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"A quarter to one," said Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, looking at his watch, as he went into the room. "And in this rain; and such an interesting distance. I've no clock.. . and there are nothing but market-gardens round me... so that you fall behind the times.
Yet the usual signs of approach to an enormous city were awanting dwarfed trees, market-gardens, cockney arbours, in which citizens smoke their pipes in the evening, and imagine themselves in Arcadia, rows of small houses, and a murky canopy of smoke. We had steamed down Tenth Avenue for two or three miles, when we came to a standstill where several streets met.
They followed those fine boulevards, formerly in the suburbs, where there were giant elms, planted in the time of Louis XIV, ditches full of grass, ruined palisades, showing through their opening market-gardens where melons glistened in the rays of the setting sun. Both were silent; the father lost in reveries, Amedee absorbed in the confused dreams of a child.
Barges filled with Brenta water or Mirano wine take up their station at the neighbouring steps, and then ensues a mighty splashing and hurrying to and fro of men with tubs upon their heads. The brawny fellows in the wine-barge are red from brows to breast with drippings of the vat. And now there is a bustle in the quarter. A barca has arrived from S. Erasmo, the island of the market-gardens.
Adjoining such large holdings are small freeholds farmed by their peasant owners dairy farms of a few acres, market-gardens of one or two, and so on. Metayage, or the system of half-profits, is rarely found in the Cantal.
Suburbs were sprouting, almost daily, from the mould of the market-gardens in the purlieus. Corporations were contending for the possession of the natural highway approaches to each growing city.
The train was just starting; he threw himself into a carriage he would have locked himself in if he could; and felt an inexpressible relief when he found himself rushing past houses and market-gardens, whirled onward, whether he would or not, in the right path homeward. But was it the right path? for again the temptation flitted past him.
Gardeners' Lane leads through a closely built up settlement to the Whirlpool, and here the last remnant of the market-gardens is to be found. In the High Street, which is fast altering its character, there are one or two old houses, but the greater number are modern. The Public Library, which is situate in Disraeli Road, leading off the High Street, was first established in 1887.
Evening found them at rest under the village tree of a mud-walled, mud-roofed hamlet, talking to the headman as the cattle came in from the grazing-grounds and the women prepared the day's last meal. They had passed beyond the belt of market-gardens round hungry Umballa, and were among the mile-wide green of the staple crops.
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