This eBook was produced by David Widger
In which the history opens with a description of the social manners, habits, and amusements of the English People, as exhibited in an immemorial National Festivity.—Characters to be commemorated in the history, introduced and graphically portrayed, with a nasological illustration.—Original suggestions as to the idiosyncrasies engendered by trades and callings, with other matters worthy of note, conveyed in artless dialogue after the manner of Herodotus, Father of History (mother unknown).
It was a summer fair in one of the prettiest villages in Surrey. Themain street was lined with booths, abounding in toys, gleaming crockery,gay ribbons, and gilded ginger bread. Farther on, where the streetwidened into the ample village-green, rose the more pretending fabricswhich lodged the attractive forms of the Mermaid, the Norfolk Giant; thePig-faced Lady, the Spotted Boy, and the Calf with Two Heads; while highover even these edifices, and occupying the most conspicuous vantage-ground, a lofty stage promised to rural playgoers the "Grand MelodramaticPerformance of The Remorseless Baron and the Bandit's Child." Music,lively if artless, resounded on every side,—drums, fifes, penny-whistles, cat-calls, and a hand-organ played by a dark foreigner, fromthe height of whose shoulder a cynical but observant monkey eyed thehubbub and cracked his nuts.
It was now sunset,—the throng at the fullest,—an animated, joyousscene. The, day had been sultry; no clouds were to be seen, except lowon the western horizon, where they stretched, in lengthened ridges ofgold and purple, like the border-land between earth and sky. The tallelms on the green were still, save, near the great stage, one or two,upon which had climbed young urchins, whose laughing faces peered forth,here and there, from the foliage trembling under their restlessmovements.
Amidst the crowd, as it streamed saunteringly along, were two spectators;strangers to the place, as was notably proved by the attention theyexcited, and the broad jokes their dress and appearance provoked from therustic wits,—jokes which they took with amused good-humour, andsometimes retaliated with a zest which had already made them very popularpersonages. Indeed, there was that about them which propitiated liking.They were young; and the freshness of enjoyment was so visible in theirfaces, that it begot a sympathy, and wherever they went, other facesbrightened round them.
One of the two whom we have thus individualized was of that enviable age,ranging from five-and-twenty to seven-and-twenty, in which, if a mancannot contrive to make life very pleasant,—pitiable indeed must be thestate of his digestive organs. But you might see by this gentleman'scountenance that if there were many like him, it would be a worse worldfor the doctors. His cheek, though not highly coloured, was yet ruddyand clear; his hazel eyes were lively and keen; his hair, which escapedin loose clusters from a jean shooting-cap set jauntily on a well-shapedhead, was of that deep sunny auburn rarely seen but in persons ofvigorous and hardy temperament. He was good-looking on the whole, andwould have deserved the more flattering epithet of handsome, but for hisnose, which was what the French ca