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 ‘Well, ’tis quite true, sir, whether or no, I knowed the man well.’

‘Oh yes; I have no doubt of it,’ said the person behind the dun cow.

Tess’s attention was thus attracted to the dairyman’s interlocutor, of whom she could see but the merest patch, owing to his burying his head so persistently in the flank of the milcher. She could not understand why he should be addressed as ‘sir’ even by the dairyman himself. But no explanation was discernible; he remained under the cow long enough to have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation now and then, as if he could not get on.

‘Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle,’ said the dairyman, Tis knack, not strength, that does it.’

‘So I find,’ said the other, standing up at last and stretching his arms. ‘I think I have finished her, however, though she made my fingers ache.’

Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the ordinary white pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when milking, and his boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his local livery. Beneath