, officers, and gallants around, stood like gilded letters upon the dark tablet of surrounding Egdon. Every bizarre effect that could result from the random intertwining of watering-place glitter with the grand solemnity of a heath, was to be found in her.
To keep a cottage night-school was one such form; and his affliction did not master his spirit as it might otherwise have done. He walked through the warm sun westward into those tracts of Egdon with which he was best acquainted, being those lying nearer to his old home.
The strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down.
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