As make-up man, of course, so to “dress” the paper that the “markets,” Oporto, Trinidad, Porto Rico, Demerara, Havana, would be together; that “Nova Scotia Notes”—­“Weather conditions for curing have been more favourable since October set in”—­would follow “Halifax Fish Market”—­“Last week’s arrivals were:  Oct. 13, schr. Hattie Loring, 960 quintals,” etc.—­that “Pacific Coast Notes”—­“The tug Tatoosh will perform the service for the Seattle salmon packers of towing a vessel from Seattle to this port via the Panama Canal”—­would follow “Canned Salmon”; that shellfish matter would be in one place; reports of saltfish where such should be; that the weekly tale of the canned fish trade politically embraced the canned fish advertising; and so on and so on.

Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish reporter goes.  There the sight-seeing cars never find their way; the hurried commuter has not his path, nor knows of these things at all; and there that racy character who, voicing a multitude, declares that he would rather be a lamp post on Broadway than Mayor of St. Louis, goes not for to see.  Up lower Greenwich Street the fish reporter goes, along an eerie, dark, and narrow way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the “L” overhead.  He threads his way amid seemingly chaotic, architectural piles of boxes, of barrels, crates, casks, kegs, and bulging bags; roundabout many great fetlocked draught horses, frequently standing or plunging upon the sidewalk, and attached to many huge trucks and wagons; and much of the time in the street he is compelled to go, finding the side walks too congested with the traffic of commerce to admit of his passing there.

You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese.  Then you would delight in Greenwich Street.  You could feast your highly creditable appetite for these excellent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs of “wholesale dealers and commission merchants” in them.  The letter press, as you might say, of the fish reporter’s walk is a noble paean to the earth’s glorious yield for the joyous sustenance of man.  For these princely merchants’ signs sing of opulent stores of olive oil, of sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices, sugar, Spanish, Bermuda, and Havana onions, “fine” apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried fruits and raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of “fish products.”  Lo! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich Street is to-day’s translation of the Garden of Eden.

Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the importation of caviar for barter here.  Caviar from over-seas now comes, when it comes at all, mainly by the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for most of us, by the war.  The fish reporter is told, however, if it be summer, that there cannot be much doing in the way of caviar until fall, “when the spoonbill start coming in.”  And on he goes to a great saltfish house, where many men in salt-stained garments