It was on a Friday evening, near the middle of September and just before
dusk, that they reached the summit of a hill within a mile of the place
they sought. There were high banked hedges to the coach-road here,
and they mounted upon the green turf within, and sat down. The spot
commanded a full view of the town and its environs.

"What an old-fashioned place it seems to be!" said Elizabeth-Jane, while
her silent mother mused on other things than topography. "It is huddled
all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot
of garden ground by a box-edging."

Its squareness was, indeed, the characteristic which most struck the eye
in this antiquated borough, the borough of Casterbridge--at that time,
recent as it was, untouched by the faintest sprinkle of modernism. It
was compact as a box of dominoes. It had no suburbs--in the ordinary
sense. Country and town met at a mathematical line.

To birds of the more soaring kind Casterbridge must have appeared on
this fine evening as a mosaic-work of subdued reds, browns, greys, and
crystals, held together by a rectangular frame of deep green. To the
level eye of humanity it stood as an indistinct mass behind a dense
stockade of limes and chestnuts, set in the midst of miles of rotund
down and concave field. The mass became gradually dissected by the
vision into towers, gables, chimneys, and casements, the highest
glazings shining bleared and bloodshot with the coppery fire they caught
from the belt of sunlit cloud in the west.

From the centre of each side of this tree-bound square ran avenues
east, west, and south into the wide expanse of cornland and coomb to
the distance of a mile or so. It was by one of these avenues that the