Everyone in Manchester knows the Flat Iron market, and a very large number do their fancy shopping there by night. The market is the hunting-park of the bargain hunters who want, or think they want, or imagine that they may some day want ╤ a rusty old cavalry sword, or a pair of skates, or a bunch of curtain rings, or a pair of half-wellington boots, or a toy engine, or a bank of cord, green or red, or a little round looking-glass, or a pair of cork soles, or a bunch of old keys, or an old rusty lock, or a pink ice-cream, or a handful of hot chestnuts, or a small but cheerfully coloured copy of ╥The Angelus╙, or a fuzzy toy animal, or a bottle of medicine that╒ll cure anything that can be found in a medical dictionary, or a ╥gigantic penny packet╙ of notepaper, or a roll of oil-cloth, or a pair of stays ╤ for a penny. The stay merchant said, ╥The ribs is right,╙ and a little man with a red nose bought a pair.
You can buy thousands of different things. You can even buy a policeman╒s helmet. Two heroes got one each, and after buttoning their jackets up to the chin ran through the market like a brace of Merry Andrews, startling timorous merchants by suddenly popping their helmeted heads round the corners of the stall.
I think I should like to do all my marketing in the Flat Iron, for it is a real market, a place where you can swagger aloof if it suits your mind, or you can rub shoulders with the best of company, stopping occasionally to pass old-fashioned chaff. And when you stop to buy you plunge immediately into the old primeval realities of commerce. Here you do not stand sourly while a pale-faced short-tempered shopman whirls your purchase into a dexterously twisted screw of pale brown paper and sends your money trundling in a globe along naked wires. No; here before you make a purchase you can slap and thump a thing, and abuse and sneer at it, and the man behind the stall will slap and thump it too, and praise it; and at last you╒ll get the price down to near to what he will take and you will give. Then perhaps some old split-the-differ of the market rolls up and makes a bargain between you.
Oh, you can enjoy buying in the Flat Iron Market. And you can buy almost anything that heart could wish, but never a flat iron could I see. This surprised me, for you can get petticoats in Petticoat Lane. In my ignorance I did not know, till I was told, that this market takes its name from its shape. The larger priced things, like clothes and oilcloth, are sold by Dutch auction, the auctioneer striding up and down the platform of his stall, by turns wheedling the people with a honeyed tongue, or with winks and sideway glances setting the women giggling and the men roaring, or browbeating them with his fiercer banter until he has them at his mercy. ╥Some of ye don╒t come to buy, s╒elp me,╙ he cries; ╥ye come to pinch.╙
If you go to the market for pleasure only, when tired of hearing others bargain and chaff among the flare lamps you can cross the road to where the merry-go-rounds are whirling. Also sometimes there is a boxing booth, and there are several kinds of throwing games, one where you hurl balls at strangely whiskered dolls, which fall over backwards like life itself if you hit them fair. Then there is ╥The Paralizer,╙ in a tent with netted sides and top, and goal-posts at the far end, with a goalkeeper in a blue shirt. Here you pay an entrance fee, and if you are clever you kick a goal and receive a cash reward, thereby, no doubt, imperilling your pure amateur status for ever. But the goalkeeper is strong and nimble and stops more balls than he lets go by him. A young man might easily stand in front of this goalkeeper and kick away all his spare change and borrow from his friends till he broke them, and when they left him he might, if allowed to kick on credit, stand there till he kicked away his inheritance, and until the copper-bag of the lady with the red motor-cap, who takes the money, became stuffed with I O U╒s.
It is strange that show people, who are in their dress so conservative, should have taken so heavily to the red motor-cap. I think I saw the first to wear it. She drove twelve spotted horses yoked to the high band waggon of a road circus. She was perked up above the crowd like a pinnacle on a cathedral, and she had cotton wool in her ears. Her hands were light, but she had wrists of iron, and she tooled her long team down the hilly Market-street of Sligo town at a pace that made everything rattle, but she never made a mistake. I left ╥The Paralizer╙ and looked at the passengers on the merry-go-round, which had no dappled wooden horses, but cars in the shape of gondolas that not only went round and round but up and down with a sort of writhing motion. I did not mount the cars. I turned away from the Flat Iron and the revolving music and the smoking oil lamps.
