ONE:The tents and stalls were blocked as usual round the central crest of pines. It was all much as it had been five years ago on the day of the Riot. There was the outer fringe of strange dwellings��tents full of smoke and sprawling squalling children, tilt carts with soup-pots hanging from their axles over little fires, and[Pg 60] gorgeously painted caravans which stood out aristocratically amidst the prevalent sacking. There was a jangle of voices��the soft Romany of the gipsies, the shriller cant of the pikers and half-breeds, the broad drawling Sussex of the natives. Head of all the Fair, and superintending the working of the crazy merry-go-round, was Gideon Teazel, a rock-like man, son, he said, of a lord and a woman of the Rosamescros or Hearnes. He stood six foot eight in his boots and could carry a heifer across his shoulders. His wife Aurora, a pure-bred gipsy, told fortunes, and was mixed up in more activities than would appear from her sleepy manner or her invariable position, pipe in mouth, on the steps of her husband's caravan. Gideon loved to display his devotion for her by grotesque endearments and elephantine caresses��due no doubt to the gaujo strain in him, for the true gipsies always treated their women in public as chattels or beasts of burden, though privately they were entirely under their thumbs.Then the conversation wandered from Reuben's successes to the price he had paid for them, which proved more interesting and more comforting to those assembled.

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