yellow furze;
his animal kingdom, the snakes and croppers; his society, its human
haunters. Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the
heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym.
He gazed upon the wide prospect as he walked, and was glad.

To many persons this Egdon was a place which had slipped out of its
century generations ago, to intrude as an uncouth object into this.
It was an obsolete thing, and few cared to study it. How could this
be otherwise in the days of square fields, plashed hedges, and meadows
watered on a plan so rectangular that on a fine day they looked
like silver gridirons? The farmer, in his ride, who could smile at
artificial grasses, look with solicitude at the coming corn, and sigh
with sadness at the fly-eaten turnips, bestowed upon the distant
upland of heath nothing better than a frown. But as for Yeobright,
when he looked from the heights on his way he could not help indulging
in a barbarous satisfaction at observing that, in some of the attempts
at reclamation from the waste, tillage, after holding on for a year
or two, had receded again in despair, the ferns and furze-tufts
stubbornly reasserting themselves.

He descended into the valley, and soon reached his home at Blooms-End.
His mother was snipping dead leaves from the window-plants. She looked
up at him as if she did not understand the meaning of his long stay
with her; her face had worn that look for several days. He could
perceive that the curiosity which had been shown by the hair-cutting
group amounted in his mother to concern. But she had asked no question
with her lips, even when the arrival of his trunk suggested that he
was not going to leave her soon. Her silence besought an explanation
of him more loudly than words.

"I am not going back to Paris again, mother," he said. "At least, in
my old capacity. I have given up the business."

Mrs. Yeobright turned in pained surprise. "I thought something was
amiss, because of the boxes. I wonder you did not tell me sooner."

"I ought to have done it. But I have been in doubt whether you would
be pleased with my plan. I was not quite clear on a few points
myself. I am going to take an entirely new course."

"I am astonished, Clym. How can you want to do better than you've
been doing?"

"Very easily. But I shall not do better in the way you mean; I
suppose it will be called doing worse. But I hate that business of
mine, and I want to d