This is the midnight market. Under the very noses of the steamships that have brought this garden-truck up from the south, it is being auctioned off to a hundred or so keen-nosed, keener-witted wholesalers. They wander about under long awning roofs erected in the centre of the street, through the gaunt open shadowy spaces of the piers, poking into the tops of barrels, pinching, tasting, critically examining all the while that they are dickering in prices. When the day is fully born and downtown alive once again, there will be other wholesale markets, more sedate-looking affairs in rooms that have been built for the purpose by the traffic departments of the railroads. In these rooms, with the seats arranged in tiers and each seat having a broad writing arm like a college classroom, fruit and vegetables will be sold in carload lots. There will be records of prices--quotations. The thing will approach the dignity of those bourses where cotton and coffee and metals and securities are sold. But the midnight market scorns such formalities, such dignities. It clings to its own hubbub--its own unsystematic way of accomplishing a great business. It prefers to sell as the stuff is unloaded; that has been its method for three-quarters of a century and any method that has stood 75 years is at least entitled to a measure of consideration. But not all its offerings have come by these big coasting steamships, whose outlines show vague at their piers in the darkness of the night. For, grinding against the piles of these same wharves, as the unseen tide changes, are groups of car-floats that have been ferried from the great railroad terminals across the river. Each car-float has two trackfuls of refrigerator cars--12 or 14 or 16 in all--lined against a long roofed platform running just above keel. When the pert and busy little tugs have pushed and pulled and bunted the floats all into position, the platforms are quickly connected by gangways, canvas-covered against the stress of hard weather. A great freight-house, almost Venetian in type, floats upon the surface of the silent river and becomes part and parcel of the pier itself. After that it is quick work to open each of the cars--to wheel out sample barrels of potatoes, of cabbage, of celery, of lettuce, of cauliflower--all the growing things of country farms that go to feed the hungry city.