"St. Aidens!" echoed Miss Turner, with a note of pleasure in her voice. "Why, I stayed there one year too, long ago, with my father. Yes, let us go to St. Aidens by all means," she said heartily. "Your mother could come with us," she continued, addressing her nephew.—"And you," turning to the doctor, "I daresay Alice will make you welcome if you will join us during our stay."
So there and then the question was settled, and by the second week in June to St. Aidens the family went.
It is the time of the yearly fair at St. Aidens. The buying and selling are done, and now the people who have flocked thither in crowds are free to enjoy the shows and performances which make the fair a festival to be looked forward to and back upon as the chief outing of the season.
There are many items of attraction. Here Punch and Judy make public their domestic broils for the benefit of the onlookers—old, young, and middle-aged—whom this sample pair never fail to draw around them wherever they appear. There an Indian juggler squats, the centre of a gaping circle, as without a grimace he swallows swords, scissors, knives, old nails, and scraps of metal that would tax the stomach of an ostrich. Farther away is an Italian basket-maker, with olive skin and oily manners; while leaning listlessly against the railing behind him is a woman—his wife, probably—with dusky hair, and sad dark eyes which hardly seem to see her green love-birds pecking knowingly at their pack of dirty cards. Along near the pier a negro minstrel with his banjo is singing one of the simple melodies of his race, its sad, sweet refrain almost drowned in the roars of laughter called forth by a chalky-faced clown, who appears to be not a compound of flesh, blood, and nerves like ordinary mortals, but just a bundle of wire springs and india-rubber balls.
The hobby-horses go round and round, with their ever-changing load, in monotonous regularity. The switchback railway sways up and down to the time of its own mechanical music, amid shrieks of delight and peals of merriment; while youngsters yell aloud with excitement or fear as the gaudily-painted gondolas swing them up higher and higher than before.
The noise is deafening. Between the cries of ice-cream vendors, the high-pitched eloquence of medicine-men, peddlers, tired children, and scolding mothers, it is well-nigh maddening. Still the crowd elbows and jostles along, gradually growing noisier and denser. There they mingle shoulder to shoulder, the squalid and the well-to-do, lads and lasses, boys and girls, husbands and wives, grave and gay; while friendly greetings are exchanged, light jests bandied as they move backwards and forwards, intent upon the fun of the fair, with hardly a glance for the feast of beauty which nature has spread around them with such a lavish hand.
Along the level ground above the beach the tents and caravans are drawn up in orderly array. Stretching away from the shore is the bay, lying calm and unruffled under the summer sky, except when its glassy surface is rippled by the dip of an oar or churned into froth by the restless pulsations of a passing steamer. Across the bay the hills rise beautiful and purple-blue through the evening glow, throwing out encircling arms around the villages dotted thick and white along their base, as the arms of a mother are open wide to infold her nestling children.
Away to the left the bay stretches on till its waters are merged in ocean; while to the east, above the little town, with its swarming streets, its bustling railway station, its quiet cemetery, its chimneys, and its spires, rises another range of hills, seeming in their nearness like a God-built barrier between that old-world village on the Scottish coast and the steadily advancing steps of the great city which lies beyond.