starts off on his long, slow journey into London. Mile after
mile over muddy or dusty roads, through villages where everyone is
asleep, where not even a dog barks, on and on to London. It may be very
cold, and the horse only goes slowly, so it cannot be very comfortable;
but this is the man's work, and he must do it. Perhaps the cartman has a
little boy, and takes him too, and you see the little boy, when the cart
is coming back empty in the morning, lying sound asleep on the straw
dead tired, while his father drives home.

All the carts gather up to the market, and then they are unloaded. One
brings vegetables, and another fruit, and another flowers, and by two
o'clock everything is in its place and ready to be sold. Then the buyers
come--shop people again, greengrocers and fruiterers--and they look
round and try to get the best they can at the lowest prices.

There is a great hall covered in with glass, and in this the flowers are
arranged. It is lovely--like a huge flower-show. Of course, the flowers
are different at different times of the year, but in the early summer
you can see banks and banks of roses, all colours--red and yellow and
white--and masses of sweet-scented carnations and lilies and heliotrope;
and the smell is very sweet, so different from the market at
Billingsgate. All the people here, except you and me, are busy people
come to buy in order to sell again, and some of them don't look very
rich. Do you see that girl there in the corner with a red shawl and a
hat with huge untidy feathers all out of curl? She is a flower-girl, and
she is going to spend two or three shillings on buying a basket of
flowers. These she will do up into little bunches, and if she is lucky
enough to sell them again she will make a few shillings before the
evening. When she has chosen her flowers she goes away and sits down on
a cold stone step, and begins pulling them about and blowing into the
roses to make them open, and if you feel as I do you will not care to
buy them then; you would much rather she left them just as they were
and did not finger them. But she thinks people will be more likely to
buy them if they are carefully arranged. When she has done she starts
off to walk a long way to a stand where she goes every day, perhaps a
place where two or three streets join and there is an open space. There
is one in the West End, where there is an island of pavement between
lines of traffic north and south, east and west; th