, for she went out
to seek him when he did not come home, and she smelt a piece of dead
fish, just the very thing she liked most of all. So she crawled up the
side of the funny basket that was lying in the water, and found that the
bit of dead fish was inside it. But that did not matter, for there was a
hole at the top; so in popped Mrs. Crab, and there she had to stay, for
she could not get out again. She tried and tried, but the hole was made
with bits of stick pointed inwards, so that she could not get up to it
from the inside. Many lobsters have been caught that way, and now Mrs.
Crab was too; and when the men came in the evening to look at their
baskets, they were quite pleased, for they found not only Mrs. Crab,
but four of her friends whom she had invited inside because she felt
lonely. So Mrs. Crab went to the market too, but it was not to the same
market as her husband, and she did not meet him again. All those shrimps
lying near were caught by boys with nets. The boys ran into the water
with bare feet, and thrust their nets along the sandy bottom, and each
time they came out they picked out the shrimps from the net and threw
them into a pail, and only the very strongest managed to hop back on to
the sand again; nearly all of them went to market.

But while we have been looking at these things the market has been
getting emptier; and now there are only a few young lads left, who have
little barrows and carts, and are called costers, and they are walking
round the stalls and picking out what they will buy after the
fishmongers have got all the best of the fish. It is time to go away,
and soon Billingsgate will be nearly desolate. It is not a nice place,
and if there were not some policemen near I should not like to have
brought you here.

We cannot go to Covent Garden Market where the flowers are this morning,
for it is nearly seven o'clock, and too late, as we ought to be there
very early; but we can go to the meat market, which is not at all a
pretty sight, and a long way off. But it is very wonderful. Here there
is selling going on quite late, until about ten o'clock, perhaps, and
even to the middle of the day the place is still busy. It is a huge
place with a great glass roof, and there are rows of stalls with narrow
passages like streets between them, and everywhere are great masses of
raw meat. It is a city of meat; you walk down lanes of meat--meat
everywhere. All the butchers in London come here to choo