Henchard would gladly have joined; for the savour of the stew had floated from the cottage into the porch with such appetizing distinctness that the meat, the onions, the pepper, and the herbs could be severally recognized by his nose.  But as sitting down to hob-and-nob there would have seemed to mark him too implicitly as the weather-caster’s apostle, he declined, and went his way.

The next Saturday Henchard bought grain to such an enormous extent that there was quite a talk about his purchases among his neighbours the lawyer, the wine merchant, and the doctor; also on the next, and on all available days.  When his granaries were full to choking all the weather-cocks of Casterbridge creaked and set their faces in another direction, as if tired of the south-west.  The weather changed; the sunlight, which had been like tin for weeks, assumed the hues of topaz.  The temperament of the welkin passed from the phlegmatic to the sanguine; an excellent harvest was almost a certainty; and as a consequence prices rushed down.

All these transformations, lovely to the outsider, to the wrong-headed corn-dealer were terrible.  He was reminded of what he had well known before, that a man might gamble upon the square green areas of fields as readily as upon those of a card-room.

Henchard had backed bad weather, and apparently lost.  He had mistaken the turn of the flood for the turn of the ebb.  His dealings had been so extensive that settlement could not long be postponed, and to settle he was obliged to sell off corn that he had bought only a few weeks before at figures higher by many shillings a quarter.  Much of the corn he had never seen; it had not even been moved from the ricks in which it lay stacked miles away.  Thus he lost heavily.

In the blaze of an early August day he met Farfrae in the market-place.  Farfrae knew of his dealings (though he did not guess their intended bearing on himself) and commiserated him; for since their exchange of words in the South Walk they had been on stiffly speaking terms.  Henchard for the moment appeared to resent the sympathy; but he suddenly took a careless turn.

“Ho, no, no!—­nothing serious, man!” he cried with fierce gaiety.  “These things always happen, don’t they?  I know it has been said that figures have touched me tight lately; but is that anything rare?  The case is not so bad as folk make out perhaps.  And dammy, a man must be a fool to mind the common hazards of trade!”

But he had to enter the Casterbridge Bank that day for reasons which had never before sent him there—­and to sit a long time in the partners’ room with a constrained bearing.  It was rumoured soon after that much real property as well as vast stores of produce, which had stood in Henchard’s name in the town and neighbourhood, was actually the possession of his bankers.

Coming down the steps of the bank he encountered Jopp.  The gloomy transactions just completed within had added fever to the original sting of Farfrae’s sympathy that morning, which Henchard fancied might be a satire disguised so that Jopp met with anything but a bland reception.  The latter was in the act of taking off his hat to wipe his forehead, and saying, “A fine hot day,” to an acquaintance.