henaeus himself, the classic historian of classic
gluttons and classic bills of fare, could not but feel a glow at the
sight of the good things here displayed, if he were alive. Quincy Market
culminates at Thanksgiving time. It then attains to the zenith of good
fare.

Cleanliness and spruceness are the rule among the Quincy Market men and
stall-keepers. The matutinal display outside of apples, pears, onions,
turnips, beets, carrots, egg-plants, cranberries, squashes, etc., is
magnificent in the variety and richness of its hues. What a multitude of
orchards, meadows, gardens, and fields have been laid under contribution
to furnish this vegetable abundance! And here are their choicest
products. The foodful Earth and the arch-chemic Sun, the great
agriculturist and life-fountain, have done their best in concocting
these Quincy Market culinary vegetables. They wear a healthful,
resplendent look. Inside, what a goodly vista stretches away of fish,
flesh, and fowl! From these white stalls the Tempter could have
furnished forth the banquet the Miltonic description of which has been
quoted.

Here is a stall of ripe, juicy mutton, perhaps from the county of St.
Lawrence, in Northeastern New York. This is the most healthful and
easily digested of all meats. Its juiciness and nutritiousness are
visible in the trumpeter-like cheeks of the well-fed John Bull. The
domestic Anglo-Saxon is a mutton-eater. Let his offshoots here and
elsewhere follow suit. There is no such timber to repair the waste of
the human frame. It is a fuel easily combustible in the visceral grate
of the stomach. The mutton-eater is eupeptic. His dreams are airy and
lightsome. Somnus descends smiling to his nocturnal pillow, and not clad
in the portentous panoply of indigestion, which rivals a guilty
conscience in its night visions. The mutton department of Quincy Market
is all that it should be.

Next we come upon "fowl of game," wild ducks, pigeons, etc.--What has
become of those shoals of pigeons, those herrings of the air, which used
in the gloom and glory of a breezy autumnal day to darken the sun in
their flight, like the discharge of the Xerxean arrows at Thermopylae?
The eye sweeps the autumnal sky in vain now for any such winged
phenomenon, at least here in New England. The days of the bough-house
and pigeon-stand strewn with barley seem to have gone by. Swift of
flight and shapely in body is the North American wild pigeon, running
upon the air flee