gamester gives the new hat to the shepherd, and, soon after, the
half-sovereign to Willum, who thereout decorates his sweetheart with
ribbons to his heart's content.

"Who can a be?" "Wur do a cum from?" ask the crowd. And it soon flies
about that the old west-country champion, who played a tie with Shaw the
Lifeguardsman at "Vizes" twenty years before, has broken Joe Willis's
crown for him.

How my country fair is spinning out! I see I must skip the wrestling;
and the boys jumping in sacks, and rolling wheelbarrows blindfolded;
and the donkey-race, and the fight which arose thereout, marring the
otherwise peaceful "veast;" and the frightened scurrying away of the
female feast-goers, and descent of Squire Brown, summoned by the wife of
one of the combatants to stop it; which he wouldn't start to do till he
had got on his top-boots. Tom is carried away by old Benjy, dog-tired
and surfeited with pleasure, as the evening comes on and the dancing
begins in the booths; and though Willum, and Rachel in her new ribbons,
and many another good lad and lass don't come away just yet, but have
a good step out, and enjoy it, and get no harm thereby, yet we, being
sober folk, will just stroll away up through the churchyard, and by the
old yew-tree, and get a quiet dish of tea and a parley with our gossips,
as the steady ones of our village do, and so to bed.

That's the fair, true sketch, as far as it goes, of one of the larger
village feasts in the Vale of Berks, when I was a little boy. They
are much altered for the worse, I am told. I haven't been at one these
twenty years, but I have been at the statute fairs in some west-country
towns, where servants are hired, and greater abominations cannot be
found. What village feasts have come to, I fear, in many cases, may