We are now near a portion of the "Tess" locality, for a short distance to the right stands Norris Mill, the "Talbothays" of the novel, while the Frome Valley, in which it is situated, is the "Vale of Great Dairies", the "valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness". Here, too, is the western extremity of the far-famed "Egdon Heath", that succession of wild unenclosed moorlands that stretch in unbroken continuity from near Dorchester to Poole Harbour; but a description of this vast heathland must be deferred for the moment, for a short walk leads to Higher Bockhampton, a most charming and secluded hamlet, at the farther end of which is the birthplace of the Wessex novelist, a small thatched house embowered in a world of rural opulence. Mr. Hardy's childhood's days were impregnated with rustic peace and solitude, and the formative influences of his early environment have left their mark on his great romances. From the birthplace a most pleasant ramble over Bockhampton Heath leads into the Yellowham Woods, the "Great Yalbury" wood, in the depths of which Fancy Day resided when living in her father's cottage. Here, too, as told in _Far from the Madding Crowd_, Joseph Poorgrass had the experience, the re-telling of which always put this most modest of men to the blush. "Once he had been working late at Yalbury Bottom, and had had a drop of drink, and lost his way as he was coming home along through Yalbury Wood.... And as he was coming along in the middle of the night, much afeared, and not able to find his way out nohow, a' cried out, 'Man-a-lost! man-a-lost!' A owl in a tree happened to be crying 'whoo-whoo-whoo!' as owls do you know, Shepherd, and Joseph, all in a tremble, said, 'Joseph Poorgrass, of Weatherbury, sir!'" "No, no, now, that's too much," said the timid man.... "I didn't say _sir_ ... I never said _sir_ to the bird, knowing very well that no man of a gentleman's rank would be hollerin' there at that time o' night. 'Joseph Poorgrass, of Weatherbury,' that's every word I said, and I shouldn't ha' said that if't hadn't been for keeper Day's metheglin." Out on to the main road again, the same one that we left at Stinsford crossroads, a short walk past the little hamlet of Troy Town, and we enter Puddletown (strictly Piddleton, from the A.S. _piddle_, a small stream), the old home of the de Pydels, and the "Weatherbury" of romance. Occupying a prominent position facing the village square where used to stand the maypole, stocks, and Hundred house, is a thatched house with a projecting window supported on columns, which architects consider to be one of the finest Georgian windows in the country. This was, in the eighteenth century, the private residence of the Boswells.