A quack doctor in a huge caravan drawn by four horses, appeared next, and apparently with much profitable practice, among the dupes who crowded about him to read his puffs and buy his physic. A pedlar in another part of the place where the crowd was considerable, without coat or waistcoat (the wind was at north-east), and labouring very hard with his hands and lungs, was disposing of coloured cotton handkerchiefs by a sort of auction form. He took a piece from a lot of the same pattern, tied it round his waist or on his head as an indication that the handkerchiefs he was about to put up for sale were of the same sort, and then named a price, lowering the amount, perhaps, from twenty to fourteen sous, until he heard such an amount bid as satisfied him; then with the rapidity of a conjuror he flung the article to the bidder. Another and another purchaser followed as fast as he could unfold and throw the handkerchiefs at their faces, stopping occasionally for a few seconds to receive payments from many customers; then he opened a fresh lot, and thus perpetually exhibited varieties, selling all the time at a rate of rapidity which I had never seen equalled, and which could only occur where every individual in the little crowd is strictly honest.
Little bags of silver and copper were, in the open booths, carelessly slipped into unlocked boxes, from which any clever rogue might easily have helped himself; but such an occurrence is almost unknown in the provincial parts of France. These latter exhibitions were certainly neither English nor Irish.
It would afford no interest to any of my readers to inform them of the number of horses which I purchased, nor of the prices which I paid, nor of the arrangements which I made for sending them to Liverpool. It is enough to tell them that out of the many strings of horses which had been conducted to the fair in the English way by ropes from the head to the tail, and the tail to the head, in succession, and were now drawn up in rank and file under the shade of a wall for inspection, I bought some of those which were most free from the characteristic defects of the Norman horses, and had them safely stabled.
I returned to the scene of gaiety and confusion. There was a young woman there, bare-headed, but decently dressed in the main, playing upon a violin, while her male partner blew a terrible blast upon a bugle at intervals, at the conclusion of each, announcing a grand spectacle for the evening. The female had given a finishing scrape, and in a moment was on the ground, flat upon her back, but fortunately without injury to herself or her fiddle. I looked about and perceived the cause of the disaster: a horse had been pressed forward very rudely through the crowd, with a calf dangling from each of his sides, and one of these coming into violent contact with the fair musician, had thrown her down.
The mode by which those wretched animals had been conveyed to the fair was truly horrible. The four legs of each being bound, a rope connecting the poor creatures together by their tortured limbs was passed over the back of the horse, keeping them in equilibrio, and with the heads hanging downwards in agony, while the ligatures confining the legs by which they were suspended were impressed, by the weight of the body below, into the very bone! Oh, for a Humane Society in France to prevent such monstrous cruelty, taking for their motto the sentiment of her own Montaigne: “even theology enjoins kindness to brute animals; and considering that the same Master has given us our dwelling-place with them, and that they like ourselves are of his family, we should have a fellow feeling for them!”
Attracted by a concourse of children in another spot, I soon found myself standing close to an old woman who was dealing out small thin cakes in a curious kind of manner. Before her was placed what appeared to be a small round table, but with an index, which, after being set in motion by a boy, stopped suddenly, and pointed like the hand of a clock to one of twelve numbers described in a circle. The perpetual invitation was, “Play, play! twelve cakes for a halfpenny;” and the little urchins, preferring the chance of twelve cakes for a halfpenny to the certainty of perhaps only three or four from a regular vender elsewhere, came up in rapid succession and with eager eyes to the game. Joy sparkled in the countenance of the juvenile speculator if the hand pointed to a high number; disappointment lowered upon his brow if a unit or two was the number which fortune assigned to him, while the hearty laugh of the spectators increased the acrimony of his temper.
I tried my own luck, and had one cake for my share, to the unrestrained delight of the little folk.
“Cakes for a halfpenny!” said I to myself. “What a good subject for a moral reflection!”
Here we have the seeds of gambling sown at an early season in the lively soil, and the systematic culture of this baneful and vivacious principle subsequently ensures its establishment in the human heart through the length and breadth of the land; it finds its congenial bed every where, from the child of the poorest mechanic to the grey-headed gamester in the polished societies of higher life. The avaricious principle thus precociously introduced into the youthful heart among the many natural weeds which are but too ready to spring up there, has its own distinctive fruits; and though it may be urged by those who think not deeply on the effects of early impressions on the ductile mind of childhood, that the disappointment which the little gamester experiences in his play of “twelve cakes for a halfpenny” counterbalances (as a trial of temper) the evils arising on the other hand from success in his object, this defence is really untenable in its general points.
In the little party before me I saw the willing and prepared pupils of a higher order of play—of rouge-et-noir, and hazard, and ecarté—by which so many of our own countrymen are infatuated, and sometimes ruined, when they take up their residence in France, heedless of the value of that time and those opportunities for the right use of which they are responsible to the bountiful Giver of them.