re flooded with the glow from clusters of electric bulbs,
and, with the shuffle of feet on the stone flags, the huge market woke
slowly to life, like a man who stretches himself and yawns. Outside,
the carters encouraged the horses with short, guttural cries, the heavy
vehicles bumped on the uneven flags, the horses' feet clattered loudly
on the stones as the drivers backed the carts against the stalls, and
the unloading began.

In half an hour the grimy stalls had disappeared under piles of green
vegetables, built up in orderly masses by the Chinese dealers. The
rank smell of cabbages filled the air, the attendants gossiped in a
strange tongue, and the arcades formed three green lanes, piled with
the fruits of the earth. Here and there the long green avenues were
broken with splashes of colour where piles of carrots, radishes and
rhubarb, the purple bulbs of beetroot, the creamy white of
cauliflowers, and the soft green of eschalots and lettuce broke the
dominant green of the cabbage.

The markets were transformed; it was an invasion from the East.
Instead of the sharp, broken cries of the dealers on Saturday night,
the shuffle of innumerable feet, the murmur of innumerable voices in a
familiar tongue, there was a silence broken only by strange guttural
sounds dropping into a sing-song cadence, the language of the East.
Chinamen stood on guard at every stall, slant-eyed and yellow, clothed
in the cheap slops of Sydney, their impassive features carved in
fantastic ugliness, surveying the scene with inscrutable eyes that had
opened first on rice-fields, sampans, junks, pagodas, and the barbaric
trappings of the silken East.

At four o'clock the sales began, and the early buyers arrived with the
morose air of men who have been robbed of their sleep. There were
small dealers, Dagoes from the fruit shops, greengrocers from the
suburbs, with a chaff-bag slung across their arm, who buy by the dozen.
They moved silently from stall to stall, pricing the vegetables,
feeling the market, calculating what they would gain by waiting till
the prices dropped, making the round of the markets before they filled
the chaff-bags and disappeared into the darkness doubled beneath their
loads.

Chook and Pinkey reached the markets by the first workman's tram in the
morning. As the rain had set in, Chook had thrown the chaff-bags over
his shoulders, and Pinkey wore an old jacket that she was ashamed to
wear in the daytime. By her co