It was very seldom that any harm was done.

Once a serious fire broke out amongst the old wooden houses down on the river, and some of them were burnt to the ground, a fate that no one deplored; once a sailor was murdered in a drunken squabble at "The Dog and Pilchard," the wildest of the riverside hostelries; and once a Canon was caught and stripped and ducked in the waters of the Pol by a mob who resented his gentle appeals that they should try to prefer lemonade to gin; but these were the only three catastrophes in all the history of the fair.
During the fair week the town sniffed of the sea--of lobster and seaweed and tar and brine--and all the tales of the sea that have ever been told by man were told during these days in Polchester.
The decent people kept their doors locked, their children at home, and their valuables in the family safe.

No upper class child in Polchester so much as saw the outside of a gipsy van.

The Dean's Ernest was accustomed to boast that he had once been given a ride by a gipsy on a donkey, when his nurse was not looking, but no one credited the story, and the details with which he supported it were feeble and unconvincing.
The Polchester children in general were told that "they would be stolen by the gipsies if they weren't careful," and, although some of them in extreme moments of rebellion and depression felt that the life of adventure thus offered to them, might, after all, be more agreeable than the dreary realism of their natural days, the warning may be said to have been effective.
No family in Polchester was guarded more carefully in this matter of the Pauper's Fair than the Cole family.

Mr.Cole had an absolute horror of the fair.