“Loth would I be to leave you, Joan.” “And why?” “Why, we are good friends, I hope: and I am grateful.” “Oh, aye—wish thee’d learn to speak the truth, Jack. Art longing to be hence, and shalt—soon.” “Why, Joan, you would not have me dwell here always?” She made no answer for a while, and then with a change of tone— “Shalt ride wi’ me to Bodmin Fair to-morrow for a treat, an’ see the Great Turk and the Fat ’Ooman and hocus-pocus. So tell me more ’bout Joan the Frenchwoman.” On the morrow, about nine in the morning, we set off—Joan on the strawberry, balanced easily on an old sack, which was all her saddle; and I on Molly, that now was sound again and chafing to be so idle. As we set out, Joan’s father for the first time took some notice of me, standing at the door to see us off and shouting after us to bring home some account of the wrestling. Looking back at a quarter mile’s distance I saw him still fram’d in the doorway, with the cat perch’d on his shoulder. Bodmin town is naught but a narrow street, near on a mile long, and widening toward the western end. It lies mainly along the south side of a steep vale, and this May morning as Joan and I left the moors and rode down to it from northward, already we could hear trumpets blowing, the big drum sounding, and all the bawling voices and hubbub of the fair. Descending, we found the long street lin’d with booths and shows, and nigh blocked with the crowd: for the revel began early and was now in full swing. And the crew of gipsies, whifflers, mountebanks, fortune tellers, cut-purses and quacks, mix’d up with honest country faces, beat even the rabble I had seen at Wantage. Now my own first business was with a tailor: for the clothes I wore when I rode into Temple, four months back, had been so sadly messed with blood, and afterward cut, to free them from my wound, that now all the tunic I wore was of sackcloth, contrived and stitch’d together by Joan. So I made at once for a decent shop, where luckily I found a suit to fit me, one taken (the tailor said) off a very promising young gentleman that had the misfortune to be kill’d on Braddock Down. Arrayed in this, I felt myself again, and offered to take Joan to see the Fat Woman. We saw her, and the Aethiop, and the Rhinoceros (which put me in mind of poor Anthony Killigrew), and the Pig-fac’d Baby, and the Cudgel play; and presently halted before a Cheap Jack, that was crying his wares in a prodigious loud voice, near the town wall. ’Twas a meagre, sharp-visag’d fellow with a grey chin beard like a billy goat’s; and (as fortune would have it) spying our approach, he picked out a mirror from his stock and holding it aloft, addressed us straight—