The French policemen, called
gendarmes, are also in uniform of so military a kind that unless we knew
we should certainly mistake them for soldiers.

There are stalls set out on the pavements, heaped up with embroidery and
odds and ends, including soap, which is manufactured here very largely.
Bright-eyed girls try to entice us to buy as we pass. One street is just
like a flower garden, lined with stalls piled up with violets and roses
and anemones and other blossoms. Trams follow one another along the
rails in an endless procession. We walk on briskly and turn down a side
street; here at last is what I have been looking for, and well worth
finding it is too! It is a shop with great plate-glass windows; on one
side is every kind of preserved fruit, and on the other a variety of
chocolates, tarts, and expensive sweets. Look at that dainty box filled
with dark green figs, artistically set off by sugared violets pressed
into all the niches! These are rather different from the flat, dry brown
figs which is all that English children recognise under that name.
Another box glows with tiny oranges, mandarins they call them here, and
piled up over them are richly coloured cherries shining with sugar
crystals. In the centre is an enormous fruit like a dark orange-coloured
melon, surrounded by heaps of others, while the plain brown chestnuts,
that don't attract much notice, are really the best of all, for they are
the _marrons glaces_ for which Marseilles is famed, and once you have
tasted these, freshly made, all other sweets will seem insipid to you.

[Illustration: THE FRENCH POLICEMAN.]

Inside the shop there are many carefully dressed ladies, daintily
holding little plates, and going about from one counter to another,
picking up little cakes filled with cream and soaked in syrup. They eat
scores of them, and they do it every day and any hour of the day, in the
morning or afternoon or whenever they happen to pass. No wonder they
look pasty-faced! We are only here for once, so we need have no
compunction about our digestions, especially as there is an empty place
left after that tantalising bacon-less breakfast. We are soon provided
with a plate each and a little implement which looks as if it had
started life as a butter-knife and suddenly changed its mind to become a
fork.

The shop-girls take no notice of what we eat; we can pick and choose
freely, and at the end they trust us to say how many cakes we have had.
We can g