at day in the
Three-cornered Wood. Poor little sewster, she had known joyous Muckleys
too, but now she was up in the Three-cornered Wood hanging herself, aged
nineteen. I know nothing more of her, except that in her maiden days
when she left the house her mother always came to the door to look
proudly after her.

How to describe the scene, when owing to the throng a boy could only
peer at it between legs or through the crook of a woman's arm? Shovel
would have run up ploughmen to get his bird's-eye view, and he could
have told Tommy what he saw, and Tommy could have made a picture of it
in his mind, every figure ten feet high. But perhaps to be lost in it
was best. You had but to dive and come up anywhere to find something
amazing; you fell over a box of jumping-jacks into a new world.

Everyone to his taste. If you want Tommy's sentiments, here they are,
condensed: "The shows surpass everything else on earth. Four streets of
them in the square! The best is the menagerie, because there is the
loudest roaring there. Kick the caravans and you increase the roaring.
Admission, however, prohibitive (threepence). More economical to stand
outside the show of the 'Mountain Maid and the Shepherd's Bride' and
watch the merriman saying funny things to the monkey. Take care you
don't get in front of the steps, else you will be pressed up by those
behind and have to pay before you have decided that you want to go in.
When you fling pennies at the Mountain Maid and the Shepherd's Bride
they stop play-acting and scramble for them. Go in at night when there
are drunk ploughmen to fling pennies. The Fat Wife with the Golden Locks
lets you put your fingers in her arms, but that is soon over. 'The
Slave-driver and his Victims.' Not worth the money; they are not
blooding. To Jerusalem and Back in a Jiffy. This is a swindle. You just
keek through holes."

But Elspeth was of a different mind. She liked To Jerusalem and Back
best, and gave the Slave-driver and his Victims a penny to be
Christians. The only show she disliked was the wax-work, where was
performed the "Tragedy of Tiffano and the Haughty Princess." Tiffano
loved the woodman's daughter, and so he would not have the Haughty
Princess, and so she got a magician to turn him into a pumpkin, and then
she ate him. What distressed Elspeth was that Tiffano could never get to
heaven now, and all the consolation Tommy, doing his best, could give
her was, "He could go, no doubt he could go