on the ground like
kites of brown cloth, slimy and viscous to the touch.

The scales happened to be occupied by some out-of-town bakers,
good-looking fellows with square leather aprons, their sleeves rolled
up, and flour in their hair and eyebrows. They were weighing out bags of
fresh, nutty bread, which seemed to bring a fragrance of life into that
nauseating ambient of sea-carrion. Waiting for their turn, the
fish-women were blarneying with customs men or idlers who stood about
looking at the big fish with the curiosity of landlubbers. Meanwhile,
other women were coming in on foot from down the coast, carrying their
baskets on their heads or by the handles. The group was growing in
numbers every minute, and the line of baskets now reached clear from the
scales to the bridge.

The officials were getting bad-tempered with that snarling, loud-talking
mob of harpies who wore them out every morning with their
quarrelsomeness and unreasonable haggling. Every one of them shouted at
you as if you had no ears, reenforcing every other word with an
interjection from that inexhaustible store of epithet native to the
shores of the Mediterranean. Rivals, on meeting here again after a
set-to on the beach the day before, would revive the passions of the
unsettled argument, annotating insults with obscene gestures,
emphasizing accusations with cadenced slapping of hands on thighs, or
lifting clenched fists above their heads as if they were about to
strike. And then, when you would think of calling the police, if not the
undertaker, laughter, suddenly everywhere, as though the hens in a big
hen coop had started cackling all at once! Some one of the combatants
had scored with an unusually cutting or scurrilous phrase!

The bakers were slow in getting off the scales; so gibes began to rain
on them; and they, for their part, were not the men to accept such
taunts in silence. Indecencies, blasphemies, slanderous genealogies
began to fly back and forth, though the deadliest thrusts seemed to
rouse only friendly grins and guffaws.

Outstanding in the thickest of the riot, and the center of most
attention, stood Dolores, _la del Retor_, as comely as usual and better
dressed than any of the others, carelessly leaning against a corner of
the office shanty, her arms folded behind her back, her magnificent bust
thrown forward, smiling with satisfied complacency at the interested
glances that reached her tan shoes and the red stockings so bla