ather moves;
stillness is a state to which she must be a total stranger, we could
fancy. "Good day, ma'am." "What's for you, sir?" "Nice pork, _dear_?
black meat? I'll wait _of ye_ this minute, sir." "Yes, ma'am, beautiful
ham; did you please to want any? Oh, thank you; very well, another day I
shall be _proud_ to wait _of ye_." "No harm in asking," she adds,
turning apologetically to her more profitable customers. And so she goes
on, ever moving, ever talking, ever cheerful, civil, and attentive, one
never-ending strain of courtesy and kindness pouring from her lips, while
her hands are ever busy cutting and weighing, and folding up in fine
white linen cloths, her sausages and bacon, and black meat, and still
nicer white juvenile-looking pork, just fresh from the pickle. Probably
she has a home somewhere, but her sphere of usefulness and theatre of
glory must be at the market-stall; she must have been born and bred a
market-woman. Further on, there sits a melancholy and original old lady,
proprietress of a heterogeneous kind of heap, composed of small
quantities of the choicest produce of various sources of supply--stray
joints of pork, trifling displays of butter, a few eggs, and an
occasional specimen of poultry; but her fame is built upon her unrivalled
"tatoes," hidden up in pads, and carefully concealed from the eyes of
chance passengers; their discovery is a mine of wealth to the privileged
few, especially in bad seasons. Dealing forth sparingly, like a miser
counting out his treasures, the queen of murphies compensates for the
reserve that would seem to imply her belief that her purchasers were
begging favours of her, by the involuntary boon she confers upon the
lover of idioms, in her quaint displays of her county's dialect. The
ordinary greeting of "How d'ye do?" will be met by the assurance that she
"don't _fare to feel_ no matters," or she "_fares to_ feel _right
muddled_," or "_no how_," or that she is scarce fit to be "abroad." Her
"tatoes" she will recommend as eating like balls of flour, if cooked
_enow_ (a word indiscriminately used to express quantity and degree).
She will occasionally detail particulars of her market-horse's
"_trickiness_" when he "_imitated_" to kick on the road, and how she
"_gots_" him on as well as she could. Her breakfast jug she will
designate a _gotch_, and many other like specimens will she afford of the
contents of the vocabulary of East Anglia. A traveller may w