When a certain Mr. Singleton, we are told, was ordained curate of St. Nicholas after taking his degrees at college with “respectable mediocrity” he was attracted by the appearance of the rooms above the toyshop, “and there by the advice of Dr. Grampound (the Rector) did he place himself on his arrival at Belford. He occupied the first floor, consisting of the sitting-room—a pleasant apartment with one window abutting on the High Bridge and the other on the market-place, also a small chamber behind with its tent-bed and dimity furniture.” And there the curate continued “to live for full thirty years with the selfsame spare, quiet, decent landlady and her small serving maiden Patty, a demure, civil damsel dwarfed as it should seem by constant curtseying.... Except for the clock of time, which, however imperceptibly, does still keep moving, everything about the little toyshop was at a standstill. The very tabby cat, which lay basking on the hearth, might have passed for his progenitor of happy memory, who took his station there the night of Mr. Singleton’s arrival; and the self-same hobby-horse still stood rocking opposite the counter, the admiration of every urchin who passed the door. “There the rocking-horse remained, and there remained Mr. Singleton, gradually advancing from a personable youth to a portly middle-aged man.” We have already mentioned the frequent small fairs that were held in the market-place from time to time, but the chief event of the year in such matters was the Reading Great Fair, which took place regularly upon May Day. “It was a scene of business as well as of pleasure,” writes Mary Mitford, “being not only a great market for horses and cattle, but one of the principal marts for the celebrated cheese of the great dairy counties.... Before the actual fair day waggon after waggon, laden with the round, hard, heavy merchandise, rumbled slowly into the Forbury, where the great space before the school-house was fairly covered with stacks of Cheddar and North Wilts. “Fancy the singular effect of piles of cheeses several feet high extending over a whole large cricket ground, and divided only by narrow paths littered with straw, amongst which wandered chapmen offering a taste of their wares to their cautious customers, the country shop-keepers (who poured in from every village within twenty miles), and to the thrifty house-wives of the town.... Fancy the effect of this remarkable scene, surrounded by the usual moving picture of a fair, the fine Gothic church of St. Nicholas on one side, the old arch of the Abbey and the abrupt eminence called Forbury Hill, crowned with a grand clump of trees, on the other.... When lighted up at night it was, perhaps, still more fantastic and attractive, when the roars and howlings of the travelling wild beasts used to mingle so grotesquely with the drums, trumpets and fiddles of the dramatic and equestrian exhibitions, and the laugh and shout and song of the merry visitors.”