A prowling gendarme in official blue and red came up to the stall and sniffed at the company.  He pounced on me.

“Your letters of identification?” he asked.

I handed him a recommendation I had from the Governor of Archangel.  He returned it with such deference that all the other customers stared.  Archangel was three thousand miles away.  Russian governors have long arms.

It is unpleasant, however, to be scrutinised and thought suspicious.  I finished my tea and then returned to the crowd.  There was yet more of the fair to see—­the stalls of Caucasian wares, the silks, the guns, the knives, Armenian and Persian carpets, Turkish slippers, sandals, yards of brown pottery, where at each turn one sees huge pitchers and water-jugs and jars that might have held the forty thieves.  At one booth harness is sold and high Turkish saddles, at another pannier baskets for mules.  A flood of colour on the pavement of a covered way—­a great disarray of little shrivelled lemons, with stalks in many cases, for they have been gathered hard by.  In the centre of the market-place are all the meat and fish shops, and there one may see huge sturgeon and salmon brought from the fisheries of the Caspian.  Garish notices inform in five languages that fresh caviare is received each day.  Round about the butchers are sodden wooden stalls, labelled

  SNOW MERCHANTS,

and there, wrapped in old rags, is much grey muddy snow melting and freezing itself.  It has been brought on rickety lorries down the rutty tracks of the mountains, down, down into the lowland of Batum, where even October suns are hot.

Near the snow stalls behold veiled Turkish women just showing their noses out of bright rags, and tending the baking of chestnuts and maize cobs, sausages, pies, fish, and chickens.  Here for eightpence one may buy a hot roast chicken in half a sheet of exercise-paper.  The purchasers of hot chicken are many, and they take them away to open tables, where stand huge bottles of red wine and tubs of tomato-sauce.  The fowl is pulled to bits limb by limb, and the customer dips, before each bite, his bone in the common sauce-bowl.

Those who are poorer buy hot maize cobs and cabbage pies; those who feel hot already themselves are fain to go to the ice and lemonade stall, and spend odd farthings there.  I bought myself matsoni, Metchnikof’s sour milk and sugar, at a halfpenny a mug.

The market square is vast.  It is wonderful the number of scenes enacting themselves at the same time.  All the morning in another quarter men were trying on old hats and overcoats, and having the most amazing haggling over articles which are sold in London streets for a pot of ferns or a china butter-dish.  In another part popular pictures are spread out, oleographs showing the Garden of Eden, or the terror of the Flood, or the Last Judgment, and such like; in another is a wilderness of home-made bamboo furniture, a speciality of Batum.  And for all no lack of customers.