ort inside, and rendering at the same
time the unlighted country without strangely solitary and vacant in
aspect, considering its nearness to life. The difference between burgh
and champaign was increased, too, by sounds which now reached them above
others--the notes of a brass band. The travellers returned into the High
Street, where there were timber houses with overhanging stories,
whose small-paned lattices were screened by dimity curtains on a
drawing-string, and under whose bargeboards old cobwebs waved in the
breeze. There were houses of brick-nogging, which derived their chief
support from those adjoining. There were slate roofs patched with tiles,
and tile roofs patched with slate, with occasionally a roof of thatch.

The agricultural and pastoral character of the people upon whom the town
depended for its existence was shown by the class of objects displayed
in the shop windows. Scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears, bill-hooks,
spades, mattocks, and hoes at the iron-monger's; bee-hives,
butter-firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay-rakes,
field-flagons, and seed-lips at the cooper's; cart-ropes and
plough-harness at the saddler's; carts, wheel-barrows, and mill-gear at
the wheelwright's and machinist's, horse-embrocations at the chemist's;
at the glover's and leather-cutter's, hedging-gloves, thatchers'
knee-caps, ploughmen's leggings, villagers' pattens and clogs.

They came to a grizzled church, whose massive square tower rose unbroken
into the darkening sky, the lower parts being illuminated by the nearest
lamps sufficiently to show how completely the mortar from the joints
of the stonework had been nibbled out by time and weather, which had
planted in the crevices thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass
almost as far up as the very battlements. From this tower the clock
struck eight, and thereupon a bell began to toll with a peremptory
clang. The curfew was still rung in Casterbridge, and it was utilized by
the inhabitants as a signal for shutting their shops. No sooner did the
deep notes of the bell throb between the house-fronts than a clatter
of shutters arose through the whole length of the High Street. In a few
minutes business at Casterbridge was ended for the day.

Other clocks struck eight from time to time--one gloomily from the gaol,
another from the gable of an almshouse, with a preparative creak of
machinery, more audible than the note of the bell; a row of tall,
varnished case-cl