Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Chapter 1

Description of Farmer Oak: An incident.

" When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread, till they

were within an unimportant distance to his ears, his eyes were reduced

to mere chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending

upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the

rising sun.

His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man

of sound judgement, easy motions, proper dress and general good character.

On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to a postponing

treatment of things, whose best clothes and seven-and-six-penny

umbrella were always hampering him: up in the whole one who felt

himself to occupy morally the vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality

which lay between the Sacrament people of the parish and the drunken

divisions of its inhabitants - that is, he went to church, but yawned

privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed,

and thought of what there was for dinner when he meant to be listening

to the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public

opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums he was considered

rather a bad man; when they were pleased he was rather a good man;

when they were neither he was a man whose moral colour was a kind

of pepper and salt mixture."