Henchard did not reply to that very obvious suggestion, and, turning on his heel, went away.

It had been only a passing fancy of his, but opposition crystallized it into a determination.  “I’ll welcome his Royal Highness, or nobody shall!” he went about saying.  “I am not going to be sat upon by Farfrae, or any of the rest of the paltry crew!  You shall see.”

The eventful morning was bright, a full-faced sun confronting early window-gazers eastward, and all perceived (for they were practised in weather-lore) that there was permanence in the glow.  Visitors soon began to flock in from county houses, villages, remote copses, and lonely uplands, the latter in oiled boots and tilt bonnets, to see the reception, or if not to see it, at any rate to be near it.  There was hardly a workman in the town who did not put a clean shirt on.  Solomon Longways, Christopher Coney, Buzzford, and the rest of that fraternity, showed their sense of the occasion by advancing their customary eleven o’clock pint to half-past ten; from which they found a difficulty in getting back to the proper hour for several days.

Henchard had determined to do no work that day.  He primed himself in the morning with a glass of rum, and walking down the street met Elizabeth-Jane, whom he had not seen for a week.  “It was lucky,” he said to her, “my twenty-one years had expired before this came on, or I should never have had the nerve to carry it out.”

“Carry out what?” said she, alarmed.

“This welcome I am going to give our Royal visitor.”

She was perplexed.  “Shall we go and see it together?” she said.

“See it!  I have other fish to fry.  You see it.  It will be worth seeing!”

She could do nothing to elucidate this, and decked herself out with a heavy heart.  As the appointed time drew near she got sight again of her stepfather.  She thought he was going to the Three Mariners; but no, he elbowed his way through the gay throng to the shop of Woolfrey, the draper.  She waited in the crowd without.

In a few minutes he emerged, wearing, to her surprise, a brilliant rosette, while more surprising still, in his hand he carried a flag of somewhat homely construction, formed by tacking one of the small Union Jacks, which abounded in the town to-day, to the end of a deal wand—­probably the roller from a piece of calico.  Henchard rolled up his flag on the doorstep, put it under his arm, and went down the street.

Suddenly the taller members of the crowd turned their heads, and the shorter stood on tiptoe.  It was said that the Royal cortege approached.  The railway had stretched out an arm towards Casterbridge at this time, but had not reached it by several miles as yet; so that the intervening distance, as well as the remainder of the journey, was to be traversed by road in the old fashion.  People thus waited—­the county families in their carriages, the masses on foot—­and watched the far-stretching London highway to the ringing of bells and chatter of tongues.