able ready
for all comers, and not unlikely to make them remember feast time--for
feast-cake is very solid, and full of huge raisins. Moreover, feast-time
was the day of reconciliation for the parish. If Job Higgins and Noah
Freeman hadn't spoken for the last six months, their "old women" would
be sure to get it patched up by that day. And though there was a good
deal of drinking and low vice in the booths of an evening, it was pretty
well confined to those who would have been doing the like, "veast or no
veast," and on the whole, the effect was humanizing and Christian. In
fact, the only reason why this is not the case still, is that gentlefolk
and farmers have taken to other amusements, and have, as usual,
forgotten the poor. They don't attend the feasts themselves, and call
them disreputable, whereupon the steadiest of the poor leave them also,
and they become what they are called. Class amusements, be they for
dukes or plough-boys, always become nuisances and curses to a country.
The true charm of cricket and hunting is, that they are still more or
less sociable and universal; there's a place for every man who will come
and take his part.

No one in the village enjoyed the approach of "veast day" more than Tom,
in the year in which he was taken under old Benjy's tutelage. The feast
was held in a large green field at the lower end of the village. The
road to Farringdon ran along one side of it, and the brook by the side
of the road; and above the brook was another large gentle sloping
pasture-land, with a footpath running down it from the churchyard; and
the old church, the originator of all the mirth, towered up with its
grey walls and lancet windows, overlooking and sanctioning the whole,
though its own share therein had been forgotten. At the point where the
footpath crossed the brook and road, and entered on the field where the
feast was held, was a long low road-side inn, and on the opposite side
of the field was a large white thatched farm-house, where dwelt an old
sporting farmer, a great promoter of the revels.

Past the old church, and down the footpath, pottered the old man and the
child hand in hand early on the afternoon of the day before the feast,
and wandered all round the ground, which was already being occupied by
the "cheap Jacks," with their green covered carts and marvellous
assortment of wares, and the booths of more legitimate small traders
with their tempting arrays of fairings and eatables! a