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And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!" It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves.
They crowd everywhere to the menagerie of wild beasts, to see the 'pelican of the wilderness; to the penny peepshows, where they fire six shots for a sou at a plaster cast of Bismarck; to the lotteries for crockery and bonbons, and to all sorts of exhibitions 'gratis. Of the quantity of cider and absinthe consumed in one day, the holiday-makers may have rather a confused and careless recollection, as they are jogged home, thirteen deep in a long cart, with a neglected, footsore old horse, weighed down with his clumsy harness and his creaking load, and deafened by the jingling of his rusty bells.
The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires, none of the contrivances to make people laugh the clowns, the cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds.
They did not go straight home again, as was first intended, Julia's interest and gaiety seemed to have infected the others all except Denah, and they walked for a little while among the booths of toys, and sweets, and peepshows, and entertainments.
Like vast pieces of stage scenery the various passages and movements are towed before our eyes, and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of titanic rocks and lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind us dangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread fairs.
Yet she couldn't help also knowing that an important effect, for his judgment, or at least for his amusement which was his feeling, since, marvellously, he did have feeling was produced by it. All her little pieces had now then fallen together for him like the morsels of coloured glass that used to make combinations, under the hand, in the depths of one of the polygonal peepshows of childhood.
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