keep, we are compelled to respect it as satisfying a perennial want of boy-nature.
Still more to be venerated is the "darling dolly." Was there ever an age in the world's history in which the "puppa" did not exist in some form or other?—incipient maternal love ever needing something to nurture it and to gratify it. No one could have invented the doll; it must have been the spontaneous creation of girl-nature, tying up a heap of rags into the semblance of a baby.
Shall we then despise the village fair, which showered blessings on the little ones, and provided them with many a happy illusion ere the hard realities of life had dulled their small imaginations? Nay, rather let us pause with delight before the gingerbread stall, and the good-stuff stall, and think how many little mouths have watered as they surveyed those wonderful figures in gingerbread, those piles of hardbake, those bottles of bull's-eyes, those sticks of sugar-candy. Wonderful figures in gingerbread, did we say? Yes, indeed, for why are they so large, and some of them actually gilt? Know ye not that these gingerbreads are the most ancient relics of the fair? They are the true fairings, being nothing else originally than representations of the patron saint of the Church, in honour of whose dedication the fair was held.
Alas! there is a falling off in all these things, but we make bold to say gingerbread and bull's-eyes and sugar candy never can and never will go out of fashion as long as there are boys and girls to eat them.
Yet we must admit it does require some imagination to invest that line of stalls, so strongly suggestive of the Lowther Arcade in petto with the halo of antiquity, especially when, coming to that ancient institution the roundabout, instead of our old friend the hobby-horse, we find it a circle of bicycles, with such legends as these:—"Go on, Joseph," "Going to the Derby," "Patronized by the Nobility," etc.
How that bicycle roundabout speaks of the mutability of all things! Bicycles, indeed, in place of the greasy pole, the jumping in sacks, the bull-baiting, the bear-baiting, the fighting with quarter-staves, the boxing and wrestling, and all the other sports suggestive of rough, strong, sturdy old England!
