“Yes, indeed!  It’s no use talking to you,” someone shouts angrily.  “You should look before you speak!  Do you call this a pigeon?  It is an eagle, not a pigeon!”

A tall thin man, with a shaven upper lip and side whiskers, who looks like a sick and drunken footman, is selling a snow-white lap-dog.  The old lap-dog whines.

“She told me to sell the nasty thing,” says the footman, with a contemptuous snigger.  “She is bankrupt in her old age, has nothing to eat, and here now is selling her dogs and cats.  She cries, and kisses them on their filthy snouts.  And then she is so hard up that she sells them.  ’Pon my soul, it is a fact!  Buy it, gentlemen!  The money is wanted for coffee.”

But no one laughs.  A boy who is standing by screws up one eye and looks at him gravely with compassion.

The most interesting of all is the fish section.  Some dozen peasants are sitting in a row.  Before each of them is a pail, and in each pail there is a veritable little hell.  There, in the thick, greenish water are swarms of little carp, eels, small fry, water-snails, frogs, and newts.  Big water-beetles with broken legs scurry over the small surface, clambering on the carp, and jumping over the frogs.  The creatures have a strong hold on life.  The frogs climb on the beetles, the newts on the frogs.  The dark green tench, as more expensive fish, enjoy an exceptional position; they are kept in a special jar where they can’t swim, but still they are not so cramped. . . .

“The carp is a grand fish!  The carp’s the fish to keep, your honour, plague take him!  You can keep him for a year in a pail and he’ll live!  It’s a week since I caught these very fish.  I caught them, sir, in Pererva, and have come from there on foot.  The carp are two kopecks each, the eels are three, and the minnows are ten kopecks the dozen, plague take them!  Five kopecks’ worth of minnows, sir?  Won’t you take some worms?”

The seller thrusts his coarse rough fingers into the pail and pulls out of it a soft minnow, or a little carp, the size of a nail.  Fishing lines, hooks, and tackle are laid out near the pails, and pond-worms glow with a crimson light in the sun.

An old fancier in a fur cap, iron-rimmed spectacles, and goloshes that look like two dread-noughts, walks about by the waggons of birds and pails of fish.  He is, as they call him here, “a type.”  He hasn’t a farthing to bless himself with, but in spite of that he haggles, gets excited, and pesters purchasers with advice.  He has thoroughly examined all the hares, pigeons, and fish; examined them in every detail, fixed the kind, the age, and the price of each one of them a good hour ago.  He is as interested as a child in the goldfinches, the carp, and the minnows.  Talk to him, for instance, about thrushes, and the queer old fellow will tell you things you could not find in any book.  He will tell you them with enthusiasm, with passion, and will scold you too for your ignorance.  Of goldfinches and bullfinches he is ready to talk endlessly, opening his eyes wide and gesticulating violently with his hands.  He is only to be met here at the market in the cold weather; in the summer he is somewhere in the country, catching quails with a bird-call and angling for fish.