The daily supply of fish to Billingsgate amounts, on an average, to 500 tons. It is difficult to realise how prodigious a quantity is this; but the imagination is assisted by reflecting that one ton of fish is equal in weight to twenty-eight sheep, so that the day's supply of 500 tons is equivalent to a woolly herd of not less than 14,000. London in this manner draws to itself the great bulk of the fish that are caught around our coasts; but, it must be understood, Billingsgate does not exist for the advantage of metropolitan consumers alone. Most of the large provincial towns draw upon the great fish-market of the Thames, and almost as soon as the day's supply is landed and sold much of it is speeding off in fast trains to the great centres of industry, where it is again distributed, it may be, to less important communities, and to small hamlets nestling amid ancestral trees. At Billingsgate you may make your purchases by the ton or the single fish. There are fish-salesmen of varying degrees, some selling, in large quantities, the fish as it is landed from the boats, others selling over again to shopkeepers and to costermongers what they have only themselves purchased some half-an-hour before. The more respected and prosperous dealers, coming early, with long purses, have the pick of the market, and are speeding off home again before the bell of St. Paul's has tolled the hour of nine. Then the costermongers come crowding in, shouting, pushing, swearing, exchanging jokes, impugning the freshness of the fish, boiling into anger at the prices asked from them, and filling the market-hall with an amazing clatter of Cockney tongues. The attendance of the London coster is regulated by the supply of fish. Sometimes only a few scores of these itinerant dealers are to be encountered in Old Thames Street; sometimes they are present by hundreds and thousands. It has never yet been discovered how the intelligence of a profuse and cheap fish supply is diffused over London; but it invariably occurs that when the market is overstocked every costermonger in town has knowledge of the fact long before noon. It is much as if the street-dealers were connected with Billingsgate by electric wires. "Barrows" come racing by dozens over London Bridge; Covent Garden Market is suddenly deserted by the most numerous class of its customers; from Shadwell, from Kentish Town, from more remote Hammersmith, the costermonger rushes off to Billingsgate as if for bare life, and by mid-day cheap fish is being cried all through the London streets and far off at the doors of "Villadom" in the suburbs.