Bareheaded and barefooted multitudes of both sexes were present, regardless of appearances, half mad with delight, and exhibiting many a frolic and gambol considerably at variance with the etiquette of fashionable life, although we question whether the most fashionable fete, of them all ever produced half so much happiness.

Farmers had come from a distance in the country, mounted upon lank horses ornamented with incrusted hips, and caparisoned with long-straw back-suggauns that reached from the shoulders to the tail, under which ran a crupper of the same material, designed, in addition to a hay girth, to keep this primitive riding gear firm upon the animal's back.

Behind the farmer, generally sat either a wife or a daughter, remarkable for their scarlet cloaks and blue petticoats; sometimes with shoes and stockings, and very often without them.

Among those assembled, we cannot omit to mention a pretty numerous sprinkling of that class of strollers, vagabonds, and impostors with which the country, at the period of our tale, was overrun.

Fortune-tellers, of both sexes, quacks, cardcutters, herbalists, cow-doctors, whisperers, with a long list of such cheats, were at the time a prevailing nuisance throughout the kingdom; nor was there a fair proportion of them wanting here.