On Saturdays the
great market, silent and deserted for six nights in the week, was a
debauch of sound and colour and smell. Strange, pungent odours
assailed the nostrils; the ear was surprised with the sharp, broken
cries of dealers, the cackle of poultry, and the murmur of innumerable
voices; the stalls, splashed with colour, astonished the eye like a
picture, immensely powerful, immensely crude.

The long rows of stalls were packed with the drift and refuse of a
great City. For here the smug respectability of the shops were cast
aside, and you were deep in the romance of traffic in merchandise
fallen from its high estate--a huge welter and jumble of things
arrested in their ignoble descent from the shops to the gutter.

At times a stall was loaded with the spoils of a sunken ship or the
loot from a city fire, and you could buy for a song the rare fabrics
and costly dainties of the rich, a stain on the cloth, a discoloured
label on the tin, alone giving a hint of their adventures. Then the
people hovered round like wreckers on a hostile shore, carrying off
spoil and treasure at a fraction of its value, exulting over their
booty like soldiers after pillage.

There was no caprice of the belly that could not be gratified, no want
of the naked body that could not be supplied in this huge bazaar of the
poor, but its cost had to be counted in pence, for those who bought in
the cheapest market came here.

A crowd of women and children clustered like flies round the lolly
stall brought Chook to a standstill; the trays heaped with sweets
coloured like the rainbow, pleased his eye, and, remembering Ada's
childish taste for lollies, he thought suddenly of her friend, Pinkey
the red-haired, and smiled.

Near at hand stood a collection of ferns and pot-plants, fresh and
cool, smelling of green gardens and moist earth. Over the way, men
lingered with serious faces, trying the edge of a chisel with their
thumb, examining saws, planes, knives, and shears with a workman's
interest in the tools that earn his bread.

Chook stopped to admire the art gallery, gay with coloured pictures
from the Christmas numbers of English magazines. On the walls were
framed pictures of Christ crucified, the red blood dropping from His
wounds, or the old rustic bridge of an English village, crude as
almanacs, printed to satisfy the artistic longings of the people.

Opposite, a cock crowed in defiance; the hens cackled loudly in the
coops; th