sharply; by this time he was far away.

The cab, by trotting steadily along the same road, soon withdrew them
from the West End, and plunged them into London. It appeared that this
was a great manufacturing place, where the people were engaged in
making things, as though the West End, with its electric lamps, its vast
plate-glass windows all shining yellow, its carefully-finished houses,
and tiny live figures trotting on the pavement, or bowled along on
wheels in the road, was the finished work. It appeared to her a very
small bit of work for such an enormous factory to have made. For some
reason it appeared to her as a small golden tassel on the edge of a vast
black cloak.

Observing that they passed no other hansom cab, but only vans and
waggons, and that not one of the thousand men and women she saw was
either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs. Ambrose understood that after all
it is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of
innumerable poor people. Startled by this discovery and seeing herself
pacing a circle all the days of her life round Picadilly Circus she was
greatly relieved to pass a building put up by the London County Council
for Night Schools.

"Lord, how gloomy it is!" her husband groaned. "Poor creatures!"

What with the misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind
was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.

At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed
like an egg-shell. The wide Embankment which had had room for
cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane steaming
with smells of malt and oil and blocked by waggons. While her husband
read the placards pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which
certain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to find
information. From a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons with
sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither help
nor attention. It seemed a miracle when an old man approached, guessed
their condition, and proposed to row them out to their ship in the
little boat which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of steps.
With some hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their places,
and were soon waving up and down upon the water, London having shrunk
to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square buildings and
oblong buildings placed in rows like a child's avenue of bricks.

The river, which had a certain amount of tr