The market square is vast. It is wonderful the number of scenes
enacting themselves at the same time. All the morning in another
quarter men were trying on old hats and overcoats, and having the most
amazing haggling over articles which are sold in London streets for a
pot of ferns or a china butter-dish. In another part popular pictures
are spread out, oleographs showing the Garden of Eden, or the terror
of the Flood, or the Last Judgment, and such like; in another is a
wilderness of home-made bamboo furniture, a speciality of Batum. And
for all no lack of customers.
What a place of mystery is a Russian Fair, be it in the capital or at
the outposts of the Empire! There is nothing that may not be found
there. One never knows what extraordinary or wonderful thing one may
light upon there. Among old rusty fire-irons one finds an ancient
sword offered as a poker; among the litter of holy and secular
secondhand books, hand-painted missals of the earliest Russian times.
Nothing is ever thrown away; even rusty nails find their way to the
_bazar_. The miscellanies of a stall might upon occasion be what is
left behind after a house removal. On one table at Batum I observed
two moth-eaten rusty fezes, a battered but unopened tin of herrings in
tomato-sauce, another tin half-emptied, a guitar with one string, a
good hammer, a door-mat worn to holes, the clearing of a book-case, an
old saucepan, an old kerosene stove, a broken coffee-grinder, and a
rusty spring mattress.
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