The Wessex short stories: the hangman who comes to supper and does not say what he does; the three strangers; a wife who takes her husband's arm to a dead man's hand for a cure; the Trumpet-Major's Melancholy Hussar deserting for love. 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.