I Felt
The Ridicule Of My Situation, But Had Too Much Gallantry To Desert This
Fair One, Who Had Sacrificed Everything For Me.
Having wandered through
the fair, we emerged, like another Adam and Eve, into unknown regions,
and "had the world before us where to choose." Never was a more
disconsolate pair seen in the soft valley of West End.
The luckless
Columbine cast back many a lingering look at the fair, which seemed to
put on a more than usual splendor; its tents, and booths, and
parti-colored groups, all brightening in the sunshine, and gleaming
among the trees; and its gay flags and streamers playing and fluttering
in the light summer airs. With a heavy sigh she would lean on my arm
and proceed. I had no hope or consolation to give her; but she had
linked herself to my fortunes, and she was too much of a woman to
desert me.
Pensive and silent, then, we traversed the beautiful fields that lie
behind Hempstead, and wandered on, until the fiddle, and the hautboy,
and the shout, and the laugh, were swallowed up in the deep sound of
the big bass drum, and even that died away into a distant rumble. We
passed along the pleasant sequestered walk of Nightingale lane. For a
pair of lovers what scene could be more propitious? - But such a pair of
lovers! Not a nightingale sang to soothe us: the very gypsies who were
encamped there during the fair, made no offer to tell the fortunes of
such an ill-omened couple, whose fortunes, I suppose, they thought too
legibly written to need an interpreter; and the gypsey children crawled
into their cabins and peeped out fearfully at us as we went by.
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