If you have visited many of the places touched upon in this article in the same night, you will find yourself caught in the act by the early sunlight, and as it will then be too late to go to bed, you can do nothing better than turn your steps towards the Madeleine. There you may find the market-people taking the flowers out of the black canvas wagons and putting up the temporary booths, while the sidewalk is hidden with a mass of roses in their white paper cornucopiæ and the dark, damp green of palms and ferns. It will be well worth your while to go on through the silent streets from this market of flowers to the market of food in the Halles Centrales, where there are strawberry patches stretching for a block, and bounded by acres of radishes or acres of mushrooms, and by queer fruits from as far south as Algiers and Tunis, just arrived from Marseilles on the train, and green pease and carrots from no greater a distance than just beyond the fortifications. It is the only spot in the city where many people are awake. Everybody is awake here, bustling and laughing and scolding--porters with brass badges on their sleeves carrying great piles of vegetables, and plump market-women in white sleeves and caps, and drivers in blue blouses smacking their lips over their hot coffee after their long ride through the night. It is like a great exposition building of food exhibits, with the difference that all of these exhibits are to be scattered and are to disappear on the breakfast-tables of Paris that same morning. Loud-voiced gentlemen are auctioneering off whole crops of potatoes, a sidewalk at a time, or a small riverful of fish with a single clap of the hands; live lobsters and great turtles crawl and squirm on marble slabs, and vistas of red meat stretch on iron hooks from one street corner to the next. You are, and feel that you are, a drone in this busy place, and salute with a sense of guilty companionship the groups of men and girls in dinner dress who have been up all night, and who come singing and chaffing in their open carriages in search of coffee and a box of strawberries, or a bunch of cold, crisp radishes with the dew still on them, which they buy from a virtuous matron of grim and disapproving countenance at a price which throws a lurid light on the profits of Bignon's and Laurent's. And then you become conscious of your evening dress and generally dissolute and out-of-place air, and hurry home through the bright sunlight to put out your sputtering candle and to creep shamefacedly to bed. III PARIS IN MOURNING [Illustration]