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 ‘You should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best.’

Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to the dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in the shape of ‘Why?’ came as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had been spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto perceived.

‘Oh yes; there’s nothing like a fiddle,’ said the dairyman. ‘Though I do think that bulls are more moved by a tune than cows—at least that’s my experience. Once there was a old aged man over at Mellstock—William Dewy by name—one of the family that used to do a good deal of business as tranters over there, Jonathan, do ye mind?—I knowed the man by sight as well as I know my own brother, in a manner of speaking. Well, this man was a coming home along from a wedding where he had been playing his fiddle, one fine moonlight night, and for shortness’ sake he took a cut across Forty-acres, a field lying that way, where a bull was out to grass. The bull seed William, and took after him, horns aground, begad; and though William runned his