e week, or questions set for those who like them. It is Miss
Fennimore who is the nucleus of the band; she sits with them in church,
she keeps the books, writes the questions, and leads the singing; and she
is walking between her two chief friends, answering their eager and
intelligent questions about trees and flowers, and directing their
observation.

Boys! boys! boys! Objects in flat caps and little round buttons atop,
knee-breeches, and short-tailed coats, funnier to look at than their
white-capped sisters, gentlemanly choristers, tidy sons of artisans and
warehousemen, ragged half-tamed little street vagabonds, all file past,
under curate, schoolmaster or pupil teacher, till the whole multitude is
safely deposited in a large mead running into the heart of the Forest,
and belonging to the ranger, Sir John Raymond, who has been busy there,
with all his family, for the last three days.

Policemen guard the gates from intruders, but all can look over the low
hedge at the tents at either end, the cord dividing boy from girl, and
the scattered hay, on which the strangers move about, mostly mazed by the
strange sights, sounds, and smells, and only the petted orphans venturing
to tumble about that curious article upon the ground. Two little
sisters, however, evidently transplanted country children, sit up in a
corner where they have found some flowers, fondling them and hugging them
with ecstasy.

The band strikes up, and, at the appointed signal, grace is said by the
archdeacon from the centre, the children are seated on the grass, and
'the nobility, clergy, and gentry' rush to the tents, and emerge with
baskets of sandwiches of the largest dimensions, or cans full of Sir
John's beer. The Whittingtonians devour as those that have eaten nothing
this morning, the Wulstonites as though country air gave great keenness
of appetite; the subdued silence of awe passes off, and voices, laughing,
and play begin to betray some real enjoyment and familiarity.

Such as are not too perfectly happy in the revelry of tumbling on the
grass are then paraded through the show, to gaze at peas, currants, and
potatoes, pyramids of geraniums, and roses peeping through white paper.
Thence the younger ones return to play in the field; such of the elder
ones as prefer walking are conducted through forest paths to gather
flowers, and to obtain a closer view of that oft-described sight, a
corn-field. Some of the elder Wulstonians get up a da