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 Players, humble Dorset mummers. The local doctor will be Tristram, a pretty little shop-assistant will put on the robes and chaplet of Iseult of the White Hands. In the "cast" are also a greengrocer, a solicitor's clerk, a saddler, a master-brewer.

Inside the old Exchange is the audience, simple country people for the most part, seated under the oak ceiling, flanked by green-painted Gothic arches—the very scene of the Casterbridge Mayor's spectacular downfall. A local musical band, the Frampton Family Orchestra (Framptons have been mayors of the town), scrapes away on fiddles and viols, discoursing old country tunes and lively dances, for all the world like the antique Mellstock Choir. Humble folk all, here, except for a few well-fed squires whose motors are parked outside, and a sprinkling of dinner-jacketed London critics.

A microphone dangles from the ceiling in front, ready to spread the atmosphere of the evening across all England through the etheric pulsations of the British Broadcasting Company. The critics for the two-penny papers, the photographers, the microphone, seem, in a sense, to be intruders, just as you did, perhaps, when you visited the old hangman's cottage, when you trod the narrow winding lanes that brought you to the shallow Froom River and the one-time haunts of the furmity-woman.

Mrs. Hardy has come in, but not Hardy himself.

All your reflections are interrupted when the Frampton musicians suddenly silence their fiddling. The lights are switched off—on, and off again, with the customary indecision of an amateur first-night stage electrician. A projection-machine hisses and sputters fitfully in the