It reminds one of Hardy, and then one remembers that when "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" appeared in the _Atlantic_, _The Return of the Native_ had for three months been running as a serial in _Harper's Monthly_, and that, somewhat later, _In the "Stranger-People's" Country_ and _Wessex Folk_ ran for months parallel in the same magazine. It is impossible not to think of Hardy as one reads _Where the Battle Was Fought_, 1884. The battle-field dominates the book as completely as does Egdon Heath _The Return of the Native_, and it dominates it in the same symbolic way: By wintry daylight the battle-field is still more ghastly. Gray with the pallid crab-grass which so eagerly usurps the place of the last summer's crops, it stretches out on every side to meet the bending sky. The armies that successively encamped upon it did not leave a tree for miles, but here and there thickets have sprung up since the war, and bare and black they intensify the gloom of the landscape. The turf in these segregated spots is never turned. Beneath the branches are rows of empty, yawning graves, where the bodies of soldiers were temporarily buried. Here, most often, their spirits walk, and no hire can induce the hardiest plowman to break the ground. Thus the owner of the land is fain to concede these acres to his ghostly tenants, who pay no rent. A great brick house, dismantled and desolate, rises starkly above the dismantled desolation of the plain. The title of the book--_Where the Battle Was Fought_--makes the battle-field central in the tragedy, and so it is with the short stories "'Way Down in Lonesome Cove" and "Drifting Down Lost Creek." Nature is always cognizant of the human tragedy enacted before it and always makes itself felt. In _The Juggler_, Tubal Cain Sims believes that murder has been done: "He sighed an' groaned like suthin' in agony. An' then he says, so painful, 'But the one who lives--oh, what can I do--the one who lives!'" He paused abruptly to mark the petrified astonishment on the group of faces growing white in the closing dusk. An owl began to hoot in the bosky recesses far up the slope. At the sound, carrying far in the twilight stillness, a hound bayed from the door of the little cabin in the Cove, by the river. A light, stellular in the gloom that hung about the lower levels, suddenly sprung up in the window. A tremulous elongated reflection shimmered in the shallows.