Thomas Hardy

The Return of the Native Thomas Hardy

Along the road walked an old man. He was white-headed as a mountain, bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect. He wore a glazed hat, an ancient boat-cloak, and shoes; his brassbuttons bearing an anchor upon their face. In his hand was a silver-headed walking stick, which heused as a veritable third leg, perseveringly dotting the ground with its point at every few inches'interval. One would have said that he had been, in his day, a naval officer of some sort or other. Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white. It was quite open to theheath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon. The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze over the tract that he had yet to traverse. At length he discerned, a long distance in front of him, a moving spot, which appeared to be avehicle, and it proved to be going the same way as that in which he himself was journeying. It wasthe single atom of life that the scene contained, and it only served to render the general lonelinessmore evident. Its rate of advance was slow, and the old man gained upon it sensibly. When he drew nearer he perceived it to be a spring van, ordinary in shape, but singular in colour, this being a lurid red. The driver walked beside it; and, like his van, he was completely red. One dyeof that tincture covered his clothes, the cap upon his head, his boots, his face, and his hands. He wasnot temporarily overlaid with the colour; it permeated him. The old man knew the meaning of this. The traveller with the cart was a reddleman-a personwhose vocation it was to supply farmers with redding for their sheep. He was one of a class rapidlybecoming extinct in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, during the lastcentury, the dodo occupied in the world of animals. He is a curious, interesting, and nearly perishedlink between obsolete forms of life and those which generally preva