But as the coach came in sight at a bend of the road, two figures were seen hastening along from the direction of the rectory. One was a tall youthful form clad in black from his low felt hat to his buckle shoes. His steinkirk was black, and its fringed ends were tucked into a black waistcoat. Black were his plain drugget coat and breeches, black also his woollen stockings. Nothing redeemed the sable hue of his garments save his cambric shirt, the white front of which was much exposed, in the fashion of the time. Harry Rochester’s face was pale, its expression sad. His companion, a head shorter than himself, was Sherebiah Minshull, clad in the sober brown of ordinary country wear, and trudging along steadily under the weight of a fair-sized valise. Winter or summer, his appearance never varied: his firm round cheeks were always ruddy, his blue eyes always bright; and his expression, now as always, was that of placid self-content, well becoming "a man of peace". The two drew nearer to the inn, where the group had by this time been enlarged by the accession of the greater part of the village population, women and children, workers and loafers, mingled in one interested throng. As Giles Appleyard was at that moment explaining to the passenger at his side, he had never seen such a crowd at Winton St. Mary before, though he had driven the coach, good weather and bad, for fifteen years come Christmas. It reminded him of the crowd at Salisbury Fair. "And seein’ as how I’ve been laid up wi’ a bad leg for two months," he added, "I’m behind the times, I be; news travels slow to them as don’t drive coaches, and, i’ feck, I know no more than the dead what this mortal big crowd do mean, i’ feck I don’t." But many voices were ready to tell him when, having pulled up his four steaming horses at the inn door, he descended with grave deliberation from his perch, saluted Mistress Joplady with the gallantry of the road, and entered her house "to warm his nattlens", as he said, with a tankard of her home-brewed. Young pa’son was a-gwine to Lun’on town! It seemed a slight cause for such an unwonted scene; in reality it was a momentous event in the life of Harry Rochester and in the history of his village. Small things bulk large in the imagination of rustic folk; a journey to London came within the experience of few of them; and the departure of young pa’son, following so closely upon two such notable events as the cricket match and the attack on the Lord High Treasurer, had already furnished unfailing material for gossip, and would be the theme of comment and speculation for a year to come.