Page:Lady Anne Granard 2.pdf/170

168

"I am going to ask you a question that does not require much legal acumen to answer," said Lord Meersbrook to his attorney, when he called the next day in Lincoln's Inn: "what is a bazaar or fancy fair?—of course I know the meaning of the first word pretty well, but I don't understand the second." "A fancy fair is a new kind of charity, my lord; or, strictly speaking, a new mode of dispensing it, by employing the wits and fingers of our wives and daughters in making all sorts of fidfads, which turns your house into a Babel, sends your servants to Ackermann's, or the haberdasher's, ten times a day for coloured paper and pasteboard, fancy edgings and colour-boxes, ribbon and velvet, silver edging, beads and braid, card-racks and hand-screens, dolls' heads and purse-clasps—in short, things without end, as I know to my sorrow." "And I to my joy," thought Lord Meersbrook, but he only said, "And these are worked up for purposes of charity?" "They are, my lord, so worked up that fifty or perhaps a hundred per cent, arises from the exercise