Notwithstanding an
occasional odd gravity which awoke their sense of the ludicrous for the
moment, they began to view him through a golden haze which the tone
of his mind seemed to raise around him. Casterbridge had
sentiment--Casterbridge had romance; but this stranger's sentiment was
of differing quality. Or rather, perhaps, the difference was mainly
superficial; he was to them like the poet of a new school who takes
his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first
to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till
then.
The silent landlord came and leant over the settle while the young
man sang; and even Mrs. Stannidge managed to unstick herself from the
framework of her chair in the bar and get as far as the door-post,
which movement she accomplished by rolling herself round, as a cask
is trundled on the chine by a drayman without losing much of its
perpendicular.
"And are you going to bide in Casterbridge, sir?" she asked.
"Ah--no!" said the Scotchman, with melancholy fatality in his voice,
"I'm only passing thirrough! I am on my way to Bristol, and on frae
there to foreign parts."
"We be truly sorry to hear it," said Solomon Longways. "We can ill
afford to lose tuneful wynd-pipes like yours when they fall among us.
And verily, to mak' acquaintance with a man a-come from so far, from the
land o' perpetual snow, as we may say, where wolves and wild boars and
other dangerous animalcules be as common as blackbirds here-about--why,
'tis a thing we can't do every day; and there's good sound information
for bide-at-homes like we when such a man opens his mouth.
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