Thus arrayed, and with thirty pounds in my pocket to purchase a horse for my father, I took the road, stick in hand, for Glasgow.

It was a fine summer morning.  I was in high spirits; and, in my red waistcoat and red garters, looked, I believe, as tight and comely a lad as might be seen.

Pushing on with a light heart and light step, I quickly reached the suburbs of the city, and in a few minutes more was within view and earshot of the sights and sounds of the fair.  I saw the crowd; I got a glimpse of the canvas roofs of the shows at the end of the old bridge—­the locality on which the fair was then held; and heard the screaming and braying of the cracked trumpets, the clanging of the cymbals, and the thunders of the bass drums.

My heart beat high on hearing these joyous sounds.  I quickened my pace, and in a few seconds was in the thick of the throng that crowded the space in front of the long line of shows extending from the bridge to the Bridgegate.  As it was yet several hours to the height of the horse-market, I resolved on devoting that interval to seeing some of the interesting sights which stood in such tempting array before me.

The first that fixed my regard was “The Great Lancashire Giant,” whose portrait at full length—­that is, at the length of some fifteen or twenty feet—­flapped on a sheet of canvas nearly as large as the mainsail of a Leith smack.

This extraordinary personage was represented, in the picture, as a youth of sixteen, dressed in a ruffled shirt, a red jacket, and white trousers; and his exhibitor assured the spectators that, though but a boy, he already measured nine feet in height and seven feet round the body; that each of his shoes would make a coffin for a child of five years old, and every stocking hold a sack of flour.  Six full-grown persons, he added, could be easily buttoned within his waistcoat; and his tailor, he asserted, was obliged to mount a ladder when he measured him for a jacket.

Deeply interested by the astounding picture of this extraordinary youth, and the still more astounding description given of him by his exhibitor, I ascended the little ladder that conducted to the platform in front of the show, paid my twopence—­the price of admission—­and in the next minute was in the presence of “The Great Lancashire Giant;” a position which enabled me to make discoveries regarding that personage that were not a little mortifying.

In the first place, I found that, instead of being a youth of sixteen, he was a man of at least six-and-thirty; in the next, that if it had not been for the raised dais on which he stood, the enormous thickness of the soles of his shoes, and the other palpably fictitious contrivances and expedients by which his dimensions were enlarged, he would not greatly have exceeded the size of my own father.  I found, in short, that the tremendous “Lancashire Giant” was merely a pretty tall man, and nothing more.