When she walked with her mother, on the other hand, she often beheld the Scotchman looking at them with a curious interest.  The fact that he had met her at the Three Mariners was insufficient to account for it, since on the occasions on which she had entered his room he had never raised his eyes.  Besides, it was at her mother more particularly than at herself that he looked, to Elizabeth-Jane’s half-conscious, simple-minded, perhaps pardonable, disappointment.  Thus she could not account for this interest by her own attractiveness, and she decided that it might be apparent only—­a way of turning his eyes that Mr. Farfrae had.

She did not divine the ample explanation of his manner, without personal vanity, that was afforded by the fact of Donald being the depositary of Henchard’s confidence in respect of his past treatment of the pale, chastened mother who walked by her side.  Her conjectures on that past never went further than faint ones based on things casually heard and seen—­mere guesses that Henchard and her mother might have been lovers in their younger days, who had quarrelled and parted.

Casterbridge, as has been hinted, was a place deposited in the block upon a corn-field.  There was no suburb in the modern sense, or transitional intermixture of town and down.  It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green tablecloth.  The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the spectators room.

The corn grown on the upland side of the borough was garnered by farmers who lived in an eastern purlieu called Durnover.  Here wheat-ricks overhung the old Roman street, and thrust their eaves against the church tower; green-thatched barns, with doorways as high as the gates of Solomon’s temple, opened directly upon the main thoroughfare.  Barns indeed were so numerous as to alternate with every half-dozen houses along the way.  Here lived burgesses who daily walked the fallow; shepherds in an intra-mural squeeze.  A street of farmers’ homesteads—­a street ruled by a mayor and corporation, yet echoing with the thump of the flail, the flutter of the winnowing-fan, and the purr of the milk into the pails—­a street which had nothing urban in it whatever—­this was the Durnover end of Casterbridge.