t lay the principal
street of Bandon, seething with horses, loud with voices, and as the
engine-driver, with the stern humour of his kind, let loose the usual
assortment of sounds, it seemed as though the roadway below boiled over.
Horses reared, plunged and stampeded, while high above the head of a
long-tailed chestnut a countryman floated forth into space, a vision, in
its brief perfectness, delightfully photographed on the retina.

From the moment of leaving the railway station the fair was all
pervading. It appeared that the whole district had turned horse dealer.
The cramped side pavements of the town failed to accommodate the
ceaseless promenade of those whose sole business lay in criticising the
companion promenade of horses in the narrow street. They haled horses
before them with the aplomb of a colonel of cavalry buying remounts.

"Hi! bay horse! Pull in here! Foxy mare! Hi, boy, bring up that foxy
mare!"

The ensuing comments, though mainly of a damaging nature, were
understood on both sides to be no more than conventional dismissals. The
bay horse and the foxy mare were re-absorbed in the stream; their
critics directed their attentions elsewhere with unquenched assiduity.

It is the truest, most changeless trait of Irish character, the desire
to stand well with the horse, to be his confidant, his physician, his
exponent. It is comparable to the inborn persuasion in the heart of
every man that he is a judge of wine.

The procession of horses in the long, narrow street makes the brain
swim. Hardly has the eye taken in the elderly and astute hunter with the
fired hocks, whose forelegs look best in action, when it is dazzled by
the career of a cart-horse, scourged to a mighty canter by a boy with a
rope's end, or it is horrified by the hair-breadth escape of a group of
hooded countrywomen from before the neighing charge of a two-year-old in
a halter and string. Yet these things are the mere preliminary to the
fair. At the end of the town a gap broken in a fence admits to a long
field on a hillside. The entrance is perilous, and before it is achieved
may involve more than one headlong flight to the safe summit of a
friendly wall, as the young horses protest, and whirl, and buck with the
usual fatuity of their kind. Once within the fair field there befal the
enticements of the green apple, of the dark-complexioned sweetmeat
temptingly denominated "Peggy's leg," of the "crackers"--that is, a
confection resembli