The first day is the Sheep Fair. As many as 150,000 sheep have been sold here on this day. The Horse Fair is held every day; and an astonishing number and variety of horses there are too. Irish horses, brought all the way from Cork, Scotch horses, Welsh horses; every kind of horse, from the Suffolk Punch to the New Forest Pony. Great lumbering young cart-horses stand behind their pens with manes and tails plaited to wonderment with straw, for all the world like beauties dressed for the County Ball, and just as proud and self-conscious. Do you want to buy a horse of any kind at the Fair? Then don’t!--unless, indeed, you know all that is to be known about horses, and a bit over; otherwise the dealer will ‘have’ you, for a dead certainty. To see them showing off a horse’s good qualities and hiding his bad ones is a liberal education, but see that you acquire your knowledge at some one else’s expense. With this determination you can afford to be well amused with the waving of coloured flags on long sticks, by which the horses are made to pirouette before the eyes of likely purchasers, and can safely smile at the wily dealer’s exclamations of ‘There’s blood!’ ‘Get up, my beauty!’ and ‘Here’s the quality!’ The very pick of the horseflesh, however, does not reach Weyhill. The dealers bring their stock with them by road from Milford, Holyhead, Scotland, at the rate of ten miles a day, and as they thus have to come a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, the journey takes from ten days to a fortnight. This would be a serious expense and loss of time were it not for the fact that dealers always look to make sales along the road. The second day of the Fair is known as Mop Fair, or Molls’ and Johns’ Day. Its official title is the Hiring, or Statute Fair. At twelve o’clock, mid-day, farm-servants, men or women, ‘Molls’ or ‘Johns,’ leave their employ, and, drawing their wages, offer themselves to be hired for the coming twelvemonth. They stand in long lines, the carters with a length of plaited whipcord in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of wool, and wait while the farmers come and bargain with them. When they have struck up an agreement, the men proceed to fix coloured ribbons in their hats, and do their best to have a merry time with the wages they have just received. [Sidenote: _MINOR TRADES_]