The intelligence was in a general sense true; and Henchard’s stores, which had remained in a paralyzed condition during the settlement of his bankruptcy, were stirred into activity again when the new tenant had possession.  Thenceforward the full sacks, looped with the shining chain, went scurrying up and down under the cat-head, hairy arms were thrust out from the different door-ways, and the grain was hauled in; trusses of hay were tossed anew in and out of the barns, and the wimbles creaked; while the scales and steel-yards began to be busy where guess-work had formerly been the rule.

32.

Two bridges stood near the lower part of Casterbridge town.  The first, of weather-stained brick, was immediately at the end of High Street, where a diverging branch from that thoroughfare ran round to the low-lying Durnover lanes; so that the precincts of the bridge formed the merging point of respectability and indigence.  The second bridge, of stone, was further out on the highway—­in fact, fairly in the meadows, though still within the town boundary.

These bridges had speaking countenances.  Every projection in each was worn down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from generations of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year made restless movements against these parapets, as they had stood there meditating on the aspect of affairs.  In the case of the more friable bricks and stones even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the same mixed mechanism.  The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the coping off and throw it down the river, in reckless defiance of the magistrates.

For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of the town; those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in crime.  Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their meditations in preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.

There was a marked difference of quality between the personages who haunted the near bridge of brick and the personages who haunted the far one of stone.  Those of lowest character preferred the former, adjoining the town; they did not mind the glare of the public eye.  They had been of comparatively no account during their successes; and though they might feel dispirited, they had no particular sense of shame in their ruin.  Their hands were mostly kept in their pockets; they wore a leather strap round their hips or knees, and boots that required a great deal of lacing, but seemed never to get any.  Instead of sighing at their adversities they spat, and instead of saying the iron had entered into their souls they said they were down on their luck.  Jopp in his time of distress had often stood here; so had Mother Cuxsom, Christopher Coney, and poor Abel Whittle.