The two men pushed their way back to the taut vibrating rope, beyond which the driving-contest was now proceeding; and as they rested there, Wolf’s mind felt liberated from all its agitations, and he drank in the scene before him with unruffled delight. The peculiar smells that came to his nostrils⁠—leather, and straw, and horse-dung, and tobacco-smoke, and cider-sour human breath, and paint, and tar, and half-devoured apples⁠—were all caught up and overpowered by one grand dominant odour, the unique smell of the trodden grass of a fair-field. Let the sun shine as it would from the cold blue heaven! Let the chariots of white clouds race as they pleased under that airy tent! It was from the solid ground under human feet, under equine hooves, that this Dorsetshire world gave forth its autochthonous essence, its bittersweet, rank, harsh, terrestrial sweat, comforting beyond conscious knowledge to the heart of man and beast.