A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 205 



there is business doing at good prices. The half- 

 gipsy dealers of our own country and the visitors from 

 Cork are not doing ill : fifty pounds for a young Irish 

 horse, much too soft for our up-and-down roads, seems 

 sufficient. Still, there are worse animals than the 

 rough-coated mount of the blue-chinned, bullet-headed 

 "gippo," whose long grey Newmarket flies behind 

 him, and whose seat is worth seeing. He is a type 

 of the horse-interest as definitely as the lantern-jawed, 

 sandy-bearded Saxon is of the race that deals with 

 the " Ship." 



I went back to look for Bob in the Pleasure Fair, 

 and found him, at the far end of the half-crown I 

 had commissioned him to spend, shooting at eggshells 

 poised on a small fountain ; while Alice and the rest 

 of the party, laden with cocoanuts and jumbles and 

 fairing toys, respectfully looked on. I was seized 

 straightway ; and although the small people had been 

 all round the shows twice, from the Fat Lady to the 

 Theatre Royal (alternately rendering an abridged 

 Faust and the Green Bushes), was made to go round 

 with them again. At ordinary times I should loathe 

 the tawdry pandemonium, and hold sound opinions 

 about the duty of local bodies towards the physical 

 and spiritual nastiness of a Yahoo camp once a year 

 in our midst ; but through the hold of a small hand, 



