h people, and the sidewalks on either hand were lined with
still drowsy laborers on their way to work, their lunch baskets hung
over their shoulders and cigar butts in their mouths. Pairs of relief
horses for the police were being driven through the street by boys
riding bareback on one of their two steeds.

Servant girls were tripping along toward market. Street sweepers were
busy at work on the mud the rain had washed into the gutters, where
cows at intervals were being milked. The sheet-iron coverings of store
windows were being raised, letting the light in upon the colorful
displays inside. Through open doors the scratching of brooms on floors
could be heard, while clouds of dust came driving out, making
Jacob's-ladders of the sunbeams.

When the _tartanas_ reached the _Pescaderia_ the women porters there
hurried out to meet them and help the sailors' wives unload. Servile
before these latter, whom they regarded as bosses, they trooped in line
through the narrow cell-like doors of the fish-portico, fetid air-holes,
through which the stenches from inside poured out. The baskets were
dumped on the marble flooring and the fish arranged in line on beds of
seaweed. On every hand were trundles of big fish and barrels where the
"produce" of the day before was packed in ice.

Across the market was another line of vendors, dressed in costumes like
those from the Cabanal, but more miserable in appearance, if anything,
and with more repulsive faces still. They were the women of Albufera, a
strange concentration of poverty and degradation, housing in wretched
shanties a people that lives among the reeds and mud of the lake
marshes, fishing in the murky, shallow waters from black, bluff-bowed
boats that look like coffins. On these ashen, weather-beaten features
indigence was drawn in its most ghastly outlines. Every eye was aglow
with the wild gleam of fever; and the odors that came from clothes,
here, had not the vigorous pungency of the open seashore, but the subtle
nausea of swamp land and the infectious muck of stagnant pools. The bags
these women were emptying on the tables were squirming masses of life.
As the eels came out they twisted into rings of black slime, or wriggled
on their white bellies, or lifted their pointed heads like snakes.
Nearby, whitening, dead, lay the fresh-water fry, tench, for the most
part, insufferably noisome, glittering with the subdued metallic luster
of poisonous tropical fruit. Here, too, w