Chapter 32

Two bridges stood near the lower part of Casterbridge town.
The first, of weather-stained brick, was immediately at the
end of High Street, where a diverging branch from that
thoroughfare ran round to the low-lying Durnover lanes; so
that the precincts of the bridge formed the merging point of
respectability and indigence. The second bridge, of stone,
was further out on the highway--in fact, fairly in the
meadows, though still within the town boundary.

These bridges had speaking countenances. Every projection
in each was worn down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more
by friction from generations of loungers, whose toes and
heels had from year to year made restless movements against
these parapets, as they had stood there meditating on the
aspect of affairs. In the case of the more friable bricks
and stones even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the
same mixed mechanism. The masonry of the top was clamped
with iron at each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing
for desperate men to wrench the coping off and throw it down
the river, in reckless defiance of the magistrates.

For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of
the town; those who had failed in business, in love, in
sobriety, in crime. Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose
the bridges for their meditations in preference to a
railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.

There was a marked difference of quality between the
personages who haunted the near bridge of brick and the
personages who haunted the far one of stone. Those of
lowest character preferred the former, adjoining the town;
they did not mind the glare of the public eye. They had
been of comparatively no account during their successes; and
though they might feel dispirited, they had no particular
sense of shame in their ruin. Their hands were mostly kept
in their pockets; they wore a leather strap round their hips
or knees, and boots that required a great deal of lacing,
but seemed never to get any. Instead of sighing at their
adversities they spat, and instead of saying the iron had
entered into their souls they said they were down on their
luck. Jopp in his time of distress had often stood here; so
had Mother Cuxsom, Christopher Coney, and poor Abel Whittle.

The miserables who would pause on the remoter bridge
were of a politer stamp. They included bankrupts,
hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called "out of a
situation" from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of
the professional class--shabby-genteel men, who did not know
how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and
dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark.
The eye of this species were mostly directed over the