nt to the circumstances; but they are not often met
with.

So much dust had been raised on the highway by traffic resulting from the
presence of the Court at the town further on, that brambles hanging from
the fence, and giving a friendly scratch to the wanderer's face, were
dingy as church cobwebs; and the grass on the margin had assumed a paper-
shaving hue. Bob's father had wished him to take David, lest, from want
of recent experience at the whip, he should meet with any mishap; but,
picturing to himself the awkwardness of three in such circumstances, Bob
would not hear of this; and nothing more serious happened to his driving
than that the wheel-marks formed two serpentine lines along the road
during the first mile or two, before he had got his hand in, and that the
horse shied at a milestone, a piece of paper, a sleeping tramp, and a
wheelbarrow, just to make use of the opportunity of being in bad hands.

He entered Casterbridge between twelve and one, and, putting up at the
Old Greyhound, walked on to the Bow. Here, rather dusty on the ledges of
his clothes, he stood and waited while the people in their best summer
dresses poured out of the three churches round him. When they had all
gone, and a smell of cinders and gravy had spread down the ancient high-
street, and the pie-dishes from adjacent bakehouses had all travelled
past, he saw the mail coach rise above the arch of Grey's Bridge, a
quarter of a mile distant, surmounted by swaying knobs, which proved to
be the heads of the outside travellers.

'That's the way for a man's bride to come to him,' said Robert to himself
with a feeling of poetry; and as the horn sounded and the horses
clattered up the street he walked down to the inn. The knot of hostlers
and inn-servants had gathered, the horses were dragged from the vehicle,
and the passengers for Casterbridge began to descend. Captain Bob eyed
them over, looked inside, looked outside again; to his disappointment
Matilda was not there, nor her boxes, nor anything that was hers. Neither
coachman nor guard had seen or heard of such a person at Melchester; and
Bob walked slowly away.

Depressed by forebodings to an extent which took away nearly a third of
his appetite, he sat down in the parlour of the Old Greyhound to a slice
from the family joint of the landlord. This gentleman, who dined in his
shirt-sleeves, partly because it was August, and partly from a sense that
they would not be so fit for pu