treets, spoke in other ways than by
articulation. Not to hear the words of your interlocutor in metropolitan
centres is to know nothing of his meaning. Here the face, the arms, the
hat, the stick, the body throughout spoke equally with the tongue. To
express satisfaction the Casterbridge market-man added to his utterance
a broadening of the cheeks, a crevicing of the eyes, a throwing back of
the shoulders, which was intelligible from the other end of the street.
If he wondered, though all Henchard's carts and waggons were rattling
past him, you knew it from perceiving the inside of his crimson mouth,
and a target-like circling of his eyes. Deliberation caused sundry
attacks on the moss of adjoining walls with the end of his stick,
a change of his hat from the horizontal to the less so; a sense of
tediousness announced itself in a lowering of the person by spreading
the knees to a lozenge-shaped aperture and contorting the arms.
Chicanery, subterfuge, had hardly a place in the streets of this honest
borough to all appearance; and it was said that the lawyers in the Court
House hard by occasionally threw in strong arguments for the other side
out of pure generosity (though apparently by mischance) when advancing
their own.

Thus Casterbridge was in most respects but the pole, focus, or
nerve-knot of the surrounding country life; differing from the many
manufacturing towns which are as foreign bodies set down, like boulders
on a plain, in a green world with which they have nothing in common.
Casterbridge lived by agriculture at one remove further from the
fountainhead than the adjoining villages--no more. The townsfolk
understood every fluctuation in the rustic's condition, for it affected
their receipts as much as the labourer's; they entered into the troubles
and joys which moved the aristocratic families ten miles round--for the
same reason. And even at the dinner-parties of the professional families
the subjects of discussion were corn, cattle-disease, sowing and
reaping, fencing and planting; while politics were viewed by them less
from their own standpoint of burgesses with rights and privileges than
from the standpoint of their country neighbours.

All the venerable contrivances and confusions which delighted the eye
by their quaintness, and in a measure reasonableness, in this rare old
market-town, were metropolitan novelties to the unpractised eyes of
Elizabeth-Jane, fresh from netting fish-seines in a seaside co