Descending the western side of the hill and passing the broad park-lands of Kingston, we enter the town of Dorchester along the straight and level road running through the water-meadows of the river Frome. Until a few years ago this approach was shaded and rendered beautiful by an avenue of stately old elms that enclosed the distant picture of the town as in a frame; but they were cut down by the Duchy of Cornwall officials, in whose hands much of the surrounding property is placed, and only the pitiful stumps of them, shorn off close to the ground, remain to tell of their existence. As Dorchester is approached the road is seen in the distance becoming a street, and going, as straight as ever, and with a continuous rise, [Sidenote: ‘_CASTERBRIDGE_’] [Illustration: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ DORCHESTER.] through the town, with the square tower of St. Peter’s and the spiky clock-tower of the Town Hall cresting the view in High West Street, and in High East Street the modern Early English spire of All Saints nearer at hand. The particular one among the many bridges and culverts that carry the rivulets under the road here, mentioned by the novelist in his _Mayor of Casterbridge_ as the spot where Henchard, the ruined mayor, lounged in his aimless idleness, amid the wastrels and ne’er-do-weels of Casterbridge, is the bridge that finally brings the road into the town, by the old ‘White Hart Inn.’ It is the inevitable lounging-stock for Dorchester’s failures, who mostly live near by at Fordington, the east end of the town, where the ‘Mixen Lane’ of the story, ‘the mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant’ was situated. It is a transfigured Dorchester that is painted by the novelist in that story; or, perhaps more exactly, the Dorchester of fifty years ago. ‘It is huddled all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot of garden-ground by a box-edging,’ is the not very apt comparison with the tall chestnuts and sycamores of the surviving avenues. ‘It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green tablecloth. The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.’