of his situation; nevertheless famous
he was.

He grew up and was helped out in life. That waggery of fate which
started Clive as a writing clerk, Gay as a linen-draper, Keats as a
surgeon, and a thousand others in a thousand other odd ways, banished
the wild and ascetic heath lad to a trade whose sole concern was with
the especial symbols of self-indulgence and vainglory.

The details of this choice of a business for him it is not necessary
to give. At the death of his father a neighbouring gentleman had
kindly undertaken to give the boy a start, and this assumed the form
of sending him to Budmouth. Yeobright did not wish to go there, but
it was the only feasible opening. Thence he went to London; and
thence, shortly after, to Paris, where he had remained till now.

Something being expected of him, he had not been at home many days
before a great curiosity as to why he stayed on so long began to
arise in the heath. The natural term of a holiday had passed, yet
he still remained. On the Sunday morning following the week of
Thomasin's marriage a discussion on this subject was in progress at
a hair-cutting before Fairway's house. Here the local barbering was
always done at this hour on this day, to be followed by the great
Sunday wash of the inhabitants at noon, which in its turn was followed
by the great Sunday dressing an hour later. On Egdon Heath Sunday
proper did not begin till dinner-time, and even then it was a somewhat
battered specimen of the day.

These Sunday-morning hair-cuttings were performed by Fairway; the
victim sitting on a chopping-block in front of the house, without a
coat, and the neighbours gossiping around, idly observing the locks
of hair as they rose upon the wind after the snip, and flew away out
of sight to the four quarters of the heavens. Summer and winter the
scene was the same, unless the wind were more than usually blusterous,
when the stool was shifted a few feet round the corner. To complain
of cold in sitting out of doors, hatless and coatless, while Fairway
told true stories between the cuts of the scissors, would have been
to pronounce yourself no man at once. To flinch, exclaim, or move a
muscle of the face at the small stabs under the ear received from
those instruments, or at scarifications of the neck by the comb, would
have been thought a gross breach of good manners, considering that
Fairway did it all for nothing. A bleeding about the poll on Sunday
afternoons was amply ac