ap Street engulfed
them. They were jostled in the crowd. It was, after all, only Hampstead
Heath on a small scale.

"Walk up, walk up! All the fun of the fair! Buy a teazer! Buy a teazer!
Buy a teazer! Tickle the girls! Walk up! Try your luck at the darts,
sir; now then, sir, come on!"

The confused roar was as music to Gordon's soul. He had the Cockney love
of a fair. The children of London are still true to the coster legends
of the Old Kent Road.

Gordon and Rudd did not stop long in Cheap Street. The real business was
in the fair fields by Rogers's house. This was only the outskirts.

The next hour passed in a dream. Lights flared, rifles snapped at
fugitive ping-pong balls leaping on cascades of water, swing-boats rose
heavenwards, merry-go-rounds banged out rag-time choruses. Gordon let
himself go. He and Rudd tried everything. After wasting half-a-crown on
the cocoanuts, Rudd captured first go at the darts a wonderful vase
decorated with the gilt legend, "A Present from Fernhurst," and Gordon
at the rifle range won a beautiful china shepherdess which held for days
the admiration of the School House, until pining perhaps for its lover,
which by no outlay of darts could Gordon secure, it became dislodged
from the bracket and fell in pieces on the floor, to be swept away by
Arthur, the school _custos_, into the perpetual darkness of the dustbin.

Weary at last, the pair sought the shelter of a small cafe, where they
luxuriously sipped lemonade. Faces arose out of the night, passed by and
faded out again. The sky was red with pleasure, the noise and shrieks
grew louder and more insistent. There was a dance going on.

"I say, Rudd, do you dance?"

"No, not much."

"Well, look here, I can, a bit; at any rate I am going to have a bit of
fun over there. Let us go on our own for a bit. Meet me here at a
quarter to four."

"Right," said Rudd, and continued sipping the lurid poison that called
itself American cream soda, and was in reality merely a cheap illness.

Gordon walked in the direction of the dancing. The grass had been cut
quite short in a circle, and to the time of a broken band the town
dandies were whirling round, flushed with excitement and the close
proximity of a female form. "The Maenads and the Bassarids," murmured
Gordon to himself, and cursed his luck for not knowing any of the girls.
Disconsolately he wandered across to the Bijou Theatre, a tumble-down
hut where a huge crowd was jostling and