Thomas Hardy

“ Penny. “That’ll put the stuns upon a man, when you must measure mother and daughter’s lasts to tell ’em apart.”
“You’ve no cause to complain, Reuben, of such a close-coming flock,” said Mrs. Dewy; “for ours was a straggling lot enough, God knows!”
“I d’know it, I d’know it,” said the tranter. “You be a well-enough woman, Ann.”
Mrs. Dewy put her mouth in the form of a smile, and put it back again without smiling.
“And if they come together, they go together,” said Mrs. Penny, whose family had been the reverse of the tranter’s; “and a little money will make either fate tolerable. ”

“ Whilst the dancing progressed the older persons sat in a group under the trunk of the tree,—the space being allotted to them somewhat grudgingly by the young ones, who were greedy of pirouetting room,—and fortified by a table against the heels of the dancers. Here the gaffers and gammers, whose dancing days were over, told stories of great impressiveness, and at intervals surveyed the advancing and retiring couples from the same retreat, as people on shore might be supposed to survey a naval engagement in the bay beyond ”

“ Dewy came up, talking to one person and looking at another. “Happy, yes,” she said. “’Tis always so when a couple is so exactly in tune with one another as Dick and she.”
“When they be’n’t too poor to have time to sing,” said grandfather James.
“I tell ye, neighbours, when the pinch comes,” said the tranter: “when the oldest daughter’s boots be only a size less than her mother’s, and the rest o’ the flock close behind her. A sharp time for a man that, my sonnies ”