For the first time, I took a close look at the checkers and realized that unlike the women hawking cigarettes and gardenias in 40's movies, who looked like Hollywood starlets, the coat-check crew all appeared to have arrived the night before from very far away.

Older women hawked their wares in loud Cantonese.

He strolled through a building called Progressland, where a man hawked miracle vacuum cleaners, a woman hawked T-shirts for every occasion, and local Democrats and Republicans hawked ideology.

The woman suddenly hawked violently and spat on the ground at his feet.

Dublin past and future meet on Moore Street: women have hawked fruit and flowers there for generations, and an indoor market now caters to Asian and African immigrants with fried plantains and enormous plates of Chinese noodles.

Workmen were setting up a bandstand in front of the imposing 16th-century town hall and women in straw hats hawked melons from wooden stands.

He went through the marketplace, past booths where dark-eyed girls sold flowers and stalls where old women hawked brightly painted pottery.

The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and more often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts of milk he daily required.

One man was selling pink candyfloss; another was frying slivers of meat in an enormous pan, making enchiladas; a woman was hawking toy iguanas.