Chapter 33

At this date there prevailed in Casterbridge a convivial
custom--scarcely recognized as such, yet none the less
established. On the afternoon of every Sunday a large
contingent of the Casterbridge journeymen--steady church-
goers and sedate characters--having attended service, filed
from the church doors across the way to the Three Mariners
Inn. The rear was usually brought up by the choir, with
their bass-viols, fiddles, and flutes under their arms.

The great point, the point of honour, on these sacred
occasions was for each man to strictly limit himself to
half-a-pint of liquor. This scrupulosity was so well
understood by the landlord that the whole company was served
in cups of that measure. They were all exactly alike--
straight-sided, with two leafless lime-trees done in eel-
brown on the sides--one towards the drinker's lips, the
other confronting his comrade. To wonder how many of these
cups the landlord possessed altogether was a favourite
exercise of children in the marvellous. Forty at least
might have been seen at these times in the large room,
forming a ring round the margin of the great sixteen-legged
oak table, like the monolithic circle of Stonehenge in its
pristine days. Outside and above the forty cups came a
circle of forty smoke-jets from forty clay pipes; outside
the pipes the countenances of the forty church-goers,
supported at the back by a circle of forty chairs.

The conversation was not the conversation of week-days, but
a thing altogether finer in point and higher in tone. They
invariably discussed the sermon, dissecting it, weighing it,
as above or below the average--the general tendency being to
regard it as a scientific feat or performance which had no
relation to their own lives, except as between critics and
the thing criticized. The bass-viol player and the clerk
usually spoke with more authority than the rest on account
of their official connection with the preacher.

Now the Three Mariners was the inn chosen by Henchard as the
place for closing his long term of dramless years. He had
so timed his entry as to be well established in the large
room by the time the forty church-goers entered to their
customary cups. The flush upon his face proclaimed at once
that the vow of twenty-one years had lapsed, and the era of
recklessness begun anew. He was seated on a small table,
drawn up to the side of the massive oak board reserved for
the churchmen, a few of whom nodded to him as they took
their places and said, "How be ye, Mr. Henchard? Quite a
stranger here."

Henchard did not take the trouble to reply for a few
moments, and his eyes rested on his stretched-out legs and
boots. "Yes," he said at length; "that's true. I've