vegetables and fruit and flowers the noise and bustle were gradually
increasing. The whole place was by degree waking up, from the popular
quarter where the cabbages are piled at four o'clock in the morning,
to the lazy and wealthy district which only hangs up its pullets and
pheasants when the hands of the clock point to eight.

The great covered alleys were now teeming with life. All along the
footways on both sides of the road there were still many market
gardeners, with other small growers from the environs of Paris,
who displayed baskets containing their "gatherings" of the previous
evening--bundles of vegetables and clusters of fruit. Whilst the crowd
incessantly paced hither and thither, vehicles barred the road; and
Florent, in order to pass them, had to press against some dingy sacks,
like coal-sacks in appearance, and so numerous and heavy that the
axle-trees of the vans bent beneath them. They were quite damp, and
exhaled a fresh odour of seaweed. From a rent low down in the side of
one of them a black stream of big mussels was trickling.

Florent and Claude had now to pause at every step. The fish was arriving
and one after another the drays of the railway companies drove up laden
with wooden cages full of the hampers and baskets that had come by train
from the sea coast. And to get out of the way of the fish drays, which
became more and more numerous and disquieting, the artist and Florent
rushed amongst the wheels of the drays laden with butter and eggs and
cheese, huge yellow vehicles bearing coloured lanterns, and drawn by
four horses. The market porters carried the cases of eggs, and baskets
of cheese and butter, into the auction pavilion, where clerks were
making entries in note books by the light of the gas.

Claude was quite charmed with all this uproar, and forgot everything to
gaze at some effect of light, some group of blouses, or the picturesque
unloading of a cart. At last they extricated themselves from the crowd,
and as they continued on their way along the main artery they presently
found themselves amidst an exquisite perfume which seemed to be
following them. They were in the cut-flower market. All over the
footways, to the right and left, women were seated in front of large
rectangular baskets full of bunches of roses, violets, dahlias, and
marguerites. At times the clumps darkened and looked like splotches
of blood, at others they brightened into silvery greys of the softest
tones. A l