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Updated: April 30, 2025
This afternoon we went out for a while to forget it, if we could. We went to the Lung Fu-Ssu, a sort of rag-fair held every ten days in the grounds of an old temple in the East City. It's a wonderful fair, usually, with booths and stalls stretching in every direction, and spreading all over the ground, underfoot as well.
Stillwater, viewed from a certain point, was a sort of microcosm, a little international rag-fair to which nearly every country on earth had contributed one of its shabby human products. "I am moving," wrote Mr. Taggett, "in an atmosphere in which any crime is possible. I give myself seven days at the outside to light upon the traces of Shackford's murder. I feel him in the air."
Our orators and writers are of the same poverty, and, in this rag-fair, neither the Imagination, the great awakening power, nor the Morals, creative of genius and of men, are addressed. But though orator and poet are of this hunger party, the capacities remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with meaning.
Rome, though it surpasses all the cities of the earth in the number, beauty, and splendour of its public monuments, is imposing only in parts. It presents no effective tout ensemble. Some of its noblest edifices are huddled into corners, and lost amid a crowd of mean buildings. The Pantheon rises in the fish-market. The Navonna Mercato, which has the finest fountain in Italy, is a rag-fair.
At Sa Leone men are punished for not wearing overalls, and thus the 'city' becomes a rag-fair. The Timni men are dark negroids with the slightest infusion of Semitic blood; some had coated their eyebrows and part of their faces with chalk for ophthalmia. They appeared to be merry fellows enough; and they are certainly the only men in the colony who ever pretend to work.
And another specialty of the Roman Ghetto is that it is not altogether easy to obtain a sight of the miscellaneous treasures of this rag-fair.
Your letter was a bomb of joy to me last evening. I have taken heaps of your clothes to mend. What a rag-fair your closet was and you did not tell me! Mrs. Alcott brought me some beer made of spruce only, and it was nice. Thou shalt have thy own beer, when you come home. Bab went to see Mrs. Alcott, and I resumed weeding. At seven I heard thirteen cannon-shots, and did not understand it.
But the broadest merriment was excited by a group of figures ridiculously dressed in old regimentals which seemed to have been purchased at a military rag-fair or pilfered from some receptacle of the cast-off clothes of both the French and British armies.
The Bradley-Martins are henceforth entitled to wear their ears interlaced with laurel leaves as a sign of superiority in their "set." They won the burro pennant honestly, if not easily, daylight being plainly visible between their foam-crested crupper and the panting nostrils of the Vanderbilts. They are now monarch of Rag-fair, chief gyasticuti of the boundless realm of Nescience and Noodledom.
So this day, when he came to see how the workmen were getting on, he found me in the deserted schoolroom, looking at my faded summer bonnet and some old ribbons I had been sponging out, and half-worn-out gloves a sort of rag-fair spread out on the deal table. I was in a regular passion with only looking at that shabbiness.
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