Then they rounded a bend, and there was the Fair, spread out in a vast wedge of land, bigger than Cambridge, even more noisy, much more crowded. It was mostly tents and tent-people, who were not their kind of people – Daniel watched Isaac gain a couple of inches in height as he remembered the erect posture that Puritans used to set a better example. In some secluded parts of the Fair (Daniel knew) serious merchants were trading cattle, timber, iron, barrelled oysters – anything that could be brought upriver this far on a boat, or transported overland in a wagon. But this wholesale trade wanted to be invisible, and was. What Isaac saw was a retail fair whose size and gaudiness was all out of proportion to its importance, at least if you went by the amount of money that changed hands. The larger avenues (which meant sluices of mud with planks and logs strewn around for people to step on, or at least push off against) were lined with tents of rope-dancers, jugglers, play-actors, puppet shows, wrestling-champions, dancing-girls, and of course the speciality prostitutes who made the Fair such an important resource for University students. But going up into the smaller byways, they found the tables and stalls and the cleverly fashioned unfolding wagons of traders who'd brought goods from all over Europe, up the Ouse and the Cam to this place to sell them to England.