The Introspective View of Our Great Provider of Good Cheer in Shanghai Hongkew Market: Everything from An Owl to an Omelette 'A French writer once referred to Les Halles, which blasts its myriad, incredible market sounds from the all kinds from Tientsin and Nanking are very plentiful for the Christmas season. There is vension heart of Paris, as lo centre of the! city. From the phrase, one immediately acquires a picture of pleasant petit bourgeois rotundity which comes out of its torpor long enough to haggle over prices. But it ig evident that the French writer, illustrious as he may have been, never had occasion to visit the Hongkew Market in Shanghai on the morning before Christmas, when centre of another city _was gnawing with a hunger bred of the possibilities of the Christmas feast, on the coming day. Multiply this sense of approaching festivities in alimentation by the number of nationals which everyone quite casually accepts as a part of everyday life in this polyglot city, and the comparisons of the French writer sink to inconsequence. from Nanking and wild boar from goodness knows where, the latter at 50 cents a Ib. There are also blinking eyes of owls with the aspect of a Chinese sage, awaiting the approach of a Chinese epicure who proposes to add the foreigners' teest to his already long list, Fish and Flesh Near at hand are the fish stalls where there are enough sprinkling] cans in evidence to decide an extant, fish that one hat another. Meat ce red beef in plenty and all other varieties in sufficient profusion to prove this a good season. Shanghai beef comes from Tanyang, the centre of the beef raising district near Nanking where cattle similar to those raised at Tsingtao are bred, There has been no decrease in The Tower of Babel The sounds of Hongkew Marke, on a cold day, so cold that the toes of a foreign' housewife give the first faint twinge of frost-bito, are ike a For Eastern Tower of Babel.
Out of this occasionally trail. the pellucid phrases of "Wanchee bay, no wauches buy" or merely "Supposing wanchee buy". Japanese stall-keepers sit in front of their charcoal ""habachis"" with smiling endurance of pre-Christmas cold, not modified any by the presence' of moisture on concrete floors. Chinese coopers looking as cold ible, do their bit to add to the Joquaciousness of the occasion. For-ign Jadies in fur coats mingle with the throng of Christmas shoppers; with other foreign ladies not in fur coats; with amahs and amah-sano, with Chinese children nurturing bits of fish suspended by strings from small fingers, purple-coated with the old; with coolie women intent in uncertain terms on making a way through the crowd; with a Japanese mother whose small wad of a baby on her back is fascinated by the yellow oranges while amah-san buys a bit of macaroni; with the cook, who would doubtless show hig vast' disapproval of the foreign Jady's approach and threatened in-ringement on the realm of squeeze, were he not for the moment engrossed in experimenting with Second quality meat for the price of third, taking a mental note of the price of first for future reference,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.