spear against his arm,
a fibula or brooch of bronze on his breast or forehead, an urn at
his knees, a jar at his throat, a bottle at his mouth; and mystified
conjecture pouring down upon him from the eyes of Casterbridge street
boys and men, who had turned a moment to gaze at the familiar spectacle
as they passed by.

Imaginative inhabitants, who would have felt an unpleasantness at the
discovery of a comparatively modern skeleton in their gardens, were
quite unmoved by these hoary shapes. They had lived so long ago, their
time was so unlike the present, their hopes and motives were so widely
removed from ours, that between them and the living there seemed to
stretch a gulf too wide for even a spirit to pass.

The Amphitheatre was a huge circular enclosure, with a notch at opposite
extremities of its diameter north and south. From its sloping internal
form it might have been called the spittoon of the Jotuns. It was to
Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly
of the same magnitude. The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which
a true impression of this suggestive place could be received. Standing
in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees became apparent
its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day
was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from
every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for
appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative
meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one kind
of appointment--in itself the most common of any--seldom had place in
the Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers.

Why, seeing that it was pre-eminently an airy, accessible, and
sequestered spot for interviews, the cheerfullest form of those
occurrences never took kindly to the soil of the ruin, would be a
curious inquiry. Perhaps it was because its associations had about them
something sinister. Its history proved that. Apart from the sanguinary
nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached
to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had
stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband
was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand
spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her
heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and
that not o