I like to watch the crowds of people coming and going, buying and selling, dickering and chaffering. A market, particularly an old-fashioned market, such as one may see almost anywhere in Europe, in which the people from the town and the people from the country, producer and consumer, meet and bargain with each other, seems a much more wholesome and human place than, for example, a factory. Besides that, any one who goes abroad to see people rather than to see things will, I believe, find the markets of Europe more interesting and more instructive than the museums. During my journey across Europe I visited the markets in nearly every large city in which I stopped. I saw something of the curious Sunday markets of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, London, with their long lines of shouting hucksters and their crowds of hungry shoppers, and the Jewish market in the Ghetto of Cracow, Poland, where pale-faced rabbis were slaughtering, according to the strict ritual of the Jewish law, droves of squawking geese. Among others, I visited the Monday market in Catania, which differs from the markets I had seen elsewhere in the multitudes of articles of household manufacture offered for sale, and in the general holiday character of the proceedings. It was like a country fair in one of our Southern cities, only cruder and quainter. For example, instead of the familiar shooting gallery, with painted targets, one enterprising man had set up a dozen painted sticks on a rough box, and offered to the public, for something less than a cent, the opportunity to shoot at them with an ancient cross-bow, such as I did not imagine existed outside of museums. Then there were all sorts of curious and primitive games of chance. Among other devices for entertaining and mystifying the people I noticed a young woman seated in a chair, blindfolded. A crowd surrounded her while she named various objects belonging to the crowd, which her companion, a man, held in his hands. At the same time she told the colour of the hair and eyes, and reeled off a prophecy in regard to the future of the different persons to whom the article belonged. More interesting still were the public story-tellers, who seemed to take the place, to a certain extent, of the daily newspaper among the masses of the people, so many of whom can neither read nor write. The story-tellers stood upon little platforms, which they carried about with them like portable pulpits, in order that they might be plainly visible to the crowd. Each carried a large banner on which were painted a series of pictures representing the scenes in the stories which they told.