to purchase luxury or ornament, place or power, the ways and means to shine and glitter in the world, where men are prized by what they seem, rather than what they are; the wherewith to pay the idly accumulated debts, incurred through mean attempts to cover the rags of poverty, or decent homely garments of honesty, with tinsel mockeries of wealth’s trappings? Who amongst these knows aught of the meaning of the wants of life? Ask him who has known Hunger, has been face to face with want and starvation, has shared with loved and loving ones, weak babes, and sick and helpless mothers, the task of driving these unbidden guests away, has felt the gnawing pangs of their demon power, while gazing upon plenty, upon the wealth of food and sustenance displayed before his eyes! Is it not more marvellous and strange, that such piles as a market displays should ever be permitted to lie safe within the arrow-shot of gaunt and wasting poverty, than that the annals of our police reports should now and then record how poverty and crime sometimes go hand in hand?
But to look more in detail at the picture offered on a summer market-day. There to the left sit congregated together the vendors of the far-famed staple produce of the country farm-yards, sheltered from the heat by the artificial grove of variegated umbrellas, serving, or attempting to serve, the double purpose of protection from the sun in summer, and
the rain in winter and summer. The poultry “pads” and butter-stalls are one. Turkeys, and geese, and fowls, and sausages, and little round white cheeses, share the baskets and benches with eggs and pints of butter, in the land where that commodity is sold by liquid measure, whose equivalent is somewhere near about 1lb. 3 oz.
There is a legend that one who sits here is the heroine of an old tale, which goes to the effect that “once upon a time,” when the inspector came his round to test the weights of all the measured pints, the old lady was observed slily to slip a half crown into the end of a certain pint, and hand it forward to bear the scrutiny; a bystander, who watched the trick, a moment after laid his finger on the identical pint and begged to purchase it, resisting all evasion on the part of the discomfited saleswoman, who, compelled to submit, turned out eventually the “biter bit.”
Thronging around this neighbourhood, and proffering their services with most assiduous perseverance, are a host of most amiable-looking porter women, liveried in white aprons and sleeves, with a pair of huge peck baskets dangling on their arms. Tumbling, and bumping, and jostling among them, drowning their pleadings in a deafening chorus of discordant cries, come the itinerant venders of small wares—“lucifers three boxes a penny,” “cabbage-nets only a penny,” “reels of cotton two for a penny,”
little dangling bunches of skewers, ranged in progressive order on queer and mysteriously twisted holders, that seem designed to puzzle any mechanical skill to get them off again, “only a penny;” laces, and saucepans, and stationery, and kettles, thrust into notice as though haberdashers, and tinmen, and stationers were simultaneously rushing off to the gold diggings, and disposing of their goods piecemeal by auction. Ere the next range of stalls may be explored, the pathway is obstructed by some “literate” specimen of the blind, with an attendant concourse of listeners eagerly drinking in the titles of his sheet of hundred songs for a penny. “There’s a good time coming,” “All’s lost now,” “My bark is on the shore,” and “I’m on the Sea,” &c. &c.; or should any great tragedy or judicial murder have occurred recently, to furnish him with a still more profitable stock in trade, such as a “last dying speech and confession,” or “full, true, and particular account” of some “shocking and brutal outrage,” somewhat may be seen and heard of how the minds and tastes of the ignorant are vitiated, and the morbid cravings of diseased imaginations fed; and the hawker of this food for the million, forms living evidence that the eye is not the only member through whose aid vice may gain entrance to the soul. But there is little time or opportunity to philosophize amid the din of importunity that is ringing upon
the ears, “What d’ye luke for? fine guse? butifull fowill?” And there stands one who claims especial notice—the merry bacon woman, amid her throng of earnest customers. There she stands, or rather moves; stillness is a state to which she must be a total stranger, we could fancy. “Good day, ma’am.” “What’s for you, sir?” “Nice pork, dear? black meat? I’ll wait of ye this minute, sir.” “Yes, ma’am, beautiful ham; did you please to want any? Oh, thank you; very well, another day I shall be proud to wait of ye.” “No harm in asking,” she adds, turning apologetically to her more profitable customers. And so she goes on, ever moving, ever talking, ever cheerful, civil, and attentive, one never-ending strain of courtesy and kindness pouring from her lips, while her hands are ever busy cutting and weighing, and folding up in fine white linen cloths, her sausages and bacon, and black meat, and still nicer white juvenile-looking pork, just fresh from the pickle. Probably she has a home somewhere, but her sphere of usefulness and theatre of glory must be at the market-stall; she must have been born and bred a market-woman. Further on, there sits a melancholy and original old lady, proprietress of a heterogeneous kind of heap, composed of small quantities of the choicest produce of various sources of supply—stray joints of pork, trifling displays of butter, a few eggs, and an occasional specimen of poultry; but her fame is
built upon her unrivalled “tatoes,” hidden up in pads, and carefully concealed from the eyes of chance passengers; their discovery is a mine of wealth to the privileged few, especially in bad seasons. Dealing forth sparingly, like a miser counting out his treasures, the queen of murphies compensates for the reserve that would seem to imply her belief that her purchasers were begging favours of her, by the involuntary boon she confers upon the lover of idioms, in her quaint displays of her county’s dialect. The ordinary greeting of “How d’ye do?” will be met by the assurance that she “don’t fare to feel no matters,” or she “fares to feel right muddled,” or “no how,” or that she is scarce fit to be “abroad.” Her “tatoes” she will recommend as eating like balls of flour, if cooked enow (a word indiscriminately used to express quantity and degree). She will occasionally detail particulars of her market-horse’s “trickiness” when he “imitated” to kick on the road, and how she “gots” him on as well as she could. Her breakfast jug she will designate a gotch, and many other like specimens will she afford of the contents of the vocabulary of East Anglia. A traveller may with little difficulty fancy he is listening to some native of the distant county Devon; and, strange to say, the guse, fule, and enow, and other striking similarities of brogue and dialect, are not the only features of resemblance these two counties
bear to each other. The ancient rood screens of the Norfolk churches have many of them been found exactly to correspond with those found in Devonshire, and only there. In the celebrated rebellions of Edward the Sixth’s reign, many remarkable features of resemblance were observed in the character of the outbreaks at these distant points,—so much so, as to suggest the idea of secret communication being kept up between them. Whether both alike owe their peculiarities to the common parentage of the Iceni, a tribe of whom have been said to have settled in Devonshire as well as Pembrokeshire, or they are referable to any less remote link of connection, antiquarians may perhaps at some future day make clear. Certain it is, the “southron” is apt to be easily beguiled into the belief that he has met a fellow-countryman or woman among the folks who deem themselves another race than the people of the “sheeres.”
But we have here wandered far aside in our market trip; next come in due order the butcher-stalls, taking a higher rank in the social scale of market society than the humbler pads, though their wares may not compete with their neighbours for a world-wide fame—south-down mutton, prime little scot, and short-horn beef, with the usual attendant displays of calves’ white heads with staring eyes, and mangled feet hanging to dismembered legs and shoulders by little strings of sinew, looking as though