one head black and one yellow, and white protruding teeth in both
mouths. Next to him was the Fortune Teller's, and outside this a little
man with a hump beat a drum. Then there was "The Theatre of Tragedy and
Mirth," with a poster on one side of the door portraying a lady drowning
in the swiftest of rivers, but with the prospect of being saved by a
stout gentleman who leaned over from the bank and grasped her hair. Then
there was the "Chamber of the Fat Lady and the Six Little Dwarfs," and
the entry to this was guarded by a dirty sour-looking female who
gnashed her teeth at a hesitating public, before whom, with a splendid
indifference to appearance, she consumed, out of a piece of newspaper,
her evening meal.

All these things were in Jeremy's immediate vision, and beyond them was
a haze that his eyes could not penetrate. It held, he knew, wild beasts,
because he could hear quite clearly from time to time the lion and the
elephant and the tiger; it held music, because from somewhere through
all the noise and confusion the tune of a band penetrated; it held
buyers and sellers and treasures and riches, and all the inhabitants of
the world--surely all the world must be here to-night. And then, beyond
the haze, there were the silent and mysterious gipsy caravans. Dark with
their little square windows, and their coloured walls, and their round
wheels, and the smell of wood fires, and the noise of hissing kettles
and horses cropping the grass, and around them the still night world
with the thick woods and the dark river.

He did not see it all as he sat on his horse--he was, as yet, too young;
but he did feel the contrast between the din and glare around him and
the silence and dark beyond, and, afterwards, looking back, he knew that
he had found in that same contrast the very heart of romance. As it was,
he simply clutched his horse's beautiful head and waited for the ride to
begin...

They were off! He felt his horse quiver under him, he saw the mansions
of the Two-Headed Giant and the Fat Lady slip to the right, the light
seemed to swing like the skirt of someone's dress, upwards across the
floor, and from the heart of the golden woman and the king and the
minstrel a scream burst forth as though they were announcing the end of
the world. After that he had no clear idea as to what occurred. He was
swung into space, and all the life that had been so stationary, the
booths, the lights, the men and women, the very stars we