m more
comfortable, gave directions to the people below, and by the time she
went away had reconciled her stepfather to her visiting him.

The effect, either of her ministrations or of her mere presence, was a
rapid recovery. He soon was well enough to go out; and now things seemed
to wear a new colour in his eyes. He no longer thought of emigration,
and thought more of Elizabeth. The having nothing to do made him more
dreary than any other circumstance; and one day, with better views of
Farfrae than he had held for some time, and a sense that honest work was
not a thing to be ashamed of, he stoically went down to Farfrae's yard
and asked to be taken on as a journeyman hay-trusser. He was engaged
at once. This hiring of Henchard was done through a foreman, Farfrae
feeling that it was undesirable to come personally in contact with the
ex-corn-factor more than was absolutely necessary. While anxious to help
him he was well aware by this time of his uncertain temper, and thought
reserved relations best. For the same reason his orders to Henchard to
proceed to this and that country farm trussing in the usual way were
always given through a third person.

For a time these arrangements worked well, it being the custom to truss
in the respective stack-yards, before bringing it away, the hay bought
at the different farms about the neighbourhood; so that Henchard was
often absent at such places the whole week long. When this was all done,
and Henchard had become in a measure broken in, he came to work daily on
the home premises like the rest. And thus the once flourishing merchant
and Mayor and what not stood as a day-labourer in the barns and
granaries he formerly had owned.

"I have worked as a journeyman before now, ha'n't I?" he would say in
his defiant way; "and why shouldn't I do it again?" But he looked a far
different journeyman from the one he had been in his earlier days. Then
he had worn clean, suitable clothes, light and cheerful in hue; leggings
yellow as marigolds, corduroys immaculate as new flax, and a neckerchief
like a flower-garden. Now he wore the remains of an old blue cloth
suit of his gentlemanly times, a rusty silk hat, and a once black
satin stock, soiled and shabby. Clad thus he went to and fro, still
comparatively an active man--for he was not much over forty--and saw
with the other men in the yard Donald Farfrae going in and out the green
door that led to the garden, and the big house, and Lucetta.