y kind. Farm-labourers and other peasants, who combined a little
poaching with their farming, and a little brawling and bibbing with
their poaching, found themselves sooner or later in Mixen Lane. Rural
mechanics too idle to mechanize, rural servants too rebellious to serve,
drifted or were forced into Mixen Lane.

The lane and its surrounding thicket of thatched cottages stretched out
like a spit into the moist and misty lowland. Much that was sad, much
that was low, some things that were baneful, could be seen in
Mixen Lane. Vice ran freely in and out certain of the doors in the
neighbourhood; recklessness dwelt under the roof with the crooked
chimney; shame in some bow-windows; theft (in times of privation) in the
thatched and mud-walled houses by the sallows. Even slaughter had not
been altogether unknown here. In a block of cottages up an alley there
might have been erected an altar to disease in years gone by. Such was
Mixen Lane in the times when Henchard and Farfrae were Mayors.

Yet this mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant
lay close to the open country; not a hundred yards from a row of
noble elms, and commanding a view across the moor of airy uplands and
corn-fields, and mansions of the great. A brook divided the moor from
the tenements, and to outward view there was no way across it--no way
to the houses but round about by the road. But under every householder's
stairs there was kept a mysterious plank nine inches wide; which plank
was a secret bridge.

If you, as one of those refugee householders, came in from business
after dark--and this was the business time here--you stealthily crossed
the moor, approached the border of the aforesaid brook, and whistled
opposite the house to which you belonged. A shape thereupon made its
appearance on the other side bearing the bridge on end against the sky;
it was lowered; you crossed, and a hand helped you to land yourself,
together with the pheasants and hares gathered from neighbouring manors.
You sold them slily the next morning, and the day after you stood
before the magistrates with the eyes of all your sympathizing neighbours
concentrated on your back. You disappeared for a time; then you were
again found quietly living in Mixen Lane.

Walking along the lane at dusk the stranger was struck by two or three
peculiar features therein. One was an intermittent rumbling from the
back premises of the inn half-way up; this meant a skittle al