Brighton Fair. All these, and other varieties of mankind, either
thronged the spacious bar-room of the hotel, drinking, smoking, talking,
bargaining, or walked about among the cattle-pens, looking with knowing
eyes at the horned people. The owners of the cattle stood near at hand,
waiting for offers. There was something indescribable in their aspect,
that showed them to be the owners, though they mixed among the crowd.
The cattle, brought from a hundred separate farms, or rather from a
thousand, seemed to agree very well together, not quarrelling in the
least. They almost all had a history, no doubt, if they could but have
told it. The cows had each given her milk to support families,--had
roamed the pastures, and come home to the barn-yard, had been looked upon
as a sort of member of the domestic circle, and was known by a name, as
Brindle or Cherry. The oxen, with their necks bent by the heavy yoke,
had toiled in the plough-field and in haying-time for many years, and
knew their master's stall as well as the master himself knew his own
table. Even the young steers and the little calves had something of
domestic sacredness about them; for children had watched their growth,
and petted them, and played with them. And here they all were, old and
young, gathered from their thousand homes to Brighton Fair; whence the
great chance was that they would go to the slaughter-house, and thence be
transmitted, in sirloins, joints, and such pieces, to the tables of the
Boston folk.

William Allen had come to buy four little pigs to take the places of four
who have now grown large at our farm, and are to be fatted and killed
within a few weeks. There were several hundreds, in pens appropriated to
their use, grunting discordantly, and apparently in no very good humor
with their companions or the world at large. Most or many of these pigs
had been imported from the State of New York. The drovers set out with a
large number, and peddle them along the road till they arrive at Brighton