Under the Greenwood Tree

On a cold Christmas Eve the Mellstock quire — fiddles, bass-viol and voices — goes from door to door, and outside the schoolhouse a blind goes up: a girl at the window, a candle held close to her face, thanking the singers. When the men move on they find they have lost their treble. Dick Dewy is still under a beech tree, watching the lit lattice.

The new schoolmistress is Fancy Day, and the churchwarden who shouted the carollers down wants her at a keyboard. A cabinet organ stands waiting in the vicar's study; the players are given until Michaelmas. Around that quarrel turns a year of courtship in which Fancy is harder to read than Dick believes, and a whole tradition of village church music plays its last season.