Far from the Madding Crowd Ch. 2 Summary

Summary

On the eve of St Thomas's, the shortest day of the year, Gabriel Oak keeps watch over his ewes on Norcombe Hill. Hardy takes his time over the wind in the beeches and the colours of the stars before a flute begins to play, muffled, from a small shepherd's hut on wheels. Gabriel has only lately been called Farmer Oak. He has leased the sheep-farm and stocked it with two hundred sheep not yet paid for, so he tends the lambing himself. He carries a newborn lamb to the stove and is asleep on his sacks in the time a man unused to labour would take to choose which side to lie on.

The lamb's bleat wakes him at once. He returns it to its mother, reads the hour from the stars (one o'clock), and for a moment feels that the whole world has gone round to the sunny side and left him alone. Then he sees that what he took for a low star is a lamp. Through a hole in the roof of a tarred shed he looks down on two women and two cows, one of them ailing, and a day-old calf that stares at the lantern as if it were the moon. The older woman is frightened for Daisy. The younger, hooded in a cloak, yawns, wishes they could pay a man to do such work, and says her hat has blown over the hedge.

He cannot see her face, and so, Hardy says, he paints her a beauty. Then she lets the cloak fall. Black hair tumbles over a red jacket, and he knows her at once as the girl of the yellow waggon and the looking-glass, or, as he thinks of her more drily, the woman who owes him twopence. The women put the calf back with its mother and carry their lantern down the hill until it is a mere speck. Gabriel goes back to his flock.

In this chapter:Terms Characters Key Quotes Modern Story

Why This Matters

Telling Fact From Fancy

When you know little about a person, your mind fills the gap with a story that suits you. Gabriel, looking through a hole in a shed roof at a hooded woman whose face he cannot see, paints her a beauty, until she drops her cloak and he knows her as the girl of the yellow waggon.

Before you decide what someone is like, write down what you have actually seen them do, and mark what you have only imagined.

This chapter

Inside the Mind: Gabriel

He falls asleep the instant the lamb is warm, the way a town man would still be choosing a side. The hill, the flute, and the stove are not a mood. They are a mind that ends when the work ends. Later she will miss this man because nothing about him asks to be watched. The night already shows why.

Continue this thoughtOak Remains After the Lighting Changes

Coming Up in Chapter 3

At daybreak Gabriel returns to the plantation with a hat he has found in the ditch, and sees an auburn pony climbing the hill. The rider looks round to be sure no one is watching, then does something so odd beneath the low branches that Gabriel cannot bring himself to step forward and hand the hat back.

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Chapter 02

The Lantern in the Tarred Shed

NIGHT—THE FLOCK—AN INTERIOR—ANOTHER INTERIOR It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas’s, the shortest day in the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill whereon Oak had watched the yellow waggon and its occupant in the sunshine of a few days earlier. Norcombe Hill—not far from lonely Toller-Down—was one of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth. It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil—an ordinary specimen of those smoothly-outlined protuberances of…

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The Lantern in the Tarred Shed

Summary

Why This Matters