Cormac made his way, with care, through mazes of pottery--art brought from Rome. There was precious Samian ware; red, satin-glazed and wrought with fairy-like ornament--fit for daintiest lady, and so highly prized that when broken it was delicately mended with rivets of bronzed lead; plain biscuit ware, shaped into lamps, and other common vessels of black Roman pottery. He stopped and watched the play of the potter’s wheel--as hundreds have done before and after him--to see the clay, rising birdlike, to the potter’s hand; receiving there, as it were, his life and thought--created, not made. Poets sang of its dance of joy upon the wheel; bards symbolised its play in their music. Homer had compared the rhythm of its rise and fall under the potter’s hand to a dance. Then he lingered, fascinated, before the work of the Gaulish bell-casters. Fair and noble ladies knelt before the furnace and cast therein their ornaments of gold and silver; a joy and penance--both--that they should add to the golden tongues that called the folk to prayer; some of the little four-sided bells bore upon them that mystic form of the cross--the Fylfot. Sheltered by hempen awnings lay the book-stalls, with a large display of plain, waxed tablets, made of birch, elm, and the inner bark of ash; scribes were busy among them with reed and stylus. Towering above were some ancient papyrus rolls, fifteen cubits in length--reed-written with ink of gum-water and soot, and there were many plain boc-fell folios such as Cormac’s countrymen wrote on by day and night in tower and monastery, with red cinnabar and cuttle-fish ink. There were a few Hibernian bindings, splendid and massive, with clasps, hinges, and bosses upon them, that might have been used upon an abbey-door. But it was a poor collection after former days of Roman splendour--when bejewelled diptycha of gold and silver had been common--now people contented themselves with coarse birch, joined by common wire. Leaving the book-stalls behind him, Cormac made his way through many cubics’ length of earth covered with basket work of every shape and size--the famous wicker-work of ancient Britain. Marvels, too, he saw of British wool--which the Romans had taught them to spin so finely it was likened to spiders’-webs. At every point he was assailed by eager vendors. At length he sat down, tired, upon some felled trees where a group of diviners, with their dice and knuckle-bones were lounging; close to a booth where a fluttering pennon announced that a two-headed cow was on show within. From his position on the fallen tree, Cormac caught glimpses of the stone chair of the Brehon or Judge, which was placed on the great burial mound around which the Fair centred. On his right-hand stretched the race-course and wrestling rings; on his left the sea gleamed in the distance.