passing from the west. 'A sheep is after passing,' said the farmer I
was talking to, 'but it was not one of yours, for it was too wilful;
it was a mountain sheep.' Sometimes animals are astray in this way
for a considerable time--it is not unusual to meet a man the day
after a fair wandering through the country, asking after a lost
heifer, or ewe--but they are always well marked and are found in the
end.

When I reached the green above the village I found the curious
throng one always meets in these fairs, made up of wild mountain
squatters, gentlemen farmers, jobbers and herds. At one corner of
the green there was the usual camp of tinkers, where a swarm of
children had been left to play among the carts while the men and
women wandered through the fair selling cans or donkeys. Many odd
types of tramps and beggars had come together also, and were
loitering about in the hope of getting some chance job, or of
finding some one who would stand them a drink. Once or twice a stir
was made by some unruly ram or bull, but in these smaller fairs
there seldom is much real excitement till the evening, when the bad
whisky that is too freely drunk begins to be felt.

When I had spoken to one or two men that I wished to see, I sat down
near a bridge at the end of the green, between a tinker who was
mending a can and a herd who was minding some sheep that had not
been sold. The herd spoke to me with some pride of his skill in
dipping sheep to keep them from the fly, and other matters connected
with his work. 'Let you not be talking,' said the tinker, when he
paused for a moment. 'You've been after sheep since you were that
height' (holding his hand a little over the ground), 'and yet you're
nowhere in the world beside the herds that do be reared beyond on