 spittoon of the Jötuns. It was to Casterbridge what
the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude. The
dusk of evening was the proper hour at which a true impression of this
suggestive place could be received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that
time there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view
from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely,
yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent
spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there;
tentative meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one
kind of appointment - in itself the most common of any - seldom had place in the
Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers.
    Why, seeing that it was pre-eminently an airy, accessible, and sequestered
spot for interviews, the cheerfullest form of those occurrences never took
kindly to the soil of the ruin, would be a curious inquiry. Perhaps it was
because its associations had about them something sinister. Its history proved
that. Apart from the sanguinary nature of the games originally played therein,
such incidents attached to its past as these: that for scores of years the
town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her
husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand
spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart
burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of
those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. In
addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had
come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the
outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few
townspeople in the daily round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So
that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there
unseen at mid-day.
    Some boys had latterly tried to impart gaiety to the ruin by using the
central arena as a cricket-ground. But the game usually languished for the
aforesaid reason - the dismal privacy which the earthen circle enforced,
shutting out every appreciative passer's vision, every commendatory remark from
outsiders - everything, except the sky; and to play at games in such
circumstances was like acting to an empty house. Possibly, too, the boys were
timid, for some old people said that at certain moments in the summer time, in
