fair, there were children of people whom I had known as children, with
just the same love for a monkey going up one side of a yellow stick and
coming down the other, and just as strong heads for a giddy-go-round on
a hot day and a diet of peppermint lozenges, as their fathers and
mothers before them. There were the very same names--and here and there
it seemed the very same faces--I knew so long ago. A few shillings were
indeed well expended in brightening those familiar eyes: and then there
were the children with me.... Besides, there really did seem to be an
unusually nice assortment of things, and the man was very intelligent
(in reference to his wares):.... Well, well! It was two o'clock P.M.
when we went in at one end of that glittering avenue of drums, dolls,
trumpets, accordions, workboxes, and what not; but what o'clock it was
when I came out at the other end, with a shilling and some coppers in
my pocket, and was cheered, I can't say, though I should like to have
been able to be accurate about the time, because of what followed.

"I thought the best thing I could do was to get out of the fair at
once, so I went up the village and struck off across some fields into a
little wood that lay near. (A favourite walk in old times.) As I turned
out of the booth, my foot struck against one of the yellow sticks of
the climbing monkeys. The monkey was gone, and the stick broken. It set
me thinking as I walked along.

"What an untold number of pretty and ingenious things one does (not
wear out in honourable wear and tear, but) utterly lose, and wilfully
destroy, in one's young days--things that would have given pleasure to
so many more young eyes, if they had been kept a little longer--things
that one would so value in later years, if some of them had survived
the dissipating and destructive days of Nurserydom. I recalled a young
lady I knew, whose room was adorned with knick-knacks of a kind I had