Wonston market-place was on market-days an animated scene. It was filled with booths and stalls, and crowded with country-people with their produce and townspeople with their purses. On bright days parasols vied in brilliancy with the flower and fruit stalls. Butter and eggs, pottery, meat, and corn were displayed in baskets or on the cobbles. In one corner an auction was going on, in another a patent medicine vendor shouted to a crowd of gaping half-hearted customers, who fumbled their coppers and cudgelled their brains to make sure his wares would suit their own complaints, or those of Ben or Sally at home. Through the crowd, with its kaleidoscopic shifting of colour and action, drags and four with excursionists would pilot their way with much tooting of horns; or a red or yellow omnibus, laden to once again its own height with poultry hampers, would slowly wend. In the midst rose the town-cross, an obelisk on steps, with the civic horn slung at its top and a Crimean cannon at its base. The sunshine glared over all, whitening the booth awnings, and giving a dazzling cheerfulness to the whole scene. The sleepy old town awoke on these days. Its normal stagnation on every topic but its neighbour's affairs disappeared and it went in genially for dissipation of perambulation, expenditure, and acquaintanceship. Everybody was glad to see everybody else, as conducing to the general liveliness; and though everybody did not bow to everybody to whom under an inconvenient strain of circumstance they might have been introduced, there was certainly less of the eyelid bow on that day than on any other. It was the harvest of money and mind. Groaning tills afterwards disbursed to the banks; replete minds gave their surplus coin to their morals. All was grist of impression or profit. On one such day Borlase was standing before the Town Hall talking to a friend. It was later in the year, grouse-shooting was now waived in conversation for partridge prospects, _à propos_ of stubble and turnips. He had just expressed his opinion when Mr. Severn hailed him from the corn-market opposite and crossed the road.