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"Yes," she replied with a twinkle in her eye; and the clerk dipped his pen. "Twenty years ago or thereabout I was selling of furmity in a tent at Weydon Fair " "'Twenty years ago' well, that's beginning at the beginning; suppose you go back to the Creation!" said the clerk, not without satire. But Henchard stared, and quite forgot what was evidence and what was not.
A hundred times she had been upon the point of telling her daughter Elizabeth-Jane the true story of her life, the tragical crisis of which had been the transaction at Weydon Fair, when she was not much older than the girl now beside her. But she had refrained.
It now became apparent that the direction of his journey was Weydon Priors, which he reached on the afternoon of the sixth day. The renowned hill whereon the annual fair had been held for so many generations was now bare of human beings, and almost of aught besides. A few sheep grazed thereabout, but these ran off when Henchard halted upon the summit.
These tones showed that, though under a long reign of self-control he had become Mayor and churchwarden and what not, there was still the same unruly volcanic stuff beneath the rind of Michael Henchard as when he had sold his wife at Weydon Fair. "Well, he's a friend of mine, and I'm a friend of his or if we are not, what are we?
The lady returned to her mansion beyond Wintoncester, and told nothing of the interview to her noble husband, who had fortunately gone that day to do a little cocking and ratting out by Weydon Priors, and knew nothing of her movements.
"Yes, sir her only daughter." "What do you call yourself your Christian name?" "Elizabeth-Jane, sir." "Newson?" "Elizabeth-Jane Newson." This at once suggested to Henchard that the transaction of his early married life at Weydon Fair was unrecorded in the family history. It was more than he could have expected.
"Then is there any house to let a little small new cottage just a builded, or such like?" asked the other. The pessimist still maintained a negative. "Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon. There were five houses cleared away last year, and three this; and the volk nowhere to go no, not so much as a thatched hurdle; that's the way o' Weydon-Priors."
But the Seven Sleepers had a dog; and dogs of the mysterious breeds that vagrants own, that are as much like cats as dogs and as much like foxes as cats also lay about here. A little one started up under one of the carts, barked as a matter of principle, and quickly lay down again. He was the only positive spectator of the hay-trusser's exit from the Weydon Fair-field.
"Any trade doing here?" he asked phlegmatically, designating the village in his van by a wave of the broadsheet. And thinking the labourer did not understand him, he added, "Anything in the hay-trussing line?" The turnip-hoer had already begun shaking his head. "Why, save the man, what wisdom's in him that 'a should come to Weydon for a job of that sort this time o' year?"
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