Far from the Madding Crowd

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

were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were

reduced to 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 judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good

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

postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the

whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space

of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of

the parish and the drunken section,--that is, he went to church, but

yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene

creed, and thought of what there would be 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.

Since he lived six times as many working-days as Sundays, Oak's

appearance in his old clothes was most peculiarly his own--the mental

picture formed by his neighbours in imagining him being always

dressed in that way. He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at

the base by tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds,

and a coat like Dr. Johnson's; his lower extremities being encased

in ordinary leather leggings and boots emphatically large, affording

to each foot a roomy apartment so constructed that any wearer might

stand in a river all day long and know nothing of damp--their maker

being a conscientious man who endeavoured to compensate for any

weakness in his cut by unstinted dimension and solidity.