A little further on a man said to a seller:  ’You’re asking too much for them lambs.’  The seller answered:  ’If I didn’t ask it how would I ever get it?  The lambs is good lambs, and if you buy them now you’ll get home nice and easy in time to have your dinner in comfort, and if you don’t buy them you’ll be here the whole day sweating in the heat and dust, and maybe not please yourself in the end of all.’

Then they began looking at the lambs again, talking of the cleanness of their skin and the quality of the wool, and making many extravagant remarks in their praise or against them.  As I turned away I heard the loud clap of one hand into another, which always marks the conclusion of a bargain.

A little further on I found a farmer I knew standing before a public-house, looking radiant with delight.  ’It’s a fine fair, Mister,’ he said, ’and I’m after selling the lambs I had here a month ago and no one would look at them.  Then I took them to Rathdrum and Wicklow, getting up at three in the morning, and driving them in the creel, and it all for nothing.  But I’m shut of them now, and it’s not too bad a price I’ve got either.  I’m after driving the lambs outside the customs (the boundary where the fair tolls are paid), and I’m waiting now for my money.’  While we were talking, a cry of warning was raised:  ’Mind yourselves below there’s a drift of sheep coming down the road.’  Then a couple of men and dogs appeared, trying to drive a score of sheep that some one had purchased, out of the village, between the countless flocks that were standing already on either side of the way.  This task is peculiarly difficult.  Boys and men collect round the flock that is to be driven out, and try to force the animals down the narrow passage that is left in the middle of the road.  It hardly ever happens, however, that they get through without carrying off a few of some one else’s sheep, or losing some of their own, which have to be restored, or looked for afterwards.

The flock was driven by as well as could be managed, and a moment later an old man came up to us, and asked if we had seen a ewe passing from the west.  ‘A sheep is after passing,’ said the farmer I was talking to, ’but it was not one of yours, for it was too wilful; it was a mountain sheep.’  Sometimes animals are astray in this way for a considerable time—­it is not unusual to meet a man the day after a fair wandering through the country, asking after a lost heifer, or ewe—­but they are always well marked and are found in the end.

When I reached the green above the village I found the curious throng one always meets in these fairs, made up of wild mountain squatters, gentlemen farmers, jobbers and herds.  At one corner of the green there was the usual camp of tinkers, where a swarm of children had been left to play among the carts while the men and women wandered through the fair selling cans or donkeys.  Many odd types of tramps and beggars had come together also, and were loitering about in the hope of getting some chance job, or of finding some one who would stand them a drink.  Once or twice a stir was made by some unruly ram or bull, but in these smaller fairs there seldom is much real excitement till the evening, when the bad whisky that is too freely drunk begins to be felt.