to feed, and tend, and comfort the poor, and heal them when they were sick; to keep art and learning from decay and death in a dark age; to build cathedrals, whose smallest buttress shall make your children’s children, Sir Charles Barry, blush; but they were the lazy monks—so let us cry havoc upon them. They were shavelings. They didn’t wash their feet, they aided and abetted Guy Fawkes, Ignatius Loyola, and the Cardinal Archbishop of ——. It is six o’clock on a glorious summer’s morning; the lazy monks fade away like the shadows of the night, and leave me in Covent Garden, and in high market. Every morning during the summer may be called market morning; but in the winter the special mornings are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. It is a strange sight then in the winter blackness to see the gas glimmering among huge piles of vegetables hoisted high on carts, and slowly moving like Birnam Woods coming to a Dunsinane of marketdom. When the snow is on the ground, or when the rain it raineth, the glare of lights and black shadows; the rushing figures of men with burdens; the great heaving masses of baskets that are tumbled from steep heights; the brilliantly-lighted shops in the grand arcade, where, winter or summer, glow the oranges and the hot-house fruits and flowers; all these make up a series of pictures, strange and sometimes almost terrible. There are yawning cellars, that vomit green stuff; there are tall potato-sacks, propped up in dark corners, that might contain corpses of murdered men; there are wondrous masses of light and shade, and dazzling effects of candlelight, enough to make old Schkalken’s ghost rise, crayon and sketch-book in hand, and the _eidolon_ of Paul Rembrandt to take lodgings in the Piazza, over against the market. [Illustration: COVENT GARDEN MARKET: THE WEST END.]