bers watch the lackey. Sun elated them; quiet rain sobered them;
weeks of watery tempest stupefied them. That aspect of the sky which
they now regard as disagreeable they then beheld as maleficent.

It was June, and the weather was very unfavourable. Casterbridge, being
as it were the bell-board on which all the adjacent hamlets and villages
sounded their notes, was decidedly dull. Instead of new articles in the
shop-windows those that had been rejected in the foregoing summer were
brought out again; superseded reap-hooks, badly-shaped rakes, shop-worn
leggings, and time-stiffened water-tights reappeared, furbished up as
near to new as possible.

Henchard, backed by Jopp, read a disastrous garnering, and resolved to
base his strategy against Farfrae upon that reading. But before acting
he wished--what so many have wished--that he could know for certain what
was at present only strong probability. He was superstitious--as such
head-strong natures often are--and he nourished in his mind an idea
bearing on the matter; an idea he shrank from disclosing even to Jopp.

In a lonely hamlet a few miles from the town--so lonely that what are
called lonely villages were teeming by comparison--there lived a man of
curious repute as a forecaster or weather-prophet. The way to his house
was crooked and miry--even difficult in the present unpropitious season.
One evening when it was raining so heavily that ivy and laurel resounded
like distant musketry, and an out-door man could be excused for
shrouding himself to his ears and eyes, such a shrouded figure on foot
might have been perceived travelling in the direction of the hazel-copse
which dripped over the prophet's cot. The turnpike-road became a lane,
the lane a cart-track, the cart-track a bridle-path, the bridle-path a
foot-way, the foot-way overgrown. The solitary walker slipped here and
there, and stumbled over the natural springes formed by the brambles,
till at length he reached the house, which, with its garden, was
surrounded with a high, dense hedge. The cottage, comparatively a large
one, had been built of mud by the occupier's own hands, and thatched
also by himself. Here he had always lived, and here it was assumed he
would die.

He existed on unseen supplies; for it was an anomalous thing that while
there was hardly a soul in the neighbourhood but affected to laugh at
this man's assertions, uttering the formula, "There's nothing in 'em,"
with full assurance on the s