Jude the Obsure

There is in Upper Wessex an old town of nine or ten thousand souls;

the town may be called Stoke-Barehills. It stands with its gaunt,

unattractive, ancient church, and its new red brick suburb, amid

the open, chalk-soiled cornlands, near the middle of an imaginary

triangle which has for its three corners the towns of Aldbrickham

and Wintoncester, and the important military station of Quartershot.

The great western highway from London passes through it, near a point

where the road branches into two, merely to unite again some twenty

miles further westward. Out of this bifurcation and reunion there

used to arise among wheeled travellers, before railway days, endless

questions of choice between the respective ways. But the question

is now as dead as the scot-and-lot freeholder, the road waggoner,

and the mail coachman who disputed it; and probably not a single

inhabitant of Stoke-Barehills is now even aware that the two roads

which part in his town ever meet again; for nobody now drives up and

down the great western highway dally.

The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its cemetery,

standing among some picturesque mediaeval ruins beside the railway;

the modern chapels, modern tombs, and modern shrubs having a look of

intrusiveness amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient

walls.

On a certain day, however, in the particular year which has now been

reached by this narrative--the month being early June--the features

of the town excite little interest, though many visitors arrive by

the trains; some down-trains, in especial, nearly emptying themselves

here. It is the week of the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, whose

vast encampment spreads over the open outskirts of the town like

the tents of an investing army. Rows of marquees, huts, booths,

pavilions, arcades, porticoes--every kind of structure short of

a permanent one--cover the green field for the space of a square

half-mile, and the crowds of arrivals walk through the town in

a mass, and make straight for the exhibition ground. The way

thereto is lined with shows, stalls, and hawkers on foot, who make

a market-place of the whole roadway to the show proper, and lead

some of the improvident to lighten their pockets appreciably before

they reach the gates of the exhibition they came expressly to see.

It is the popular day, the shilling day, and of the fast arriving

excursion trains two from different directions enter the two

contiguous railway stations at almost the same minute. One, like

several which have preceded it, comes from London: the other by a

cross-line from Aldbrickham; and from the London train alights a

couple; a short, rather bloated man, with a globular stomach and

small legs, resembling a top on two pegs, accompanied by a woman of

rather fine figure and rather red face, dressed in black material,

and covered with beads from bonnet to skirt, that made her glisten

as if clad in chain-mail.