The watches lay in open cardboard boxes on a sloping board. There was a supply of wooden rings that just fitted round the boxes. Jan watched one oaf run through several coppers, his rings always lying between the boxes or on top of one. Jan felt it was a case for a spin, and he longed to have a try with that cunning left hand of his. But he had actually only twopence on him, and the first necessity was two-pennyworth of evidence that he had really been to the fair. Yet what trophy could compare with one of those cheap watches in its cardboard box? It so happened that Jan had a watch of his own worth everything on sale at this trumpery fair; but he could almost have bartered it for one of these that would show the top dormitory, at any rate, the kind of chap he was. And yet he was not the kind who often saw himself in heroic proportions; but an abnormal mood was at the back and front of this whole adventure; and perhaps no more fitting climax could have inflamed a reeling mind. He produced his pennies with sudden determination, yet with a hand as cool as his brain was hot, and as cool a preliminary survey to make sure that Mulberry was not already dogging him. “Two rings a penny,” said the fur-capped custodian of the watches, handing the rings to Jan. “An’ wot you rings you 'aves.” Jan stood alone before the sloping board, kept a few feet off by an intervening table, and he poised his first ring as the steam fiend broke out again with “Over the Garden Wall.” A back-handed spin sent it well among the watches, and it went on spinning until it settled at an angle over one of the boxes, as though loth to abandon the attempt to ring it properly. “Rings must lie _flat_ to win,” said the fellow in the fur cap, with a quick squint at Jan. “Try again, mister; you’ll do better with less spin.” Jan grinned dryly as he resolved to put on a bit more. He had heard his father drive hard bargains in the Saturday night’s marketing aforetime. Old Rutter had known how to take care of himself across any stall or barrow, even when his gait was like Mulberry’s on the way home; and Jan had a sense of similar capacity as he poised his second ring against the voluminous folds of Mr. Heriot’s cape. Thence it skimmed with graceful trajectory, in palpable gyrations; had circled one of the square boxes before he knew it, and was spinning down it like a nut on a bolt, when the man in the fur cap whipped a finger between the ring and the table. “That’s a near one, mister!” cried he. “But it don’t lie flat.” Nor did it. The ring had jammed obliquely on the cardboard box, a finger’s breadth from the board. “It would’ve done if you’d left it alone!” shouted Jan above the steam fiend’s roar. “That it wouldn’t! It’s a bit o’ bad luck, that’s wot it is; never knew it to 'appen afore, I didn’t; but it don’t lie straight, now do it?” “It would’ve done,” replied Jan through his teeth. “And the watch is mine, so let’s have it.”