ut. I've capital, mind ye, and I can do it."

"I'm all that way of thinking," said the new foreman. Jopp's dislike of
Farfrae as the man who had once ursurped his place, while it made him
a willing tool, made him, at the same time, commercially as unsafe a
colleague as Henchard could have chosen.

"I sometimes think," he added, "that he must have some glass that he
sees next year in. He has such a knack of making everything bring him
fortune."

"He's deep beyond all honest men's discerning, but we must make him
shallower. We'll undersell him, and over-buy him, and so snuff him out."

They then entered into specific details of the process by which this
would be accomplished, and parted at a late hour.

Elizabeth-Jane heard by accident that Jopp had been engaged by her
stepfather. She was so fully convinced that he was not the right man for
the place that, at the risk of making Henchard angry, she expressed
her apprehension to him when they met. But it was done to no purpose.
Henchard shut up her argument with a sharp rebuff.

The season's weather seemed to favour their scheme. The time was in
the years immediately before foreign competition had revolutionized
the trade in grain; when still, as from the earliest ages, the wheat
quotations from month to month depended entirely upon the home harvest.
A bad harvest, or the prospect of one, would double the price of corn in
a few weeks; and the promise of a good yield would lower it as rapidly.
Prices were like the roads of the period, steep in gradient, reflecting
in their phases the local conditions, without engineering, levellings,
or averages.

The farmer's income was ruled by the wheat-crop within his own horizon,
and the wheat-crop by the weather. Thus in person, he became a sort of
flesh-barometer, with feelers always directed to the sky and wind around
him. The local atmosphere was everything to him; the atmospheres of
other countries a matter of indifference. The people, too, who were
not farmers, the rural multitude, saw in the god of the weather a
more important personage than they do now. Indeed, the feeling of the
peasantry in this matter was so intense as to be almost unrealizable in
these equable days. Their impulse was well-nigh to prostrate themselves
in lamentation before untimely rains and tempests, which came as the
Alastor of those households whose crime it was to be poor.

After midsummer they watched the weather-cocks as men waiting in
antecham