Next comes the vegetable department, where everything green looks crisp and fresh, with the diamond dew-drops still decorating the folded leaves, and everything coloured seems painted in Nature’s brightest hues. Dainty young carrots, and tiny turnips, looking like baby snowballs, are nestling among the sedate old cabbages, whose great white hearts seem enlarged almost to bursting; and the oyster and egg plant, unknown in European markets, are hiding among the common but useful rough-coated potato; and the delicate asparagus, with its purple tips and straight white stems, bound up in big bundles, the large and well-proportioned rallying round and covering up the crippled weaklings of their kind, and performing this manœuvre so artfully that the most Argus-eyed housekeeper is sometimes taken in by the false pretence. The scarlet runners and fine marrowfat peas seem bursting out of their skins with joy at being gathered at last; from the very moment when they first unfolded their pink and purple buds they have been forced to creep up and cling to those tormenting sticks, twisting and twining and working so hard, night and day, till they were tired of living, and would really have gone soon to seed, and once more hidden themselves in their native earth. Now they are at rest--they don’t know they are going to be boiled in an hour. Here and there we come upon a silly-looking turtle lying on its back, its flabby flippers wriggling feebly as though trying to turn over and crawl back to its native element. Next we arrive at the fish and poultry division. There are golden pats of butter dressed in white frills and ornamented with violets, which, it is said, impart to it a delicious fragrance and flavour; and eggs from all the feathery tribe, white and brown, speckled and light blue, are eternally rolling over, trying to crack one another’s shells with all their might. Here plump young chickens, who were unfortunate enough to be born in the early spring, are strung up beside their tough old grandfathers; and prairie hens, and other wild birds from desolate regions, hang with stretched necks and drooping wings above the slabs of white marble, where fish from all waters are spread in tempting array. The shining red mullet, and the fat ugly sheep’s-head, and even the humble red horse, lie side by side with the aristocratic salmon; and the poor little baby porker, slaughtered in its infancy, before it had even had time to wear a ring through its nose or grout in the gutter, is lying close by, stiff and stark, with a lemon in its mouth.