but even on the footways. All along the latter were piles of small
baskets, an endless arrival of cases and hampers, and sacks of mussels,
from which streamlets of water trickled. The auctioneers' assistants,
all looking very busy, sprang over the heaps, tore away the straw at
the tops of the baskets, emptied the latter, and tossed them aside.
They then speedily transferred their contents in lots to huge wickerwork
trays, arranging them with a turn of the hand so that they might show
to the best advantage. And when the large tray-like baskets were all
set out, Florent could almost fancy that a whole shoal of fish had got
stranded there, still quivering with life, and gleaming with rosy nacre,
scarlet coral, and milky pearl, all the soft, pale, sheeny hues of the
ocean.

The deep-lying forests of seaweed, in which the mysterious life of the
ocean slumbers, seemed at one haul of the nets to have yielded up all
they contained. There were cod, keeling, whiting, flounders, plaice,
dabs, and other sorts of common fish of a dingy grey with whitish
splotches; there were conger-eels, huge serpent-like creatures, with
small black eyes and muddy, bluish skins, so slimy that they still
seemed to be gliding along, yet alive. There were broad flat skate
with pale undersides edged with a soft red, and superb backs bumpy with
vertebrae, and marbled down to the tautly stretched ribs of their
fins with splotches of cinnabar, intersected by streaks of the tint of
Florentine bronze--a dark medley of colour suggestive of the hues of a
toad or some poisonous flower. Then, too, there were hideous dog-fish,
with round heads, widely-gaping mouths like those of Chinese idols, and
short fins like bats' wings; fit monsters to keep yelping guard over the
treasures of the ocean grottoes. And next came the finer fish, displayed
singly on the osier trays; salmon that gleamed like chased silver, every
scale seemingly outlined by a graving-tool on a polished metal surface;