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"I don't speak so warm as that," said the hollow-turner, "but if 'tis right for couples to make a country talk about their separating, and excite the neighbors, and then make fools of 'em like this, why, I haven't stood upon one leg for five-and-twenty year."
Peeping out, she saw them bustling about, the hollow-turner among the rest; he was loading his wares wooden-bowls, dishes, spigots, spoons, cheese-vats, funnels, and so on upon one of her father's wagons, who carried them to the fair for him every year out of neighborly kindness.
"I can mind her mother," said the hollow-turner. "Always a teuny, delicate piece; her touch upon your hand was as soft and cool as wind. She was inoculated for the small-pox and had it beautifully fine, just about the time that I was out of my apprenticeship ay, and a long apprenticeship 'twas. I served that master of mine six years and three hundred and fourteen days."
But it was not heavy for its size; Mrs. Dollery herself carried it into the house. Tim Tangs, the hollow-turner, Bawtree, Suke Damson, and others, looked knowing, and made remarks to each other as they watched its entrance. Melbury stood at the door of the timber-shed in the attitude of a man to whom such an arrival was a trifling domestic detail with which he did not condescend to be concerned.
Perhaps you've noticed that she's got a pretty side to her face as well as a plain one? 'I can't say I've noticed it particular much, said the hollow-turner blandly. 'Well, continued Upjohn, not disconcerted, 'she has. All women under the sun be prettier one side than t'other. And, as I was saying, the pains she would take to make me walk on the pretty side were unending.
Hardy must have heard, with comfort in the thought of its literary possibilities, the following dialogue on the cleverness of women. It occurs in the last chapter of The Woodlanders. A man who is always spoken of as the 'hollow-turner, a phrase obviously descriptive of his line of business, which related to wooden bowls, spigots, cheese-vats, and funnels, talks with John Upjohn.
He wished he had not asked such people as Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty. In his mind's eye, before the event, they had been the mere background or padding of the scene, but somehow in reality they were the most prominent personages there.
The hollow-turner pronounced the days with emphasis, as if, considering their number, they were a rather more remarkable fact than the years. "Mr. Winterborne's father walked with her at one time," said old Timothy Tangs. "But Mr. Melbury won her. She was a child of a woman, and would cry like rain if so be he huffed her.
He told the men to light lanterns, and headed by himself they started, Creedle following at the last moment with quite a burden of grapnels and ropes, which he could not be persuaded to leave behind, and the company being joined by the hollow-turner and the man who kept the cider-house as they went along. They explored the precincts of the village, and in a short time lighted upon the man-trap.
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