On either side of the street the farmers' wagons stood backed up against
the sidewalk, each making a cheap shop, by which stood the sturdy owners
under the trees, laughing and chaffering with their customers. We
ourselves turned aside and walked down the centre of the street under
the sheds. On either side at the entry of the market odd business was
being plied, the traders being mostly colored women with bright chintz
dresses and richly-colored bandanna handkerchiefs coiled turban-like
above their dark faces. There were rows of roses in red pots, and
venders of marsh calamus, and "Hot corn, sah, smokin' hot," and
"Pepperpot, bery nice," and sellers of horse-radish and
snapping-turtles, and of doughnuts dear to grammar-school lads. Within
the market was a crowd of gentlefolks, followed by their black servants
with baskets--the elderly men in white or gray stockings, with
knee-buckles, the younger in very tight nankeen breeches and pumps,
frilled shirts and ample cravats and long blue swallow-tailed coats with
brass buttons. Ladies whose grandchildren go no more to market were
there in gowns with strangely short waists and broad gypsy-bonnets, with
the flaps tied down by wide ribbons over the ears. It was a busy and
good-humored throng.
"Ah," said Schmidt, "what color!" and he stood quite wrapped in the joy
it gave him looking at the piles of fruit, where the level morning
sunlight, broken by the moving crowd, fell on great heaps of dark-green
watermelons and rough cantaloupes, and warmed the wealth of peaches
piled on trays backed by red rows of what were then called love-apples,
and are now known as tomatoes; while below the royal yellow of vast
overgrown pumpkins seemed to have set the long summer sunshine in their
golden tints.
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