the church, but times are very different from what they were when I was young; I was not sexton then, but something better; helped Mr. — with his horses, and got many a broad crown. Those were the days, measter, both for men and horses; and I say, measter, if men and horses were so much better when I was young than they are now, what, I wonder, must they have been in the time of Oliver and his men?” [Picture: Horncastle Church in 1820 (since restored)] CHAPTER XLIV. LEAVING the church, I strolled through the fair, looking at the horses, listening to the chaffering of the buyers and sellers, and occasionally putting in a word of my own, which was not always received with much deference; suddenly, however, on a whisper arising that I was the young cove who had brought the wonderful horse to the fair which Jack Dale had bought for the foreigneering man, I found myself an object of the greatest attention; those who had before replied with stuff! and nonsense! to what I said, now listened with the greatest eagerness to any nonsense which I chose to utter, and I did not fail to utter a great deal; presently, however, becoming disgusted with the beings about me, I forced my way, not very civilly, through my crowd of admirers; and passing through an alley and a back street, at last reached an outskirt of the fair, where no person appeared to know me. Here I stood, looking vacantly on what was going on, musing on the strange infatuation of my species, who judge of a person’s words, not from their intrinsic merit, but from the opinion—generally an erroneous one—which they have formed of the person. From this reverie I was roused by certain words which sounded near me, uttered in a strange tone, and in a strange cadence—the words were, “them that finds, wins; and them that can’t find, loses”. Turning my eyes in the direction from which the words proceeded, I saw six or seven people, apparently all countrymen, gathered round a person standing behind a tall white table of very small compass. “What!” said I, “the thimble-engro of — Fair here at Horncastle.” Advancing nearer, however, I perceived that though the present person was a thimble-engro, he was a very different one from my old acquaintance of — Fair. The present one was a fellow about half a foot taller than the other. He had a long, haggard, wild face, and was dressed in a kind of jacket, something like that of a soldier, with dirty hempen trousers, and with a foreign-looking peaked hat on his head. He spoke with an accent evidently Irish, and occasionally changed the usual thimble formule into, “them that finds, wins, and them that can’t—och, sure!—they loses”; saying also frequently, “your honour,” instead of “my lord”. I observed, on drawing nearer, that he handled the pea and thimble with some awkwardness, like that which might be expected from a novice in the trade. He contrived, however, to win several shillings, for he did not