Flossy catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint,--like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite,--snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, and the black-petaled doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of the vegetable world in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time; and of the animal, the metamorphosed figures of Mr.Jan Coggan, the master-shearer; the second and third shearers, who travelled in the exercise of their calling, and do not require definition by name; Henery Fray the fourth shearer, Susan Tall's husband the fifth, Joseph Poorgrass the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer, and Gabriel Oak as general supervisor.

None of these were clothed to any extent worth mentioning, each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment the decent mean between a high and low caste Hindoo.

An angularity of lineament, and a fixity of facial machinery in general, proclaimed that serious work was the order of the day.
They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with transepts.

It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity.

Whether the barn had ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings nobody seemed to be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained.