Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by George Clausen, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. The Wessex short stories: three strangers who shelter from the rain at a shepherd's christening party, one of them the hangman on his way to work, who does not say so; a young wife who lays her withered arm across a hanged man's neck for a cure; a Methodist preacher in love with a widow who runs contraband; two fellow-townsmen whose lives cross over twenty years; and an imaginative woman in love with a poet she has never met. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; these came from what he was told as a boy by people who had seen it, and the withered arm is not a metaphor. Fifty-nine plates of rain, fields and farm labour by painters from Gainsborough to Constable carry the same rural weather these stories were told in.