metropolis." Two quaint old inns are still here; two great national
theatres, and a churchyard full of mouldy but still famous
celebrities,--the church itself, bare and big, rising above them. In the
days of the Stuarts, people prayed to be buried here hardly less than in
Westminster Abbey, and the lover of epitaph and monument will find
occupation for many an hour. This strange, squat old building, under the
shadow of the church, is the market, its hundred columns and
chapel-looking fronts always knee-deep and more in baskets and fruits
and vegetables, while its air still seems to breathe of old books, old
painters, and old authors.

"Night and morning are at meeting," for Covent Garden makes small
distinction between the two, and whether it is a late supper or an early
breakfast that the coffee-rooms and stalls are furnishing, can hardly be
determined by one who has elected to know how the market receives and
how it distributes its supplies. In November fog and mist, or the
blackness of early winter, with snow on the ground, or cold rain
falling, resolution is needed for such an expedition, and still more,
if one would see all that the deep night hides, and that comes to light
as the dawn struggles through. This business of feeding a city of four
million people seems the simplest and most natural of occupations; but
the facts involved are staggering, not alone in the mere matter of
quantities and the amazement at the first sight of them, but in the
thousands of lives tangled with them. Quantity is the first impression.
Every cellar runs over with green stuff, mountains of which come in on
enormous wagons and fill up all spaces left vacant, heaving masses of
basket stumbling from other wagons and filling with instant celerity. In
the great vans pour, from every market garden and outlying district of
London, from all England, from the United Kingdom, from all the world,
literally; for it is soon discovered that these enormous vehicles on
high springs and with immense wheels, drawn by Normandy horses of size
and strength to match, are chiefly from the railway stations, and that
the drivers, who seem to be built on the same plan as the horses and
vans, have big limbs and big voices and a high color, and that the
bulging pockets of their velveteen suits show invoices and receipt
books.

Not alone from railway stations and trains, from which tons of cabbages,
carrots, onions, and all the vegetable tribe issue, but from t