Throughout The Hamlet there is a steady flow of tradesmen, drummers, farmers, and other wayfarers who stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's. This entry represents the majority of them, who are not individualized in any way.
This trainman in The Hamlet appears in the scene of the shooting at the "bleak" station (138); after witnessing it, he has to rush to catch the departing train.
The tenant farmers on Varner's properties in The Hamlet are described as "patient earth-reeking men" who meet with their landlord each year after they have gathered the crop they raised on his land "to accept almost without question whatever Varner should compute he owed them for their year's work" (67).
In The Hamlet the "old man" who runs the Frenchman's Bend school before Labove is referred to only as "the Professor" (113). "Bibulous by nature," as an educator he has no control over the classroom and gets no respect from the students (113).
This entry represents the children of Frenchman's Bend in The Hamlet who attend the local school at various times, from Reconstruction to the novel's present day. According to the narrator, these boys and girls walk "back and forth in all weathers" (108) to the community schoolhouse. Many of these schoolchildren have no use for the institution at all, especially for their alcoholic professor. When Labove takes over the school, he instills discipline among the students and has a number of the "older boys" (124) build a basketball court.
In The Hamlet Ratliff's widowed sister keeps house for him in Jefferson. Neither her first nor her married name is mentioned. While there is little to define her physical appearance, Faulkner describes her "mute and outraged righteousness" when she is forced to live with Mink Snopes' wife and her two children (286). She is offended that Ratliff permits Mink's wife to do some of the housework (287).
In The Hamlet these "people" are obliquely evoked when the narrator says that the "mounds of rotting sawdust" marking the sites of the sawmills that once turned all the trees around Frenchman's Bend into lumber are the "monuments of a people's heedless greed" (190).
In The Hamlet the orphaned Lucy Pate was raised by this remote relation; she imbued Lucy with the "domestic skill" of a "country heritage" and the values of "constancy and devotion" (227).
Lump Snopes' mother in The Hamlet was one "of a moil of sisters and brothers" (218). 'Moil' is an archaic term that can mean 'confusion,' so the sense of this is that she was one of many children; this reading is confirmed when the narrator notes that her father was "a congenital failure" who "begot . . . more children whom he could not quite feed" (218).
