with bare feet, and thrust their nets along the sandy bottom, and each time they came out they picked out the shrimps from the net and threw them into a pail, and only the very strongest managed to hop back on to the sand again; nearly all of them went to market. But while we have been looking at these things the market has been getting emptier; and now there are only a few young lads left, who have little barrows and carts, and are called costers, and they are walking round the stalls and picking out what they will buy after the fishmongers have got all the best of the fish. It is time to go away, and soon Billingsgate will be nearly desolate. It is not a nice place, and if there were not some policemen near I should not like to have brought you here. We cannot go to Covent Garden Market where the flowers are this morning, for it is nearly seven o'clock, and too late, as we ought to be there very early; but we can go to the meat market, which is not at all a pretty sight, and a long way off. But it is very wonderful. Here there is selling going on quite late, until about ten o'clock, perhaps, and even to the middle of the day the place is still busy. It is a huge place with a great glass roof, and there are rows of stalls with narrow passages like streets between them, and everywhere are great masses of raw meat. It is a city of meat; you walk down lanes of meat--meat everywhere. All the butchers in London come here to choose what they will buy, and from midnight onward all is bustle and business. Some of the meat comes to the market in vans, but the greater part comes by train. Right under the market there is a place scooped out in the earth like a cellar, and the railway lines run in under there, and then from the vans standing on the lines it is easy to lift the meat up into the market. Outside there is a great square, and in the early morning this square is filled with carts of every kind waiting to carry away the meat which the butchers buy. But all the meat does not come from England. A great deal of it comes from over the sea, from Australia and New Zealand, for England herself would never have enough to feed all her people. Close to the market at Smithfield there is another, where nothing but poultry is sold. Rows and rows of dead chickens go every day to fill all the shops--good chickens and bad chickens, the chickens that obeyed their mothers and the chickens that didn't; they come here just the same to supply the wants of the people of London.