and Essex banks of the Thames, the banks of
the Humber, the Mersey, the Orwell, the Trent,
and the Ouse. The Scilly isles, which are
almost totally cultivated as market gardens,
and produce excellent articles, and always
very early, used to send their supplies no
further than Cornwall, and barter them for
what goods they wanted. Now, the Cornish
people grow for themselves and London too;
and the Scilly isles find it better to send their
produce by steamer to Southampton, whence
it comes here. Yet, notwithstanding all these
new competitors, the market gardens around
London are constantly extending. That carrier's
waggon with the light iron wheels,
which you see there just arrived, comes from
the Great Western Railway station. Those
long wooden cases are filled with new potatoes,
and strawberries very carefully packed.
The strawberries are from gardens round
about Bath. The potatoes, if, as I suppose,
they come from Cornwall, must have paid
thirty-five shillings per ton carriage. But
the Great Northern and other railways are
beginning to see the new trade that may be
created, and are lowering their rates. They
must put on more night trains, too," adds my
informant, "if they would be of service to us.
The railway supplies are apt to arrive late,
when trade begins to flag. I have known a
heavy arrival after the first buyers are gone
to bring the prices down fifty per cent, in a
moment—an obvious hardship to the earlier
buyers."

In answer to my inquiries about the fluctuations
in prices at this market, of which I
have heard some marvellous accounts, my
informant tells me that these have become
comparatively rare of late years. Except in
a case such as mentioned above, prices are
generally steady. The market gardeners
on looking round the market know what
is the supply of the morning, and fix their
prices accordingly—rarely departing from
them. They endeavour, moreover, by every
means to fit their supply to the demand,
so that a balance is generally well preserved.
They watch for any circumstances
calculated to create an extraordinary demand,
and will even transmit a message by
telegraph to various parts of England and
France, to order or countermand a supply as
events may determine. Potatoes, which are
sold almost exclusively on the southern side
of the market, have of course greatly fallen
off in quantity since the ravages of the
disease. It is calculated that not one-half the
amount of the original supply comes now to
market; although the extent of land cultivated
with potatoes has been increasing every year
since the appearance of the scourge. The
potatoes that escape fetching higher prices
than they used, the growers find their cultivation
no less profitable than before.

My guide, with more peaceful intentions
than a French statesman when he can't
persuade his friends to his way of thinking,
proposes to "descend into the street." Walking
on, somewhat bewildered with the crowd,
I notice objects in the shifting panorama
which he points out, and listen to his remarks,
until I know instinctively all he tells me.
He seems to have gifted me with some subtle
analytical power, by which, in smallest hints
and signs, I read the secrets of all things
about me.

I merely glance, for example, at yonder
stout, ruddy-complexioned little man, and
know him at once to be Mr. Squareit, of
somewhere down Dagenham way. I know
that he began life without a sixpence, and is
not ashamed to own it, and that he is now
the largest market gardener in England,
perhaps in the world: for he has five hundred
acres of land on the banks of the Thames, all
in the highest state of garden cultivation. I
know him to be filled with knowledge, mostly
gathered by his own experiments, in the use
of manures—using such odd out-of-the-way
things for that purpose as no farmer or even
market gardener thinks of using. I know,
moreover, that he sends five times as much
to this market as any other single producer,
and that his things are always earliest and
best.

That carneying old woman with the red
nose, who is pulling Mr. Squareit by the arm,
and calling him a ''jewel" and "a dear boy."
and many other tender things, all apropos
of the price of a certain "junket o' carrots"
about as big as marbles, I am able at once to
recognise as the leader of that band of old
women to whom the benevolent Marquis of
Cristal in an unlucky hour gave half-a-sovereign;
being induced thereto by a piteous
story of "hard frost and nothink doin', your
lordship." I know that the hard frost referred
to never broke up, and that his lordship,
being fond of a walk in the Centre Avenue,
is now compelled to descend from his carriage
in the Strand, and walk hither on foot. I
know also that this stratagem has been discovered,
and that the carneying old woman
and her associates have means, little short of
miraculous, for divining the moment of his
lordship's arrival. Finally, I know that the
benevolent marquis has appealed to the police
for protection in vain; and that nothing but
a high sense of his duty to society, and of his
dignity as an English nobleman, prevents his
offering to compromise the matter, by pensioning
off the carneying old woman and her
friends with a small annuity.

I know that yonder is the great pea grower,
who will send to one firm in a single day four
hundred sacks of from twelve to fifteen pecks
each, besides four or five hundred sieves of a
superior kind; and that there are other
growers who will send to single dealers in
one day seven or eight waggons of cabbages,
or fourteen to fifteen hundred bushels of
sprouts. I am reminded by this that six or
seven hundred thousand pottles of strawberries;
forty or more millions of cabbages;