‘’Twas on a frosty night in Christmas week, and among the folk invited were the said Hardcomes o’ Climmerston—Steve and James—first cousins, both of them small farmers, just entering into business on their own account.  With them came, as a matter of course, their intended wives, two young women of the neighbourhood, both very pretty and sprightly¹ maidens², and numbers of friends from Abbot’s-Cernel, and Weatherbury, and Mellstock, and I don’t know where—a regular houseful.

 

‘The kitchen was cleared of furniture for dancing, and the old folk played at “Put” and “All-fours” in the parlour, though at last they gave that up to join in the dance.  The top of the figure was by the large front window of the room, and there were so many couples that the lower part of the figure reached through the door at the back, and into the darkness of the out-house; in fact, you couldn’t see the end of the row at all, and ’twas never known exactly how long that dance was, the lowest couples being lost among the faggots and brushwood in the out-house.

 

‘When we had danced a few hours, and the crowns of we taller men were swelling³ into lumps with bumping the beams of the ceiling, the first fiddler laid down his fiddle-bow, and said he should play no more, for he wished to dance.  And in another hour the second fiddler laid down his, and said he wanted to dance too; so there was only the third fiddler left, and he was a’ old, veteran man, very weak in the wrist.  However, he managed to keep up a faltering⁴ tweedle-dee; but there being no chair in the room, and his knees being as weak as his wrists, he was obliged to sit upon as much of the little corner-table as projected beyond the corner-cupboard fixed⁵ over it, which was not a very wide seat for a man advanced in years.

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