The Life of Thomas Hardy
nor of the legend of tlie burnt griddle-cakes. You think of The Moth Signal on Egdon Heath:
From the tumulus treed with pine:
"So, hearts are thwartly smitten
In these days as in mine!"
In a case under a glass cover rests a bound manuscript, held open by rubber bands. The letters are inked with care. You read:
CHAPTER XXIX
At this hour Lucetta was bounding along the road to Port Breedy just as Elizabeth had announced. That she had chosen for her afternoon walk the road along which she had returned to Casterbridge three hours earlier in a carriage was curious—if anything should be called curious in concatenations of phenomena wherein each is known to have its accounting cause.
Darkness has fallen by the time you emerge into the cold air. You are stopping at the King's Arms Hotel. Its "spacious bow window" still "projects into the street over the main portico," just as it did when Donald Farfrae, the caroling Scotsman, inquired for "a respectable hotel more moderate than this."
You hurry to your room. You have ordered a fire to be lighted, and find your quarters swimming in smoke. You open the window. Both smoke and heat fly out. But that doesn't matter. You descend, dine, and join the crowd heading for the Corn Exchange. Hardy's "first real play" goes on the boards tonight. He has entrusted his Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall to the Hardy
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