Little bags of silver and copper were, in the open booths, carelessly slipped into unlocked boxes, from which any clever rogue might easily have helped himself; but such an occurrence is almost unknown in the provincial parts of France. These latter exhibitions were certainly neither English nor Irish. It would afford no interest to any of my readers to inform them of the number of horses which I purchased, nor of the prices which I paid, nor of the arrangements which I made for sending them to Liverpool. It is enough to tell them that out of the many strings of horses which had been conducted to the fair in the English way by ropes from the head to the tail, and the tail to the head, in succession, and were now drawn up in rank and file under the shade of a wall for inspection, I bought some of those which were most free from the characteristic defects of the Norman horses, and had them safely stabled. I returned to the scene of gaiety and confusion. There was a young woman there, bare-headed, but decently dressed in the main, playing upon a violin, while her male partner blew a terrible blast upon a bugle at intervals, at the conclusion of each, announcing a grand spectacle for the evening. The female had given a finishing scrape, and in a moment was on the ground, flat upon her back, but fortunately without injury to herself or her fiddle. I looked about and perceived the cause of the disaster: a horse had been pressed forward very rudely through the crowd, with a calf dangling from each of his sides, and one of these coming into violent contact with the fair musician, had thrown her down. The mode by which those wretched animals had been conveyed to the fair was truly horrible. The four legs of each being bound, a rope connecting the poor creatures together by their tortured limbs was passed over the back of the horse, keeping them _in equilibrio_, and with the heads hanging downwards in agony, while the ligatures confining the legs by which they were suspended were impressed, by the weight of the body below, into the very bone! Oh, for a Humane Society in France to prevent such monstrous cruelty, taking for their motto the sentiment of her own Montaigne: “even theology enjoins kindness to brute animals; and considering that the same Master has given us our dwelling-place with them, and that they like ourselves are of his family, we should have a _fellow feeling_ for them!”