There is a new market house now on the site of the old one, a pretentious affair of brick with concrete floors and screened window openings and provision for steam heat in the winter; but then, and for many years before that, the market was a decrepit shed-like thing, closed in the middle and open at the ends, with a shingled roof that sagged in on itself and had hollows in it like the sunken jaws of a toothless old hag; and there were cracks in the side walls that you could throw a dog through, almost. In the middle, under half-way shelter, were the stalls of the butchers, which were handed down from father to son so that one stall would remain in a family for generations; and here one bought the beef steaks of the period--long bib-shaped segments of pale red meat, cut miraculously long and marvelously thin, almost like apron patterns. This thinness facilitated the beating process--the cooks would pound them with tools devised for that purpose--and then they were fried through and through and drenched with a thick flour gravy. Such was the accustomed way of treating a beef steak. Persons with good teeth could eat them so, and for the others the brown flour gravy provided a sustenance. But the spring chickens were marvels for plumpness and freshness and cheapness; and in the early spring the smoked hog jowls hung in rows, fairly begging people to carry them off and boil them with salad greens; and in the fall when the hog killing season was at hand, the country sausage and the chines and backbones and spare ribs made racks of richness upon the worn marble slabs. Up at the far end of the square beyond the shed eaves stood the public scales, and around it hay growers and cord wood choppers and Old Man Brimm, the official charcoal burner of the county, waited for trade alongside their highpiled wagons. Next to them was the appointed place of the fish hucksters, which was an odorous place, where channel cats and river perch and lake crappies were piled on the benches, some still alive and feebly flapping. The darkies were sure to be thickest here. There was an unsung but none the less authentic affinity existing between a fresh-caught catfish and an old negro man.