Far from the Madding Crowd

**"Mistress and Men"** Bathsheba enters the old hall in finished dress, Liddy at her elbow, and sits at the wages table with a canvas money-bag and a time-book. She has two announcements: the bailiff is dismissed for theft, and she will manage everything herself. "The men breathed an audible breath of amazement." Then she pays wages. Hardy turns the scene into a portrait gallery. Joseph Poorgrass, asked what he does on the farm, says he does "carting things all the year" and helps at pig-killing, adding in a tone of mild grandiosity that in other people's eyes he is the "personal name of Poorgrass." Andrew Randle can curse fluently but cannot form a plain sentence -- turned away from his last place for saying, in a rare moment of coherence, that his soul was his own. Laban Tall says he'll serve whoever pays him well, until his wife arrives from the back of the room to answer for him. Cain Ball -- his mother confused Cain and Abel at the christening and the error could never be undone -- is introduced by Henery Fray with solemn regret. Gabriel appears in the doorway and is assigned Cain as under-shepherd. Bathsheba speaks to him with complete professional coolness -- as if they had never met. Hardy notes that this is the inevitable effect of the social rise that has advanced her from a cottage to a large house and fields. William Smallbury returns from Casterbridge: the Eleventh Dragoon-Guards have been moved on sudden government orders, playing "The Girl I Left Behind Me" through town. Fanny's soldier was among them; nobody knows his name. Bathsheba closes the meeting with a declaration: she will be up before them, afield before them, breakfasted before them. "I shall astonish you all." She steps from the table and "surged out of the hall, her black silk dress licking up a few straws."