Most of the people had made haste to get well for Easter, for to the good folk of Gorswen that festival meant but one event--the great fair of the borders, which had been held in the village every Easter Tuesday within the memory of even that wonderful person, the oldest inhabitant. It was a kind of central pivot for the year to turn on, and 'five years come fair-day,' or 'the last fair-day but one agone,' was the general method of calculating time amongst the villagers. Everybody put on something new for the fair, and to have appeared on that occasion in a last year's hat would have been an offence against public taste, or a confession of abject poverty scarcely removed above pauperism. Cousins to the ninth and tenth degree turned up for the fair, distant relations from remote districts or former inhabitants who had left the neighbourhood and 'got on' in other places availed themselves of cheap excursions, and visited their early home, partly for the holiday, and partly for the sake of meeting everyone else.