One element that
they introduced was Colour. Our modern Fairs are not very strong in the
element of Colour. It is true that one of the roundabouts was ablaze with
gilt and tinsel, and in the centre of it, whence comes the music, there
were women with brazen faces and bosoms of gold. It is true also that
outside the Circus and the Fat Sisters and Battling Edwardes there were
flaming pictures with reds and yellows thrown about like temperance
tracts, but the modern figures in these pictures spoilt the colour, the
photography spoilt it--too much reality where there should have been
mystery, too much mystery where realism was needed.
But here, only two yards from the Circus, was a booth hung with strange
cloths, purple and yellow and crimson, and behind the wooden boards a man
and a woman with brown faces and busy, twirling, twisting, brown hands,
were making strange sweets which they wrapped into coloured packets, and
on the other side of the Fat Sisters there was a tent with Li Hung above
it in letters of gold and red, and inside the tents, boards on trestles,
and on the boards a long purple cloth, and on the cloth little toys and
figures and images, all of the gayest colours and the strangest shapes,
and all as cheap as nothing.
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