It will be noticed in some of Hardy's novels that the name of a village or town will often crop up in the name of a character, as, for instance, Jude Fawley living in Marygreen, which may be identified with the village of Fawley Magna, in Berkshire; and the name of the schoolmaster of Leddenton, really the village of Gillingham, near Shaftesbury, is Gillingham. It was at Fawley Magna church that Phillotson and Sue were married after she had parted from Jude: "A tall new building of German Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by ninepenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years." The unusual way in which the town of Dorchester met in one line with the open country is picturesquely described by Hardy: "The farmer's boy could sit under the barley mow and pitch a stone into the office window of the town clerk ... the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the drop out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the spectators room." The intermixture of town and country life is again touched upon in a sketch of Fordington: "Here wheat ricks overhung the old Roman street, and thrust their eaves against the church tower; great thatched barns with doorways as high as the gates of Solomon's Temple opened directly upon the main thoroughfare. Barns, indeed, were so numerous as to alternate with every half-dozen houses along the way. Here lived burgesses who daily walked the fallow--shepherds in an intramural squeeze." The original manuscript of _The Mayor of Casterbridge_, which is described in the Dorchester _Guide_ by Harry Pouncy (published by Longman, Cornhill Press, Dorchester), as "an example of rare beauty of penmanship and of absorbing interest, especially in regard to the alterations" is now in the Dorset County Museum. The leaves of the manuscript have been bound in book form, and Captain Acland, the Curator, informs me the binding has resulted in the edges of the paper being cut, and the top edges being gilt. Let us hope that the marginal notes have not been maimed by the binder's guillotine--that is, if any marginal notes were added. However, the "absorbingly interesting alterations" are not yet for the public gaze, and Captain Acland was immovable before my entreaties to be allowed to make notes on them.