Before we had use for them, however, came the annual fair in September. The Ribe Fair was famous throughout the middle ages, when the town was the chief seaport of the country. Then merchants came from far and near, and the court bought its purple and fine linen of them. In our day it had dwindled, as had the Old Town itself, until barely a baker’s dozen of traders from abroad brought their wares. But the Ribe merchants built their booths in the Square, and there came embroideries from Schleswig, pottery from the country to the north--the black “Jute pots,” that alone were deemed fit to cook in by a careful housewife. The woman who served fried eels, and coffee out of a copper kettle with rock sugar in lumps,--lovely lumps, strung on a thread, can I ever forget!--sat at the Cat-head Door of the Domkirke. To us she was as much of an institution as the Domkirke itself and twice as important, for she came only once a year, while the church was there all the time. In the narrow lane between the booths multitudes of farm-folk swarmed, togged out in their best, admiring it all and meeting friends at every step. The blue of the border gendarmes and the red and green of the Fanö girls made a pretty picture. The Fair was in fact the great opportunity of the country folk for social intercourse in the days when newspapers were rare, railroad and telegraph as yet to come, and a letter an event news of which spread through a country neighborhood and was discussed at its firesides in all its probable bearings. The peasants came to the Fair, the men to dicker and trade, if nothing else their pipes, it being understood that a treat went with the trade, so that they became speedily mellow and sometimes loud over the tavern board. The women laid in their supply of ribbons, calico, and such like for the year, heard and discussed the news of weddings, christenings, and funerals; and the foundation of many a match was laid with a parting invitation to the prospective suitor to “come and see the farm” as the next step in the negotiations. [Illustration: “THERE WERE BOOTHS WITH TOYS AND BOOTHS WITH TRUMPETS.”] To us children it was all an enchanted land. There were booths with toys and booths with trumpets and booths with great “honey-cakes” with an almond heart right in the middle. No such cakes are made nowadays, and the trumpets in the toy-shops send forth no such blasts of rapture as did those we bought at the Fair in the Old Town and blew till our cheeks bulged and our eyes stared with the strain. Up and down we trooped, through lane after lane, dragging weary but happy mothers in our wake, trumpeting--I can hear those peals across all the toilsome years. Tin horns--bah! Those were _trumpets_, I tell you, red and green and silver-shine. And at last we brought up in front of the Great Panorama and stopped, breathless, to look and listen.