four o'clock
The markets were transformed ; it was an invasion from the East . Instead of the sharp , broken cries of the dealers on Saturday night , the shuffle of innumerable feet , the murmur of innumerable voices in a familiar tongue , there was a silence broken only by strange guttural sounds dropping into a sing-song cadence , the language of the East . Chinamen stood on guard at every stall , slant-eyed and yellow , clothed in the cheap slops of Sydney , their impassive features carved in fantastic ugliness , surveying the scene with inscrutable eyes that had opened first on rice-fields , sampans , junks , pagodas , and the barbaric trappings of the silken East . At four o'clock the sales began , and the early buyers arrived with the morose air of men who have been robbed of their sleep . There were small dealers , Dagoes from the fruit shops , greengrocers from the suburbs , with a chaff-bag slung across their arm , who buy by the dozen . They moved silently from stall to stall , pricing the vegetables , feeling the market , calculating what they would gain by waiting till the prices dropped , making the round of the markets before they filled the chaff-bags and disappeared into the darkness doubled beneath their loads . Chook and Pinkey reached the markets by the first workman 's tram in the morning .