ing, like the wildest of ancient Picts, into the mysterious beauties
of the Cathedral, and late at night, when the town should have slept,
arm in arm they went roaring past the dark windows, singing their songs,
stamping their feet, and every once and again ringing a decent door-bell
for their amusement. It was very seldom that any harm was done. Once a
serious fire broke out amongst the old wooden houses down on the river,
and some of them were burnt to the ground, a fate that no one deplored;
once a sailor was murdered in a drunken squabble at "The Dog and
Pilchard," the wildest of the riverside hostelries; and once a Canon
was caught and stripped and ducked in the waters of the Pol by a mob who
resented his gentle appeals that they should try to prefer lemonade to
gin; but these were the only three catastrophes in all the history of
the fair.

During the fair week the town sniffed of the sea--of lobster and seaweed
and tar and brine--and all the tales of the sea that have ever been told
by man were told during these days in Polchester.

The decent people kept their doors locked, their children at home, and
their valuables in the family safe. No upper class child in Polchester
so much as saw the outside of a gipsy van. The Dean's Ernest was
accustomed to boast that he had once been given a ride by a gipsy on a
donkey, when his nurse was not looking, but no one credited the story,
and the details with which he supported it were feeble and unconvincing.
The Polchester children in general were told that "they would be stolen
by the gipsies if they weren't careful," and, although some of them
in extreme moments of rebellion and depression felt that the life of
adventure thus offered to them, might, after all, be more agreeable than
the dreary realism of their natural days, the warning may be said to
have been effective.

No family in Polchester was guarded more carefully in this matter of the
Pauper's Fair than the Cole family. Mr. Cole had an absolute horror of
the fair. Sailors and gipsies were to him the sign and seal of utter
damnation, and although he tried, as a Christian clergyman, to believe
that they deserved pity because of the disadvantages under which they
had from the first laboured, he confessed to his intimate friends that
he saw very little hope for them either in this world or the next.
Jeremy, Helen and Mary were, during Fair Week, kept severely within
doors; their exercise had to be taken in the Cole