at lasts for several hours.
Long before dawn, the roads leading townwards are busy with all manner
of vehicles, from the great waggon drawn by four white horses driven
tandem, and laden with a moving stack of hay, to the ramshackle
donkey-cart conveying half a score of cabbages, a heap of dandelions
grubbed from the meadows, and the owner.

[Illustration: Marketing]

By daybreak the market square under the leafless trees presents a lively
scene. There are stalls sacred to poultry, to butter, eggs, and cheese;
but the vegetable kingdom predominates. Flanked by bulwarks of greens
and bundles of leeks of incredible whiteness and thickness of stem, sit
the saleswomen, their heads swathed in gay cotton kerchiefs, and the
ground before them temptingly spread with little heaps of corn salad, of
chicory, and of yellow endive placed in adorable contrast to the scarlet
carrots, blood-red beetroot, pinky-fawn onions, and glorious orange-hued
pumpkins; while ready to hand are measures of white or mottled haricot
beans, of miniature Brussels sprouts, and of pink or yellow potatoes, an
esculent that in France occupies a very unimportant place compared with
that it holds amongst the lower classes in Britain.

[Illustration: Private Boxes]

In Versailles Madame does her own marketing, her maid--in sabots and
neat but usually hideous cap--accompanying her, basket laden. From stall
to stall Madame passes, buying a roll of creamy butter wrapped in fresh
leaves here, a fowl there, some eggs from the wrinkled old dame who
looks so swart and witch-like in contrast to her stock of milk-white
eggs.

Madame makes her purchases judiciously--time is not a valuable commodity
in Versailles--and finishes, when the huge black basket is getting heavy
even for the strong arms of the squat little maid, by buying a mess of
cooked spinach from the pretty girl whose red hood makes a happy spot of
colour among the surrounding greenery, and a measure of onions from the
profound-looking sage who garners a winter livelihood from the summer
produce of his fields.

[Illustration: A Foraging Party]

Relations with uncooked food are, in Versailles, distinguished by an
unwonted intimacy. No one, however dignified his station or appearance,
is ashamed of purchasing the materials for his dinner in the open
market, or of carrying them home exposed to the view of the world
through the transpicuous meshes of a string bag. The portly gentleman
with the fur coat