Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

particularly as he seemed at present to be singularly de
ficient in all
the usual hopes of childhood. But the pair tried to dismiss, for a
while at least, a too strenuously forward view.
There is in Upper Wessex an old town of nine or ten thousand
souls; the town may be called Stoke-Barehills.* It stands with its
gaunt, unattractive ancient church, and its new red brick suburb,
amid the open, chalk-soiled cornlands, near the middle of an imagin-
ary triangle which has for its three corners the towns of Aldbrickham
and Wintoncester, and the important military station of Quarter-
shot. The great western highway from London passes through it,
near a point where the road branches into two, merely to unite again
some twenty miles further westward. Out of this bifurcation and
reunion there used to arise among wheeled travellers, before railway
days, endless questions of choice between the respective ways. But
the question is now as dead as the scot-and-lot freeholder,* the road
waggoner, and the mail coachman who disputed it; and probably not
a single inhabitant of Stoke-Barehills is now even aware that the two
roads which part in his town ever meet again; for nobody now drives
up and down the great western highway daily.
The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its cemet-
ery, standing among some picturesque mediæval ruins beside the
railway; the modern chapels, modern tombs, and modern shrubs,
having a look of intrusiveness amid the crumbling and ivy-covered
decay of the ancient walls.
On a certain day, however, in the particular year which has now

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been reached by this narrative––the month being early June––the
features of the town excite little interest, though many visitors arrive
by the trains, some down trains, in especial, nearly emptying them-
selves here. It is the week of the Great Wessex Agricultural Show,
whose vast encampment spreads over the open outskirts of the town
like the tents of an investing army. Rows of marquees, huts, booths,
pavilions, arcades, porticoes––every kind of structure short of a
permanent one––cover the green 
field for the space of a square half-
mile, and the crowds of arrivals walk through the town in a mass, and
make straight for the exhibition ground. The way thereto is lined
with shows, stalls, and hawkers on foot, who make a market-place of
the whole roadway to the show proper, and lead some of the
improvident to lighten their pockets appreciably before they reach
the gates of the exhibition they came expressly to see.
It is the popular day, the shilling day, and of the fast arriving
excursion trains two from di
fferent directions enter the two contigu-
ous railway-stations at almost the same minute. One, like several
which have preceded it, comes from London: the other by a cross-
line from Aldbrickham; and from the London train alights a couple;
a short, rather bloated man, with a globular stomach and small legs,
resembling a top on two pegs, accompanied by a woman of rather
fine figure and rather red face, dressed in black material, and covered
with beads from bonnet to skirt, that made her glisten as if clad in
chain-mail.
They cast their eyes around. The man was about to hire a 
fly as
some others had done, when the woman said, ‘Don’t be in such a
hurry, Cartlett. It isn’t so very far to the show-yard. Let us walk
down the street into the place. Perhaps I can pick up a cheap bit of
furniture or old china. It is years since I was here––never since I
lived as a girl at Aldbrickham, and used to come across for a trip
sometimes with my young man.’
‘You can’t carry home furniture by excursion train,’ said, in a
thick voice, her husband, the landlord of The Three Horns,
Lambeth; for they had both come down from the tavern in that
‘excellent, densely populated gin-drinking neighbourhood,’ which
they had occupied ever since the advertisement in those words had
attracted them thither. The con
figuration of the landlord showed
that he, too, like his customers, was becoming a
ffected by the liquors
he retailed.