Chapter: The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
departing teacher's effects.  For the schoolhouse had been partly
furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
which he thought of learning instrumental music.  But the enthusiasm
having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
moving house.

The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
sight of changes.  He did not mean to return till the evening, when
the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
everything would be smooth again.

The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
lodgings just at first.

A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: "Aunt have got a
great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you've
found a place to settle in, sir."

"A proper good notion," said the blacksmith.

It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy's aunt--an
old maiden resident--and ask her if she would house the piano till
Mr. Phillotson should send for it.  The smith and the bailiff started
to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.

"Sorry I am going, Jude?" asked the latter kindly.

Tears rose into the boy's eyes, for he was not among the regular day
scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster's life,
but one who had attended the night school only during the present
teacher's term of office.  The regular scholars, if the truth must
be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.

The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
he was sorry.

"So am I," said Mr. Phillotson.

"Why do you go, sir?" asked the boy.

"Ah--that would be a long story.  You wouldn't understand my reasons,
Jude.  You will, perhaps, when you are older."

"I think I should now, sir."

"Well--don't speak of this everywhere.  You know what a university
is, and a university degree?  It is the necessary hallmark of a man
who wants to do anything in teaching.  My scheme, or dream, is to be
a university graduate, and then to be ordained.  By going to live at
Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
have elsewhere."

The smith and his companion returned.  Old Miss Fawley's fuel-house
was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
the instrument standing-room there.  It was accordingly left in
the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.

The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
o'clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
_impedimenta_, and bade his friends good-bye.

"I shan't forget you, Jude," he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
"Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
all you can.  And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
me out for old acquaintance' sake."

The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
his patron and teacher in the loading.  There was a quiver in his lip
now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child's who has felt the
pricks of life somewhat before his time.  The well into which he was
looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
hart's-tongue fern.

He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
morning like this, and would never draw there any more.  "I've seen
him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
But he was too clever to bide here any longer--a small sleepy place
like this!"

A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well.  The morning
was a little foggy, and the boy's breathing unfurled itself as
a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air.  His thoughts were
interrupted by a sudden outcry:

"Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!"

It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off.  The boy quickly
waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
stood--nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
of Marygreen.

It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs.  Old as it
was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
history that remained absolutely unchanged.  Many of the thatched
and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
many trees felled on the green.  Above all, the original church,
hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood.  In place of it
a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
in a day.  The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
warranted to last five years.

 The novel opens with the departure of Mr. Phillotson, the schoolmaster, from the village of Marygreen in Wessex. He is packing his things onto a small cart and heading for the city of Christminster, twenty miles away. He is helped by his young, earnest student, eleven-year-old Jude Fawley, who admires him tremendously. Phillotson gives Jude a book as a farewell present and explains that he is going to Christminster to enter the university and eventually to be ordained. Jude is quite grieved as he watches him leave. His great aunt Drusilla, who is bringing up the orphaned Jude, orders him to fetch two buckets of water from the well. As Jude draws the water, he thinks about his schoolmaster.

