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 as they considered would most appeal to the Court Day crowds. The hardware merchants had taken their lawn mowers, carpet sweepers, and phonographs to the back of the store, and displayed instead rows of cheap, tin-plated wash-boilers, gray enameled sauce pans, sheep shears, tobacco knives, hoes, rakes, shovels, and cheap butcher knives. The windows of the dry-goods stores were full of overalls, corduroy trousers, work shirts, apron ginghams, and sleazy but bright colored calicoes. The two druggists had withdrawn their tooth brushes, toilet soaps, and cosmetics, and vied with each other in a tempting array of patent medicines, nursing bottles, sheep dips, and veterinary remedies.

The Town Hall, where the Court sat, showed unusual signs of activity. Boys swarmed over the stone steps; and one of the two policemen of the town walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the entrance. From time to time some one would hurry up or down the steps. More likely than not such person was baldish, parchment skinned, dressed in a rusty black suit, and carrying a leather satchel.

On every side there was uproar. Horses whinneyed and neighed, wheels rattled, small boys yodeled for joy of the crowds and excitement. From every direction came the sound of men's voices proclaiming loudly in the familiar phrases of the horse trader the virtues of the animals that they had to sell or trade.

Listening to the peans of the traders, one would be led to believe that all the horses for sale or trade were splendid animals, young, healthy, vigorous, and docile. A glance around, however, belied this impression. Very few conformed in any way with the descriptions of their enthusiastic would-be vendors. There were old horses with hanging heads and sagging haunches, bowed like an old man at the knees and shoulders. There were vicious horses, with evil, suspicious eyes and ears that they laid back ominously. There were weak, spindly horses, with no breadth to their backs and haunches that sloped away into nothing, like the shoulder of a ringleted mid-Victorian female. There were old race horses, once good for