Page:The English Peasant.djvu/119

 "  Thou, Filial Piety, wert there; &emsp;&emsp;And round the ring, benignly bright, Dwelt in the luscious half-shed tear. &emsp;&emsp;And in the parting word—Good-night."

Last autumn we stayed at a Suffolk village not a dozen miles from Honnington, where Bloomfield was born, and from Sapiston, where he worked as a farmer's boy. If you object to broken rest, do not take up your abode in a village on the night before the fair. It may be a place in which you could enjoy delicious slumbers every other night in the year, but on that particular morning you will infallibly wake long before daybreak conscious of much unpleasant bustle. There is the constant creaking of wheels coming into the village, but what is worse, a noise as the noise of a city full of undertakers—tap, tap, tap; rap-a-tap-tap. Heavy elephantine feet have been passing and repassing ever since it was light, and when at last you rise and look out of the window, behold! the little triangular market-place is full of canvas and gipsy carts. Cheery-faced country people are busy setting out their wares, while dark, sallow-visaged, inscrutable-looking men stand idly about, probably speculating on the gains their round-abouts, their shows, and their pistol galleries will bring in. By degrees the visitors arrive—boys and girls with shining morning faces, bent upon a day's fun; the elders, too, in the best spirits, and loud in their mutual greetings.

Later on in the day we thread the line of little booths, and think how many generations of Hodges and Mollies, arrayed in new smocks and blazing ribbons, have found in them a source of delight, the mere anticipation of which was enough to sweeten the monotony of their existence from year's end to year's end.

We look at those stores of dolls and whips and whistles, and think how in every age the children have looked forward to fair day as a day redolent with joyful surprises, when some good fairy seemed to load their little hands with all that heart could wish, or brightest fancy ever could conceive.

How we hate the tin whistle's shrill, brain-piercing noise! Yet when we reflect that, for aught we know, the little Saxon ploughboy blew it in the same reckless defiant way beneath the Norman