Compared, then, with the ham and beef shop, the fish-monger’s, and the inevitable oil shop, where, in such neighbourhoods as these, you buy everything, this greengrocer’s was a welcome oasis in a desert of unsavoury smells and gloomy surroundings. The colours it displayed, the brilliant flame of that pyramid of oranges, those rosy cheeks of the apples, that glaring yellow cluster of bananas hanging from a hook in the ceiling, and the soft green background of cabbages, cauliflowers and every other green vegetable which chanced to be in season, with one last touch of all, some beetroot, cut and bleeding, colour that an emperor might wear, combined to make that little greengrocer’s shop in Fetter Lane the one saving clause in an otherwise dreary scheme. It cheered you as you passed it by. You felt thankful for it. Those oranges looked clean and wholesome. They shone in the light of that double gas jet. They had every reason to shine. Mrs. Meakin rubbed them with her apron every morning when she built up that perilous pyramid. She rubbed the apples, too, until their faces glowed, glowed like children ready to start for school. When you looked at them you thought of the country, the orchards where they had been gathered, and Fetter Lane, with all its hawkers’ cries and screaming children, vanished from your senses. You do not get that sort of an impression when you look in the window of a ham and beef shop. A plate of sliced ham, on which two or three flies crawl lazily, a pan of sausages, sizzling in their own fat, bear no relation to anything higher than the unfastidious appetite of a hungry man. That sort of shop, you pass by quickly; but, even if you had not wished to buy anything, you might have hesitated, then stopped before Mrs. Meakin’s little greengrocer’s stall in Fetter Lane. Mrs. Meakin was very fat. She had a face like an apple--not an apple just picked, but one that has been lying on the straw in a loft through the winter, well-preserved, losing none of its flavour, but the skin of which is wrinkled and shrivelled with age. On a wooden chair without any back to it, she sat in the shop all day long, inhaling that healthy, cleanly smell of good mother earth which clung about the sacks of potatoes. Here it was she waited for the advent of customers. Whenever they appeared at the door, she paused for a moment, judging from their attitude the likelihood of their custom, then, slapping both hands on her knees, she would rise slowly to her feet.