ticking alternately, which were severally two and half minutes and three
minutes striking the hour of twelve, one proclaiming, in Italian
flourishes, Thomas Wood as the name of its maker, and the other--arched
at the top, and altogether of more cynical appearance--that of Ezekiel
Saunders. They were two departed clockmakers of Casterbridge, whose
desperate rivalry throughout their lives was nowhere more emphatically
perpetuated than here at Geoffrey's. These chief specimens of the
marriage provision were supported on the right by a couple of kitchen
dressers, each fitted complete with their cups, dishes, and plates, in
their turn followed by two dumb-waiters, two family Bibles, two warming-
pans, and two intermixed sets of chairs.

But the position last reached--the chimney-corner--was, after all, the
most attractive side of the parallelogram. It was large enough to admit,
in addition to Geoffrey himself, Geoffrey's wife, her chair, and her work-
table, entirely within the line of the mantel, without danger or even
inconvenience from the heat of the fire; and was spacious enough overhead
to allow of the insertion of wood poles for the hanging of bacon, which
were cloaked with long shreds of soot, floating on the draught like the
tattered banners on the walls of ancient aisles.

These points were common to most chimney corners of the neighbourhood;
but one feature there was which made Geoffrey's fireside not only an
object of interest to casual aristocratic visitors--to whom every cottage
fireside was more or less a curiosity--but the admiration of friends who
were accustomed to fireplaces of the ordinary hamlet model. This
peculiarity was a little window in the chimney-back, almost over the
fire, around which the smoke crept caressingly when it left the
perpendicular course. The window-board was curiously stamped with black
circles, burnt thereon by the heated bottoms of drinking-cups, which had