Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by John Constable, George Morland and Myles Birket Foster. Twelve Wessex tales, including the one about a captain who becomes a curate and the wife who cannot forgive it, and Alicia's Diary, and the Waterloo veteran's story. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; these are the late gleanings, and several of them are as good as the novels — the title story turns on cholera, and he does not flinch at it. Sixty plates of church porches, cathedral closes and river barges by painters including Constable and Wilkie run alongside the tales, matching Hardy's own Wessex of churches and slow water.