usiness in the cattle-line did not seem, however, to be going on.
Now and then a big fellow made an offer, and held out his hand for a
little Pictish grazier to give it a slap--a cattle bargain being
concluded by a slap of the hand--but the Welshman generally turned away,
with a half-resentful exclamation. There were a few horses and ponies in
a street leading into the fair from the south.

"I saw none sold, however. A tall athletic figure was striding amongst
them, evidently a jockey and a stranger, looking at them and occasionally
asking a slight question of one or another of their proprietors, but he
did not buy. He might in age be about eight-and-twenty, and about six
feet and three-quarters of an inch in height; in build he was perfection
itself--a better-built man I never saw. He wore a cap and a brown jockey
coat, trowsers, leggings, and highlows, and sported a single spur. He
had whiskers--all jockeys should have whiskers--but he had what I did not
like, and what no genuine jockey should have, a moustache, which looks
coxcombical and Frenchified--but most things have terribly changed since
I was young. Three or four hardy-looking fellows, policemen, were
gliding about in their blue coats and leather hats, holding their thin
walking-sticks behind them; conspicuous amongst whom was the leader, a
tall lathy North Briton with a keen eye and hard features. Now if I add
there was much gabbling of Welsh round about, and here and there some
slight sawing of English--that in the street leading from the north there
were some stalls of gingerbread and a table at which a queer-looking
being with a red Greek-looking cap on his head, sold rhubarb, herbs, and
phials containing the Lord knows what, and who spoke a low vulgar English
dialect,--I repeat, if I add this, I think I have said all that is
necessary about Llangollen Fair."

But this is a somewhat exceptional passage, and the same detachment is
rarely found except in his descriptions of scenery, which are short and
serve well enough to remind the reader of the great hills, the rapid
waters, the rocks, and the furnaces, chimneys and pits. Borrow certainly
does remind us of these things. In the first place he does so by a
hundred minute and scattered suggestions of the romantic and sublime, and
so general that only a pedant will object to the nightingales which he
heard singing in August near Bethesda. He gives us black mountains,
gloomy shadows, cascades fallin