The chapter serves less to point up Bathsheba's strongmindedness than as a picture of the vicissitudes of farm life and an appraisal of the constancy of duty on a farm. ''Gabriel, will you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon. Four other sheep had died before his arrival. When Gabriel appeared, Bathsheba looked at him with gratitude but reproved him for his unkindness. After another sheep died, Bathsheba wrote the request and added at the bottom: 'Do not desert me, Gabriel!' The men waited until Laban Tall returned with word that Gabriel would not come unless properly asked. Suddenly a sheep fell dead, and Bathsheba sent a message ordering Oak to come. Still Bathsheba refused to consider this. She thought of Boldwood, but the men told her that some of his animals had been similarly affected by vetch the other day, and he had sent for Gabriel. When she asked what to do, the men told her that the sheep had to be pierced to be relieved, and that only Oak knew how to perform this operation. Despite her velvet dress, she too ran to the fields. 'And will all die as dead as nits, if they bain't got out and cured!' said Tall.'īathsheba shouted at the men for not having gone directly to the fields to do something about it. ''And they be getting blasted,' said Henery Fray. Gabriel had been gone about twenty-four hours when, on Sunday, men came running to Bathsheba to report that many of her sheep had broken into a field of clover.

Far from the madding crowd sparknotes