She is packed in, as it were. She never alights, like her sister of the Montcalm, using the bottom of her cart as a counter, or walks about a little as do the vendors of Finlay, or spreads her stock out on boxes as do the saleswomen of Champlain. So it is at Saint Roch’s we come upon the little Flower-girl seated among her posies and sweet as the flowers she sells.
But she is not the only vendor of les belle fleurs even in Saint Roch’s; here is the old woman from Charlebourg seated behind a jar of peonies and Saint Joseph lilies, and here another beaming old face outlined by cauliflowers, bunched like so many nosegays up and down the roof-supports of her old cart.
Oh, what an air to these old French-markets of Canada! “Bon jour, madame, bon jour” the same old voice hails patrons year after year. And the attendant pageant of citizens who come to buy! What a humanly interesting tide flows back and forth, now here now there, now this way, now that, through the avenues of colour afforded by the fruits, vegetables and flowers.
Here is a Sister, face almost lost under the picturesque black bonnet, in her hands the long basket, from her side depending the Crucifix silently reminding the pious habitant in whose Name she begs.
In the early morning come the housewives who believe in the old adage of “the early bird”. These know what they want. They pounce and go.
By and by the stragglers begin to trip in, mothers who have had to see their children safely off to school, and blow off steam a little in the colourful atmosphere, before beginning to buy.
But the respite enjoyed by the old women in the carts is not for long. Their gossip and chat and calling back and forth from cart to cart, is cut short by a rising-tide of housewives arriving to buy in a heat for the noon dinner. Ten o’clock sees the tide of trade in flood, with women behind stepping on the heels of women ahead and tumultuous streams of purple beets, the chrome of carrots, the spring-green of lettuce, the pearl of onions, the fruity bloom of peach or plum, cascading into waiting basket or bag.
Now, mingling with the throng may be seen the rather more sportily dressed figures of the summer visitors, temporarily domiciled at the Frontenac and out to “do” the city—Quebec, the Capital-city of Canadian romance.
The Quebec market has filled the pages of two centuries and a half, and in all that time there, over there, a little to one side away from the crowd, a little on the outskirts of Food, as it were, has sat and still sits “the vendor of baskets” (without which no woman can come to market), and a curious appendage of “simples”—dried herbs, little squares of Spruce-gum, tiny bunches of wizened roots.
* * * *