“Now my little lads and lasses! Shut one eye, and don't breathe on the glasses! Here's Nero a-fiddling while Rome was a-burning--and Cin-cinnatus a-digging potatoes. Here's Sampson and the Phillis-tines--Cain and Abel, and the Tower of Babel.” This was sounded by a gaunt fellow (a stronger man than Sampson, for he lugged him in by the head and shoulders!) with a gin-and-fog voice and a bristly beard. His neighbour, a portly ogress with a Cyclopical physiognomy (her drum “most tragically run through!”), advertised a grunting giant, (a Pygmalion to his relations!) and backed his stupendous flitches against Smith-field and the world. “Ladies and gentlemen,” squeaked a little mountebank through an asthmatic trumpet, “walk in and see a tragical, comical, operatical, pantomimical Olla Podrida of Smiles, Tears, Broad Grins, and Horselaughs, called The Hobgoblin, or My Lady go-Nimble's Ghost; the Humours of Becky Burton and Doctor Diddleum; a Prologue by Lucifer and his imps; capering on his pericranium by _Signor Franchinello_; and dancing in a dark lantern by _Mynheer Von Trompingtonverbruggenhausentiraliravontamen!_” “Here's your dainty spiced gingerbread! that will melt in your mouth like a red hot brickbat, and rumble in your inside like Punch and his wheelbarrow!”--“And here's your Conjuration Compound, that if you bathe a beefsteak in it the over night, it will come out a veal cutlet in the morning!” The fair was lighted up, and the fun grew “fast and furious” beginning with a loud chorus of acclamation, and so running on through the whole Sol fa of St. Bartlemy delight. There was a blended incarnation of kettle-drums, fifes, fiddles, French horns, rattles, trumpets, and gongs! A giantess of alarming dimensions, beaming with maternal ecstasy! reddened with deeper intensity from her painted show-cloth; and a miniature Lady-monster, a codicil to the giantess! peeped out imploringly from a wine-cooler in which some facetious crowned sconce had ensconced her at an after-dinner merriment to his Queen and Courtiers. [Illustration: 0230] The Mermaid had a long tail to exhibit and tell. Messrs. Rumfiz and Glumfiz, disciples of Zoroaster! began their magical incantations, swallowed knives and forks and devoured blue flame with increased voracity; the Fantoccini footed it with laudable vigour; the Conjuror would have coined his copper nose, only, winked the wag, “I knows and you knows Je n'ose pas!” the lions and tigers roared “Now or never!” and amidst this oratorio of discord and din, Harlequin, Othello, Columbine, Sir John Falstaff, Desdemona, Jim Crow, Cardinal Wolsey, and Scaramouch quadrilled on the outside platform of Richardson's Grand Booth, the gong (his prompter's tintinabulum!) sounding superabundant glorification.