t; the strong, the lame, and
the blind; the noble, with his star and orders of office; the Mujik in
his shaggy sheepskin capote or tattered blouse; the Mongolian, the
Persian, and the Caucasian; the Greek and the Turk; the Armenian and
the Californian, all intent upon something, buying, selling, or
looking on.

Being the only representative from the Golden State, I was anxious to
offer some Washoe stock for sale--twenty or thirty feet in the Gone
Case; but Dominico, my interpreter, informed me that these traders had
never heard of Washoe, and were mostly involved in Russian
securities--old breeches, boots, stockings, and the like. He did not
think my "Gone Case" would bring an old hat; and as for my "Sorrowful
Countenance" and "Ragged End," he was persuaded I could not dispose of
my entire interest in them for a pint of grease.

I was very much taken with the soldiers who infested these old
markets. It was something new in military economy to see the
representatives of an imperial army supporting themselves in this way;
dark, lazy fellows in uniform, lounging about with old boots, and
suspenders hanging all over them, crying out the merits of their wares
in stentorian voices, thus, as it were, patriotically relieving the
national treasury of a small fraction of its burden. They have much
the appearance, in the crowd, of raisins in a plum-pudding.

The peasant women, who flock in from the country with immense burdens
of vegetables and other products of the farms, are a very striking, if
not a very pleasing feature in the markets. Owing to the hard labor
imposed upon them, they are exceedingly rough and brawny, and have a
hard, dreary, and unfeminine expression of countenance, rather
inconsistent with one's notions of the delicacy and tenderness of
woman. Few of them are even passably well-looking. All the natural
playfulness of the gentler sex seems to be crushed out of them; and
while their manners are uncouth, their voices are the wildest and most
unmusical that ever fell upon the ear from a feminine source. When
dressed in their best attire they usually wear a profusion of red
handkerchiefs about their heads and shoulders; and from an
unpicturesque habit they have of making an upper waist immediately
under their arms by a ligature of some sort, and tying their
apron-strings about a foot below, they have the singular appearance of
being double-waisted or three-story women. They carry their children
on their backs,