Chapter 3 - Page 2

daughter threaded
the crowd for some little distance, and then stood still.

"Why did we hinder our time by coming in here? I thought you
wished to get onward?" said the maiden.

"Yes, my dear Elizabeth-Jane," explained the other. "But I
had a fancy for looking up here."

"Why?"

"It was here I first met with Newson--on such a day as
this."

"First met with father here? Yes, you have told me so
before. And now he's drowned and gone from us!" As she
spoke the girl drew a card from her pocket and looked at it
with a sigh. It was edged with black, and inscribed within
a design resembling a mural tablet were the words, "In
affectionate memory of Richard Newson, mariner, who was
unfortunately lost at sea, in the month of November 184--,
aged forty-one years."

"And it was here," continued her mother, with more
hesitation, "that I last saw the relation we are going to
look for--Mr. Michael Henchard."

"What is his exact kin to us, mother? I have never clearly
had it told me."

"He is, or was--for he may be dead--a connection by
marriage," said her mother deliberately.

"That's exactly what you have said a score of times before!"
replied the young woman, looking about her inattentively.
"He's not a near relation, I suppose?"

"Not by any means."

"He was a hay-trusser, wasn't he, when you last heard of
him?

"He was."

"I suppose he never knew me?" the girl innocently continued.

Mrs. Henchard paused for a moment, and answered un-easily,
"Of course not, Elizabeth-Jane. But come this way." She
moved on to another part of the field.

"It is not much use inquiring here for anybody, I should
think," the daughter observed, as she gazed round about.
"People at fairs change like the leaves of trees; and I
daresay you are the only one here to-day who was here all
those years ago."

"I am not so sure of that," said Mrs. Newson, as she now
called herself, keenly eyeing something under a green bank a
little way off. "See there."

The daughter looked in the direction signified. The object
pointed out was a tripod of sticks stuck into the earth,
from which hung a three-legged crock, kept hot by a
smouldering wood fire beneath. Over the pot stooped an old
woman haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags. She stirred
the contents of the pot with a large spoon, and occasionally
croaked in a broken voice, "Good furmity sold here!"

It was indeed the former mistress of the furmity tent--once
thriving, cleanly, white-aproned, and chinking with money--
now tentless, dirty, owning no tables or benches, and having
scarce any customers except two small whity-brown boys, who
came up and asked