ven the mere visitor is fired with the
acquisition of knowledge, and, in the intervals of saving his life,
casts a withering eye on hocks and forelegs, and cultivates the gloomy
silence that distinguishes the buyer.

It can hardly fail to attract the attention of the inquirer that, in the
highest walks of horsiness, the desire to appear horsey has been left
behind. These shining ones have passed beyond symbols of canes, of
gaiters, of straws in the mouth; it is as though they craved that
incognito which for them is for ever impossible. Bandon Fair was
privileged to have drawn two such into its shouting vortex. One wears a
simple suit of black serge, with trousers of a godly fulness; in it he
might fitly hand round the plate in church. His manner is almost
startlingly candid, his speech, what there is of it, is ungarnished with
stable slang, his face might belong to an imperfectly shaved archbishop.
Yesterday he bought twenty young horses; next week he will buy forty
more; next year he will place them in the English shires at prices never
heard of in Bandon, and, be it added, they will as a rule be worth the
money. Here is another noted judge of horseflesh, in knickerbocker
breeches that seem to have been made at home for some one else, in
leather gaiters of unostentatious roominess and rusticity. Though the
August day is innocent of all suggestion of rain, he carries instead of
a riding cane a matronly umbrella. When he rides a horse, and he rides
several with a singularly intimate and finished method, he hands the
umbrella to a reverential bystander; when the trial is over the umbrella
is reassumed. If anything were needed to accent its artless domesticity,
it would be the group of boys, horse copers in ambition, possibly in
achievement, who sit in a row under a fence, with their teeth grimly
clenched upon clay pipes, their eyes screwed up in perpetual and
ungenial observation. Their conversation is telegraphic, smileless,
esoteric, and punctuated with expectoration. If Phaeton and the horses
of the sun were to take a turn round the fair field these critics would
find little in them to commend. They are in the primary phase of a
life-long art; perhaps with time and exceptional favours of fortune it
may be given to them to learn the disarming mildness, the simplicity,
that, like a water-lily, is the perfected outcome of the deep.

[Illustration: A HIERARCH OF HORSE-DEALING.]

Before two o'clock the magnates of the fai