twelve months ahead, and
potters hired themselves out for that term at the best rate they could
get. Even to the present day the housewives reckon chronology by
Martinmas. They say, "It'll be seven years come Martinmas that Sal's
babby died o' convulsions." Or, "It was that year as it rained and
hailed all Martinmas." And many of them have no idea why it is
Martinmas, and not Midsummer or Whitsun, that is always on the tips of
their tongues.
The Fair was one of the two great drunken sprees of the year, the other
being the Wakes. And it was meet that it should be so, for intoxication
was a powerful aid to the signing of contracts. A sot would put his name
to anything, gloriously; and when he had signed he had signed. Thus the
beaver-hatted employers smiled at Martinmas drunkenness, and smacked it
familiarly on the back; and little boys swilled themselves into the
gutter with their elders, and felt intensely proud of the feat. These
heroic old times have gone by, never to return.
It was on the Friday before Martinmas, at dusk. In the centre of the
town, on the waste ground to the north of the "Shambles" (as the
stone-built meat market was called), and in the space between the
Shambles and the as yet unfinished new Town Hall, the showmen and the
showgirls and the showboys were titivating their booths, and cooking
their teas, and watering their horses, and polishing the brass rails of
their vans, and brushing their fancy costumes, and hammering fresh
tent-pegs into the hard ground, and lighting the first flares of the
evening, and yarning, and quarrelling, and washing--all under the sombre
purple sky, for the diversion of a small crowd of loafers, big and
little, who stood obstinately with their hands in their pockets or in
their sleeves, missing naught of the promising spectacle.
Now, in the midst of what in less than twenty-four hours would be the
Fair, was to be seen a strange and piquant sight--namely, a group of
three white-tied, broad-brimmed dissenting ministers in earnest converse
with fat Mr Snaggs, the proprietor of Snaggs's--Snaggs's being the town
theatre, a wooden erection, generally called by patrons the "Blood Tub,"
on account of its sanguinary programmes. On this occasion Mr Snaggs and
the dissenting ministers were for once in a way agreed. They all
objected to a certain feature of the Fair. It was not the roundabouts,
so crude that even an infant of to-day would despise them. It was
not the shooting-g
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