A daily change of performances had at this time become necessary, and Richardson presented on the second day "an entire new Chinese romantic melodrama," called _The Children of the Desert_, and a comic pantomime, entitled _Harlequin and the Devil_. On the third day the pantomime was the same, preceded by "an entire new melodrama," called _The Roman Wife_.
This year there first appeared in the fair an eccentric character named James Sharp England, known as "the flying pieman." He was always neatly dressed, with a clean white apron before him, but wore no hat, and had his hair powdered and tied behind in a queue. Like the famous Tiddy-dol of a century earlier, he aimed at a profitable notoriety through a fantastic exterior and a droll manner; and he succeeded, his sales of plum-pudding, which he carried before him on a board, and vended in slices, being very great wherever he appeared. The present representative of the perambulating traders of the eccentric order is a man who has for many years strolled about the western districts of the metropolis, wearing clean white sleeves and a black velvet cap placed jauntily on his head, and carrying before him a tray of what, in oily and mellifluous accents, he proclaims to be, "Brandy balls as big as St. Paul's! Oh, _so_ nice! They are all sugar and brandy!"
The following year is memorable among showmen, and especially among menagerists, for the attack of Ballard's lioness on the Exeter mail-coach. On the night of the 20th of October, the caravans containing the animals were standing in a line along the side of the road, near the inn called the Winterslow Hut, seven miles from Salisbury, to the fair of which city the menagerie was on its way. The coach had just stopped at this inn for the guard to deliver his bag of local letters, when one of the leaders was attacked by some large animal. The alarm and confusion produced by this incident were so great that two of the inside passengers left the coach, ran into the house, and locked themselves in a room above stairs; while the horses kicked and plunged so violently that the coachman feared that the coach would be overturned. It was soon perceived by the coachman and guard, by the light of the lamps, that the assailant was a large lioness. A mastiff attacked the beast, which immediately left the horse, and turned upon him; the dog then fled, but was pursued and killed by the lioness about forty yards from the coach.
