The trading here is over in an hour, or two hours at the longest when the shipments are heavy; and then the wholesalers are wheeling their wagons into place to cart away their purchases to their own stores and warehouses. From these the retailers--the men who carry on their businesses in stalls in the public market-houses and those that have their own little shops on the street corners--make their selections. If you are a city man, you may now know that your grocer at the corner is up betimes, when the sun is just showing himself on lazy September mornings. He has been poking his way with his own horse and wagon down to the wholesalers, buying his day's stock and getting it placed just before the earliest of the housewives begins her marketing. You demand a concrete example of a city freight-house; and here it is--the historic St. John's Park of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad in New York. Up over the lines of the Central, back for hundreds of weary miles, you may hear the railroaders speak of "the Park," you may see long strings of cars, bearing merchandise tagged through to it. At Sixtieth Street, where the big freights of the New York Central come to a final halt, you see the cars sent south in long strings, each hauled by a red dummy locomotive and preceded by a boy astride a horse and holding a red flag, a familiar sight to all New Yorkers who reside upon the far west side of the town. St. John's Park handles a very large percentage of all the perishable food that comes into New York each day. It is the dingy freight-house that fills the double block between Hudson and Varick and Beach and Laight Streets; and when you ask, "Where is the park?" they will tell you that there was a day when the entire site of this freight-house--possibly the most congested in the world--was a gentle tree-filled square that faced old St. John's Church. There is never a trace of the park nowadays. The old church now faces a narrow street wherein truckmen shove and elbow and disappear in the gates of the freight station. On the Hudson Street side of the structure six pairs of railroad tracks curve into it; and far above on the cornice of the structure one can see the benign figure of the old Commodore--a heroic bronze surrounded by replicas of the trains and the steamships that he loved so well. The building of the large freight station on the site of St. John's Park away back in 1868 was a real accomplishment to the first of the house of Vanderbilt. Think of it: that freight-house could hold 100 cars. There was nothing else in all the broad land quite like that! Into St. John's Park at dawn come trainloads of produce. Even before the doors of the freight-house have opened, at six, a string of "coolers" has stopped in Hudson Street and the commission men are carting out the poultry. As soon as the station gets down to real business, butter and eggs and cheese pour in through it in carload lots.