TOM BROWN'S
mers on for three more blows despite of the shouts, is then convinced by the blood trickling into his eye. Poor Joe is sadly crestfallen, and fumbles in his pocket for the other half-sovereign; but the old gamester won't have it. "Keep thy money, man, and gi's thy hand," says he, and they shake hands; but the old gamester gives the new hat to the shepherd and, soon after, the half-sovereign to Willum, who thereout decorates his sweetheart with ribbons to his heart's content.
"Who can a be?" "Wur do a cum from?" ask the crowd. And it soon flies about that the old west-country champion, who played a tie with Shaw, the Life-guardsman at "Vizes" twenty years before, has broken Joe Willis's crown for him.
How my country fair is spinning out! I see I must skip the wrestling, and the boys jumping in sacks and rolling wheelbarrows blindfolded; and the donkey-race, and the fight which arose thereout, marring the otherwise peaceful "veast"; and the frightened scurrying away of the female feast-goers, and descent of Squire Brown, summoned by the wife of one of the combatants to stop it; which he wouldn't start to do till he had got on his topboots. Tom is carried away by old Benjy, dog-tired and surfeited with pleasure, as the evening comes on and the dancing begins in the booths; and though Willum and Rachel, in her new ribbons, and many another good lad and lass don't come away just yet, but have a good step out, and enjoy it, and get no harm thereby, yet we, being sober folk, will just stroll away up through the church-yard and by the old yew-tree, and get a quiet dish of tea and a parle with our gossips, as the steady ones of our village do, and so to bed.
That's the fair true sketch, as far as it goes, of one of the larger village feasts in the Vale of Berks when I was a little boy. They are much altered for the worse, I am told. I haven't been at one these twenty years, but I have been at the statute fairs in some west-country towns, where servants are hired, and greater abominations cannot be found. What village feasts have come to, I
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