understood every fluctuation in the rustic's condition, for it affected
their receipts as much as the labourer's; they entered into the troubles
and joys which moved the aristocratic families ten miles round--for the
same reason. And even at the dinner-parties of the professional families
the subjects of discussion were corn, cattle-disease, sowing and
reaping, fencing and planting; while politics were viewed by them less
from their own standpoint of burgesses with rights and privileges than
from the standpoint of their country neighbours.

All the venerable contrivances and confusions which delighted the eye
by their quaintness, and in a measure reasonableness, in this rare old
market-town, were metropolitan novelties to the unpractised eyes of
Elizabeth-Jane, fresh from netting fish-seines in a seaside cottage.
Very little inquiry was necessary to guide her footsteps. Henchard's
house was one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old brick. The
front door was open, and, as in other houses, she could see through the
passage to the end of the garden--nearly a quarter of a mile off.

Mr. Henchard was not in the house, but in the store-yard. She was
conducted into the mossy garden, and through a door in the wall, which
was studded with rusty nails speaking of generations of fruit-trees that
had been trained there. The door opened upon the yard, and here she was
left to find him as she could. It was a place flanked by hay-barns, into
which tons of fodder, all in trusses, were being packed from the waggons
she had seen pass the inn that morning. On other sides of the yard were
wooden granaries on stone staddles, to which access was given by Flemish
ladders, and a store-house several floors high. Wherever the doors of
these places were open, a closely packed throng of bursting wheat-sacks
could be seen standing inside, with the air of awaiting a famine that
would not come.