THE FUN OF THE FAIR There were three days in the year when the venerable market-place was out of bounds, all but the draggled ribbon of pavement running round it and the few shops opening thereon. The rest was monopolised and profaned by the vans and booths of a travelling fair, which reached the town usually about the second week in March. The school took little notice of the tawdry encampment and its boorish revels; but the incessant strains of a steam merry-go-round became part of the place for the time being, and made night especially hideous in the town houses nearest the scene. Nearest of all was Heriot’s house, and greatest of all sufferers the four boys in the little top room with the dormer window over the street. Jan was still one of them, and Bingley another. But Joyce had left, and Crabtree had taken charge of one of the long dormitories overlooking the quad. Chips Carpenter and a new boy had succeeded to their partitions; and if in one case the intellectual loss was irreparable, in the other that of an incorrigible vocabulary was perhaps less to be deplored. But Jan’s was still the silent corner; even to Chips he would have little to say before the other two; for in this his fifth term he had fallen on another evil time. It had nothing to do with his work, however, and neither could he curse his luck for a split hand or a maligned heart. He had played football every day of his second winter term—not brilliantly, for he was never quite quick enough on the ball—but with a truculent tenacity which had been rewarded with the black trimmings of the Second Lower Upper. In form he was no longer a laughing-stock; and his form was now the Middle Fifth, where one began to cope with Greek iambics as well as Latin elegiacs. But all three Fifths were beds of roses after the Middle Remove, and Dudley Relton an angel of forbearance after that inhuman old Haigh. Dudley Relton, however, besides being man enough to take the Middle Fifth on his accession to the staff, was that pioneer of cricket masters who had made a note of Jan’s name at the valued instigation of A. G. Swallow. He had also watched Jan bowling in the one game in which he had played on the Upper, thanks to the departed Sprawson, and he had his eye on the young left-hander with the queer individual action. But it was the cool eye of a long-headed cricketer, and Jan never read it for an instant. Chips might have done so if he had been in the form, but he was now in the Upper Fifth, and his sanguine prophecies were neither remembered nor renewed. Jan only wished that Relton would not look at him, sometimes, almost as though he knew all about a fellow; and it rather bothered him to get off lighter than he deserved for a false concord in his prose or a vile copy of verses.