Poetry > Ballads in the Cumberland dialect

NOTES.
Note 1, r. 17.—Let’s gow to Rosley Fair.
These fairs are holden on an extensive tract of
common, called Rosley-hill. They commence on
Whit-Monday, and continue once a fortnight till
Michaelmas. It is impossible to convey an adequate
) idea of them by description.—One part of the hill
r is covered with horses and black cattle, with dealers,
drovers, and Jockeys, who, if the day be windy and
J sultry, are involved in a hurricane of dust, almost
as violent in its duration as that which sweeps the
arid deserts of Africa: another part is overspread
with the booths of mercers, milliners, hardwaremen,
and bread-bakers. Here you see the mountebank,
\ hawker, and auctioneer, addressing the gaping crowd
5 from a wooden platform; and there you hear the
discordant strains of the ballad-singer, the music of
the bagpipe and the violin, of the fife and the
“spirit-stirring drum.”
Tents of innkeepers, crowded with bottles and
barrels, are interspersed in every part of the festal
ground, but particularly in the vicinity of the horse
fair, where the heat and dust of the day occasion a
more than usual thirst; and, much to the honour of
these knights of the cork and spigot, the malt and
spirituous liquors which they retail to their thirsty
customers, are so judiciously diluted with water, that
1 they operate with all the innocence of simple diuretics;
i so that it is not uncommon to see a company of hale
L farmers, after having exhausted all the casks and
, bottles in these moving cellars, returning to their own