The procession of horses in the long, narrow street makes the brain swim.  Hardly has the eye taken in the elderly and astute hunter with the fired hocks, whose forelegs look best in action, when it is dazzled by the career of a cart-horse, scourged to a mighty canter by a boy with a rope’s end, or it is horrified by the hair-breadth escape of a group of hooded countrywomen from before the neighing charge of a two-year-old in a halter and string.  Yet these things are the mere preliminary to the fair.  At the end of the town a gap broken in a fence admits to a long field on a hillside.  The entrance is perilous, and before it is achieved may involve more than one headlong flight to the safe summit of a friendly wall, as the young horses protest, and whirl, and buck with the usual fatuity of their kind.  Once within the fair field there befal the enticements of the green apple, of the dark-complexioned sweetmeat temptingly denominated “Peggy’s leg,” of the “crackers”—­that is, a confection resembling dog biscuit sown with caraway seeds—­and, above all, of the “crubeens,” which, being interpreted, means “pigs’ feet,” slightly salted, boiled, cold, wholly abominable.  Here also is the three-card trick, demonstrated by a man with the incongruous accent of Whitechapel and a defiant eye, that even through the glaze of the second stage of drunkenness held the audience and yet was ’ware of the disposition of the nine of hearts.  Here is the drinking booth, and here sundry itinerant vendors of old clothes, and—­of all improbable commodities to be found at a horse-fair—­wall-paper.  Neither has much success.  The old-clothes woman casts down a heap of singularly repellant rags before a disparaging customer; she beats them with her fists, presumably to show their soundness in wind and limb:  a cloud of germ-laden dust arises.

“Arrah!” she says; “the divil himself wouldn’t plaze ye in clothes.”

The wall-paper man is not more fortunate.  “Look at that for a nate patthern!” he says ecstatically, “that’d paper a bed!  Come now, ma’am, wan an’ thrippence!”

The would-be purchaser silently tests it with a wrinkled finger and thumb, and shakes her head.

“Well, I declare to ye now, that’s a grand paper.  If ye papered a room with that and put a hen in it she’d lay four eggs!” But not even the consideration of its value as an aesthetic stimulant can compass the sale of the one-and-threepenny wall-paper.

Down at this end of the fair field congregate the three-year-olds and two-year-olds; they pierce the air with their infant squeals and neighs, they stamp, and glare, and strike attitudes with absurd statuesqueness, while their owners sit on a bank above them, playing them like fish on the end of a long rope, and fabling forth their perfections with tireless fancy.  The perils of the way increase at every moment.  In and out among the restless heels the onlooker must steer his course, up into the ampler space on the hill-top, where the horses stand in more open order and a general view is possible.