But he was greatly distressed. He already knew so well what men were. He shivered in his wet clothing. "Are you afraid already? Think how brave you were just now. You must mind, not only the words, but the meaning of them." "I will be strong and brave. I will be a man among men, a good man--doing good to men." So saying, Johannes nerved himself, and with steadfast step entered the town. Here things looked truly dismal. Water was spouting out of the gutters into the streets. Everything was glistening in the wet, and big streams of water were flowing down the tent canvases. But the people were out on pleasure bent, and pleasure they would have. As the shop doors were opened one could see the red faces within, close to one another in the blue tobacco smoke, and could hear the uproar of loud singing and the stamping of feet. Under the projecting canvas of the booths the crowds flocked together, slowly pushing one past the other into the bright light of the lamps. Johannes and his Guide pressed in among them to get out of the rain. Johannes was fond of fairs. Always he was glad when the boats arrived in the canal with the timber for the various booths and play-tents; and he looked on eagerly while the flimsy structures--for that one week only--were being put together. This onlooking was an earnest of the strange and fantastic pleasures in store for him. He liked the gay and merry pageantry, the foolish inscriptions on the merry-go-rounds, the mysterious places behind and between the tents, where the performers lodged; and above all, the tiny, out-of-the-way tents with their natural curiosities, and the strange animals, which seemed so sadly out of place in this Dutch world, in their tedious, unvarying captivity, with the reveling crowd around them. And every summer he found it just as hard to see the breaking up of this variegated medley. Not that he ever had longed for the Fair when with Windekind, but, of all that he had experienced while among human beings, the Fair seemed to him the most delightful. And now he was rejoiced at the familiar scene of the booths with their toys; the cakes, layered with rose-colored sugar and inscribed with white lettering; all the shining brass-work of the toy-pistol bazaars; the small tents in lonely places, where brown, smoked eels lay between brass-headed iron bars; the shooting-galleries; the noisy and showy merry-go-rounds. Nor did he, for old remembrance' sake, mind the various odors and mal-odors; the smell of cake, of frying fat, and of smoking lamps; nor the strange, mysterious, stable and wild-beast scents that came out of the large exhibition tents.