“Now,” said Henchard, digging his strong eyes into Jopp’s face, “one thing is necessary to me, as the biggest corn-and-hay dealer in these parts.  The Scotchman, who’s taking the town trade so bold into his hands, must be cut out.  D’ye hear?  We two can’t live side by side—­that’s clear and certain.”

“I’ve seen it all,” said Jopp.

“By fair competition I mean, of course,” Henchard continued.  “But as hard, keen, and unflinching as fair—­rather more so.  By such a desperate bid against him for the farmers’ custom as will grind him into the ground—­starve him out.  I’ve capital, mind ye, and I can do it.”

“I’m all that way of thinking,” said the new foreman.  Jopp’s dislike of Farfrae as the man who had once ursurped his place, while it made him a willing tool, made him, at the same time, commercially as unsafe a colleague as Henchard could have chosen.

“I sometimes think,” he added, “that he must have some glass that he sees next year in.  He has such a knack of making everything bring him fortune.”

“He’s deep beyond all honest men’s discerning, but we must make him shallower.  We’ll undersell him, and over-buy him, and so snuff him out.”

They then entered into specific details of the process by which this would be accomplished, and parted at a late hour.

Elizabeth-Jane heard by accident that Jopp had been engaged by her stepfather.  She was so fully convinced that he was not the right man for the place that, at the risk of making Henchard angry, she expressed her apprehension to him when they met.  But it was done to no purpose.  Henchard shut up her argument with a sharp rebuff.

The season’s weather seemed to favour their scheme.  The time was in the years immediately before foreign competition had revolutionized the trade in grain; when still, as from the earliest ages, the wheat quotations from month to month depended entirely upon the home harvest.  A bad harvest, or the prospect of one, would double the price of corn in a few weeks; and the promise of a good yield would lower it as rapidly.  Prices were like the roads of the period, steep in gradient, reflecting in their phases the local conditions, without engineering, levellings, or averages.

The farmer’s income was ruled by the wheat-crop within his own horizon, and the wheat-crop by the weather.  Thus in person, he became a sort of flesh-barometer, with feelers always directed to the sky and wind around him.  The local atmosphere was everything to him; the atmospheres of other countries a matter of indifference.  The people, too, who were not farmers, the rural multitude, saw in the god of the weather a more important personage than they do now.  Indeed, the feeling of the peasantry in this matter was so intense as to be almost unrealizable in these equable days.  Their impulse was well-nigh to prostrate themselves in lamentation before untimely rains and tempests, which came as the Alastor of those households whose crime it was to be poor.