Excerpt from Owen, Vol. 1 of 3: A Waif What that the rain came down when the last Welsh colt was sold, and a wretched animal of eighteen years, with its teeth scoured and its tusks filed, remained still a dead lot on its owner's hands, the bond fide cattle fair was at end, and the drinking and quarrelsome evening that invariably Wound up the proceedings was an illegitimate ap pendage, only countenanced by a non descript crowd and a few Markshire roughs. Sober people had wound their way down the steep hill to the town, and their respective villages lying five, ten, fifteen miles beyond the Downs; and those who had stopped to revel and get drunk after the day's business deserved a wetting for the nonce, and there was no honest Markshire soul to pity them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.