The Melbourne Market is a wonder and a delight at any time, but at Christmas it is glorious. It must be remembered that it is the time of fruit and flowers. There are piles of cherries, early apricots and peaches, bananas, and pineapples and tomatoes, glowing masses of colours; and carnations, and roses, and irises, and the clear blue of cornflowers. There are confectionery stalls heaped high with every sort of cake and pastry. The keeper of one stall, where most delicious gingerbread was sold, told me that she made everything herself and had been at the market three days a week for thirty years. There are stalls of china, hats, dress materials; poultry and fish, dairy produce, pork, bacon, books. There are Chinese gardeners smiling urbanely over their stacks of vegetables; big sun-browned fruit farmers; busy wives with butter and eggs (in large white aprons); and butchers, with their blue coats, selling meat—the best at only 2d. and 2½d. a pound, here in the market—and making a most prodigious noise over it, too. I remember once fancying some brains for breakfast, fried in an outer wrapping of bacon—I knew exactly what they would look and taste like—and the laughter that greeted me when I inquired of the butchers if they had “any brains,” and how I laughed, too. When once one is up and out in the fresh air it does not take much to make one laugh at five on a summer’s morning. There is one dairy-stall at the market that is presided over by five sisters. It is all exquisitely clean, and the butter and eggs, and bacon and sausages, and jars of yellow honey are the very best procurable; while the sisters—as fresh as paint—look delightfully pretty in their large white aprons and over-sleeves. If I was a Victorian up-country farmer, it is to that stall I should go if I wanted a wife; not to “Holt’s,” which is quite close by.