arate us, for in
the never-failing love of God
there is union for evermore.'--J.
CAMM._

VIII. A WONDERFUL FORTNIGHT

I

The annual Fair on Whitsun Wednesday is the gayest time of the whole
year at Sedbergh. For a few hours the solid grey town under the green
fells gives itself up to gaiety and merriment.

The gentry of the neighbourhood as well as the country folk for miles
around come flocking to the annual hiring of farm lads and lasses,
which is the main business of the Fair. Thoughts of profit and the
chance of making a good bargain fill the heads of the older
generation. But the youths and maidens come, eager-eyed, looking for
romance. At the Fair they seek to guess what Fate may hold in store
for them during the long months of labour that will follow hard on
their few hours of jollification.

'All manner of finery was to be had' at the Fair; 'there were morris
and rapier dances, wrestling and love-making going on,' and plenty of
hard drinking too. 'The Fair at Sedbergh' was the emphatic destination
of many a prosperous farmer and labourer on a Whitsun Wednesday
morning; but it was 'Sebba Fair' he cursed thickly under his breath as
he reeled home at night.

In truth seventeenth-century Sedbergh was a busy place, not only in
Fair week, but at other times too, with its stately old church and its
grammar school; to say nothing of the fact that, in these days of
Oliver's Protectorate, it boasted no less than forty-eight different
religious sects among its few hundred inhabitants. Only the sad-eyed
Seekers, coming down in little groups from their scattered hamlets,
exchanged sorrowful greetings as they met one another amid all the
riot and hubbub of the Fair; for they had tried the forty-eight sects
in turn for the nourishment their souls needed, and had tried them all
in vain.

Until this miraculous Whitsuntide of June 1652, when, suddenly, in a
moment, everything was changed.

The little groups of Seekers stood still and looked at one another in
astonishment as they came out from the shadow of the narrow street of
grey stone houses into the open square in the centre of the town. For
there, opposite the market cross and under the spreading boughs of a
gigantic yew-tree, they saw a young man standing on a bench, and
preaching as they had never heard anyone preach before. Behind him
rose the massive square tower, and the long row of clerestory windows
tha