The fair had none of those stalls and booths which old-fashioned fairs used to have, where they sold toys, and gilt gingerbread, and carters’ whips, and cups and saucers, and mutton pies, and dolls, and china dogs, and shell boxes, and pincushions, and needle cases, and penholders with views of the Isle of Wight and Winchester Cathedral inside that you see so bright and plain when you put your eye close to the little round hole at the top. The steam roundabouts were there—but hardly a lean back of their spotted horses was covered by a rider. There were swings, but no one happened to be swinging. There were no shows, no menagerie, no boxing booth, no marionettes. No penny gaff with the spangled lady and the fat man who beats the drum. Nor were there any stalls. There were pink-and-white paper whips and bags of dust-colored minced paper—the English substitute for _confetti_—there were little metal tubes of dirty water to squirt in people’s faces, but except for the sale of these crude instruments for making other people uncomfortable there was not a stall in the fair. I give you my word, there was not a single thing that you could buy—no gingerbread, no sweets, no crockery dogs, not even a half-penny orange or a bag of nuts. Nor was there anything to drink—not as much as a lemonade counter or a ginger beer stall. The revelers were no doubt drinking elsewhere. A tomblike silence reigned—a silence which all the steam roundabout’s hideous hootings only emphasized. A very dirty-nosed boy, overhearing a hurried council, volunteered the information that the circus had not yet opened. “Never mind,” they told each other—and turned to the sideshows. These were all of one character—the arrangement by which you throw something or roll something at something else, and if you hit the something you get a prize—the sort of prize that is sold in Houndsditch at ninepence a gross. Most of these arrangements are so ordered that to get a prize is impossible. For instance, a peculiarly offensive row of masks with open mouths in which pipes are set up. In the golden days of long ago if you hit a pipe it broke—and you got a “prize” worth—I can’t do sums—put it briefly at the hundred and forty-fourth part of ninepence. But the children found that when their wooden ball struck the pipe it didn’t break. They wondered why! Then, looking more closely, they saw that the pipes were not of clay, but of painted wood. They could never be broken—and the whole thing was a cruel mockery of hope.