and wonder at the vagrant personages who accompanied these caravans. I
loitered about the village inn, listening with curiosity and delight to
the slang talk and cant jokes of the showmen and their followers; and I
felt an eager desire to witness this fair, which my fancy decked out as
something wonderfully fine.

A holyday afternoon presented, when I could be absent from the school
from noon until evening. A wagon was going from the village to the
fair. I could not resist the temptation, nor the eloquence of Tom
Dribble, who was a truant to the very heart's core. We hired seats, and
set off full of boyish expectation. I promised myself that I would but
take a peep at the land of promise, and hasten back again before my
absence should be noticed.

Heavens! how happy I was on arriving at the fair! How I was enchanted
with the world of fun and pageantry around me! The humors of Punch; the
feats of the equestrians; the magical tricks of the conjurors! But what
principally caught my attention was--an itinerant theatre; where a
tragedy, pantomime, and farce were all acted in the course of half an
hour, and more of the dramatis personae murdered, than at either Drury
Lane or Covent Garden in a whole evening. I have since seen many a play
performed by the best actors in the world, but never have I derived
half the delight from any that I did from this first representation.

There was a ferocious tyrant in a skull cap like an inverted porringer,
and a dress of red baize, magnificently embroidered with gilt leather;
with his face so be-whiskered and his eyebrows so knit and expanded
with burnt cork, that he made my heart quake within me as he stamped
about the little stage. I was enraptured too with the surpassing beauty
of a distressed damsel, in faded pink silk, and dirty white muslin,