passage. I have been in a train when the driver
has put on triple speed, and has with the
utmost glee reported himself chased by
another train that could be seen growing larger
from a mere black animalcula in the distance.
But I must leave this problem, or I shall be
too late for the bear fight at the Agricultural
Exhibition. I reach, after jolting through new
by-roads, almost impassable, the suburban fields
hired for the show. They are close to the railway;
indeed, the entrance is a little shed opening
from the platform, which is thronged with
negro salesmen of hickory nuts and Lager
beer, noisy, good natured, and vociferous of
prices.

I pay my twenty-five cents (about a shilling),
and enter. No bows or thanks, or bland
obsequious voice from the money-taker. This is a
republican country, and I am not thought
more of, because I am richer than another man
by a few hundred pounds or so. The holiday
people jostle in with me. The old Dominion has
sent her sons here by hundreds, and fine lathy
bold men her sons are. "Yes, siure—yes, siure!"
Really, they might be country people in
England, as far as their manner goes. The
fathers tow along the little boys; the mothers
lay down laws to the brood of daughters; the
lovers blush and whisper; the old people coze
and gossip—just as English human nature does,
for all I can see.

But how different the complexions! No rosy
reds and carnations here, deepening into purple;
no flushes of carmine in the young men's cheeks,
no living rose bloom in the maidens' faces; no,
mere dry nankeen colour in the one, and the
mere faint cold pink of a winter rose in the
other. No earth-shaking top-booted farmers
to pulverise the clods and slap the fat oxen; no
port-wine-coloured blood mantling in the broad
acres of their cheek. The dry sapless faces, dried
by the Indian heat, are new to me, and they show
no rude country health, they tell of no healthy
fox-chases, no windy struggling rides to market;
no, yellow blood—though it fills many a brave
honest heart in this Virginian show—brings to
me no recollections of home.

Nor does the dress either; it is all of the
new world, and confuses all my old-fashioned
notions of the distinctions of class. There are
no white smocks, silver-clean as snow-drifts, the
property of venerable countrymen; there are no
buckskins, no top-boots; no, a dead level of dull
second-hand evening costume. Every man wears
an ill-made black tail-coat, black trousers, and
a rumply, agitated, black satin waistcoat. The
women, also lean, and rather of a nankeen
colour, but gentle, well-mannered, and looking
very pleased and happy, are over-dressed. Their
bonnets, arching up over the forehead, are heavy
with ribbons of all shades of scarlet and azure;
and they wear bell-shaped hoops, that tilt
about and jerk in the most ludicrous and foolish
way. I observe that felt hats are the chief wear
with the men; and when any one carries a stick,
it is generally a solemn, old-fashioned-looking
black cane, with a huge ivory knob.

But now the sight of a distant arena, or paled-
in enclosure, with seats round it in tiers, like a
circus, draws me as a magnet cliff does an iron-
built ship, for I know it must be the place for the
bear-baiting. So I push carelessly through the
building, where the fat cattle groan over their
food, and heave and perspire, and wheeze and
heave, wonderful as I have no doubt are the
great Kentucky ox, the big Kentucky mules,
the Illinois pigs, and the horses from Indiana.
And now a terrible growling and yelping
makes me hurry faster, and I scramble to my
seat, and pay my fee, wondering what the
English papers would say if any one attempted to
bait a bear at an English Agricultural
Meeting?

And there is the bear, just as he was when
Master Slender took Saccarson by the chain, and
frightened all the Anne Pages of Windsor, by
such an exhibition of his courage! There he is,
looking furious in his carriage-rug dress at the
dogs that beleaguer him, now getting a dreadful
tug at his bleeding ears, that are fast
getting bitten, one into a pattern, the other into
a crimson and black fringe. How red and
mischievous his eyes look, how white his
enormous teeth, how broad are his terrible
forearms!

A bench breaks, and down tumble twenty or
thirty people into the pit, but no one has time
to sympathise. It is so many dollars on the bear,
"on the bear," and then so many on the dogs,
"on the dogs."

"I'll back my bull-dog from Washington,
for twenty dollars," cries a rowdy in his dirty
shirt-sleeves.  "He'd face an alligator. Yes,
siure, he would that. Oh, he's a bully-dog,
he is!"

"Done!" cries another boy, from the opposite
side. The dog goes at the bear; the bear
waits for the dog, and strikes him a side blow with
his paw, that drives him up in a whimpering
heap close to his chapfallen master's feet.

"I guess you'd better take your bully-dog
home," cries a man near, totally regardless of
the owner's feelings. "That dog would not
face a snapping turtle. Take him home!"

"Let him go to——, or Jamaica!" says the
owner, mentioning two proverbial hot places,
and giving the poor dog a kick that lifts him
up half over the wall of the pit;  "but you
should have seen him the other day in Jackson's
store—hei!  how he did tackle the badger in
Jackson's store!"

In ten minutes more the bear has "whipped"
the dogs, and the arena is empty. The lost
dollars are paid, the bear is led off to wait for
another day of misery, and the dogs are bound,
and bandaged, and carried home.

Besides the bear-pit there was a large
temporary building devoted to the exhibition of
Virginian produce, to rail-splitting machines
and snake fences, and to machines that split
shingles (or wooden tiles for roofing houses).
Then there were huge glass jars of enormous
brandy peaches and apple jelly, and there were
vast apples—larger or quicker grown, and more