ed lightly across the necks of the
two foremost. They are quite motionless, except their eyes, and the
slender rod, so lightly laid across, will remain without falling. After
traversing the whole field, if you return you will find them exactly in
the same position. Some black cattle are scattered about on the high
ground in the mist, which thickens beyond them, and fills up the immense
hollow of the valley.

In the street of booths there are the roundabouts, the swings, the rifle
galleries--like shooting into the mouth of a great trumpet--the shows,
the cakes and brown nuts and gingerbread, the ale-barrels in a row, the
rude forms and trestle tables; just the same, the very same, we saw at
our first fair five-and-twenty years ago, and a hundred miles away. It
is just the same this year as last, like the ploughs and hurdles, and
the sheep themselves. There is nothing new to tempt the ploughboy's
pennies--nothing fresh to stare at.

The same thing year after year, and the same sounds--the dismal barrel
organs, and brazen instruments, and pipes, wailing, droning, booming.
How melancholy the inexpressible noise when the fair is left behind, and
the wet vapours are settling and thickening around it! But the
melancholy is not in the fair--the ploughboy likes it; it is in
ourselves, in the thought that thus, though the years go by, so much of
human life remains the same--the same blatant discord, the same
monotonous roundabout, the same poor gingerbread.

The ploughs are at work, travelling slowly at the ox's pace up and down
the hillside. The South Down plough could scarcely have been invented;
it must have been put together bit by bit in the slow years--slower than
the ox; it is the completed structure of long experience. It is made of
many pieces, chiefly wood, fitted and shaped and worked, as it were,
together, well seasoned first, built up, like a ship, by cunning of
hand.

None of these were struck out--a hundred a minute--by irresistible
machinery ponderously impressing its will on iron as a seal on wax--a
hundred a minute, and all exactly alike. These separate pieces which
compose the plough were cut, chosen, and shaped in the wheelwright's
workshop, chosen by the eye, guided in its turn by long knowledge of
wood, and shaped by the living though hardened hand of man. So
complicated a structure could no more have been struck out on paper in a
deliberate and single plan than those separate pieces could have been
pro