A village carpenter loves a dairymaid who has caught the eye of the young squire, and a Methodist woman preacher sees where it must end. Eliot observes a whole community — workshop, farm, chapel, hall — and lets one act of weakness work through it across a generation. Paintings of pastoral landscape, village workshops and harvest fields accompany this Gilded Library edition; the ornament is a carpenter's plane, wheat ears and an oak bough.