e busted out drinking after taking nothing for
twenty-one years!"

Elizabeth-Jane jumped up, put on her things, and went out.

33.

At this date there prevailed in Casterbridge a convivial
custom--scarcely recognized as such, yet none the less established. On
the afternoon of every Sunday a large contingent of the Casterbridge
journeymen--steady churchgoers and sedate characters--having attended
service, filed from the church doors across the way to the Three
Mariners Inn. The rear was usually brought up by the choir, with their
bass-viols, fiddles, and flutes under their arms.

The great point, the point of honour, on these sacred occasions was
for each man to strictly limit himself to half-a-pint of liquor. This
scrupulosity was so well understood by the landlord that the whole
company was served in cups of that measure. They were all exactly
alike--straight-sided, with two leafless lime-trees done in eel-brown
on the sides--one towards the drinker's lips, the other confronting
his comrade. To wonder how many of these cups the landlord possessed
altogether was a favourite exercise of children in the marvellous. Forty
at least might have been seen at these times in the large room, forming
a ring round the margin of the great sixteen-legged oak table, like the
monolithic circle of Stonehenge in its pristine days. Outside and above
the forty cups came a circle of forty smoke-jets from forty clay pipes;
outside the pipes the countenances of the forty church-goers, supported
at the back by a circle of forty chairs.

The conversation was not the conversation of week-days, but a thing
altogether finer in point and higher in tone. They invariably
discussed the sermon, dissecting it, weighing it, as above or below the
average--the general tendency being to regard it as a scientific feat or
performance which had no relation to their own lives, except as between
critics and the thing criticized. The bass-viol player and the clerk
usually spoke with more authority than the rest on account of their
official connection with the preacher.

Now the Three Mariners was the inn chosen by Henchard as the place for
closing his long term of dramless years. He had so timed his entry as to
be well established in the large room by the time the forty church-goers
entered to their customary cups. The flush upon his face proclaimed
at once that the vow of twenty-one years had lapsed, and the era of
recklessness begun anew. He was