mmerce to admit of his
passing there.

You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese. Then you would delight
in Greenwich Street. You could feast your highly creditable appetite
for these excellent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs
of "wholesale dealers and commission merchants" in them. The letter
press, as you might say, of the fish reporter's walk is a noble paean
to the earth's glorious yield for the joyous sustenance of man. For
these princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores of olive oil, of
sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices, sugar, Spanish, Bermuda,
and Havana onions, "fine" apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried
fruits and raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of "fish
products." Lo! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich Street is
to-day's translation of the Garden of Eden.

Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the importation of caviar
for barter here. Caviar from over-seas now comes, when it comes at
all, mainly by the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for most
of us, by the war. The fish reporter is told, however, if it be
summer, that there cannot be much doing in the way of caviar until
fall, "when the spoonbill start coming in." And on he goes to a great
saltfish house, where many men in salt-stained garments are running
about, their arms laden with large flat objects, of sharp and jagged
edge, which resemble dried and crackling hides of some animal curiously
like a huge fish; and numerous others of "the same" are trundling round
wheelbarrow-like trucks likewise so laden. Where stacks of these hides
stand on their tails against the walls, and goodness knows how many big
boxes are, containing, as those open show, beautifully soft, thick,
cream-coloured slabs, which is fish. And where still other men, in
overalls stained like a painter's palette, are knocking off the heads
of casks and dipping out of brine still other kinds of fish for
inspection.

Here it is said by the head of the house, by the stove (it is chill
weather) in his office like a ship-master's cabin: "Strong market on
foreign mackerel. Mines hinder Norway catch. Advices from abroad
report that German resources continue to purchase all available
supplies from the Norwegian fishermen. No Irish of any account.
Recent shipment sold on the deck at high prices. Fair demand from the
Middle West."

So, by stages, on up to turn into North Moore Street, looking down a
n