under the greenwood tree; or, the mellstock quire a rural painting of the dutch school

This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west–gallery musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar officials in Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters, and other places, is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of fifty or sixty years ago