Once more in the open street, we pass up the crowded way into the market-place. A succession of wooden booths lines the road; and many of the houses have an overhanging floor resting on sturdy posts, which makes the footpath a rude colonnade. Here are piled rolls and bales of cloth, while the booths are crammed with a heterogeneous collection of articles of use and ornament diversified beyond description. A strange knot of gentlemen arrests our attention for a moment. They are clad in long gowns of black serge, and wear highly-polished boots reaching to the knee. Some have low-crowned hats, others a kind of semi-furred turban, but they all have jet black hair arranged in innumerable wiry ringlets, even to their beards. They are Polish Jews, and trade chiefly in pearls, garnets, turquoises, and a peculiar sort of ill-cut and discoloured rose-diamonds.
The market-place is scarcely passable for the crowd, and the wooden booths are so thickly studded over its whole space, as to allow of only a narrow footway between them. Here we see pipes and walking-sticks, enough not only for the present, but for generations unborn. Traversing the ground by slow degrees, we bend towards the Dresden gate, and come upon the country people, all handkerchief and waistcoat, who line the path with their little stores of toys, of eggs, butter, and little pats of goats’-milk cheese. Here is a farmer who has straggled all the way from Altenburg. He wears a queer round-crowned hat, with the rim turned up at the back; a jacket with large pockets outside, a sort of trunk hose, and black boots reaching to the knee. A little beyond him is a band of musicians with wind instruments, in the full costume of the Berg-leute, or mountaineers of Freiberg. With their jackets of black stuff, trimmed with velvet of the same hue, and edged at the bottom with little square lappets; their dark leggings and brimless hats, they look like a party of Grindoff the miller’s men in mourning.
As we approach the gates, the stalls and wares dwindle into insignificance, until they disappear altogether; and so we pass out of the city to the picturesque promenades which surround it. Afar off we hear the booming and occasional squeal of the real Fair. It is not without its drollery, and, if not equal to “Old Bartlemy” in noise and rude humour, has a word to say for itself on the point of decency. It is, however, but child’s play after all, and abounds with toys and games, from a half-penny whistle to an electric machine. Leipsic is now in its waking hours; but a short time hence her fitful three weeks’ fever will have passed away, and, weary with excitement, or as some say, plethoric with her gorge of profits, she will sink into a soulless lethargy. Her streets will become deserted, and echo to solitary footsteps; and whole rows of houses, with their lately teeming shops, will be black and tenantless, and barred and locked in grim security. The students will shine among the quiet citizens; the pigeons will flap their wings in idleness, and coo in melancholy tones as they totter about the streets; and the last itinerant player (on the flageolet, of course) will have sounded his farewell note to the slumbering city.