l there is nothing we like better
on a warm morning than a good outing on the Vinolia tram that we pick up
in Shaftesbury Avenue. There is a street running from Shaftesbury Avenue
into Oxford Street, which was once the village of St. Giles, one of the
dozens of hamlets swallowed up by the great maw of London, and it still
looks like a hamlet, although it has been absorbed for many years. We
constantly happen on these absorbed villages, from which, not a century
ago, people drove up to town in their coaches.

If you wish to see another phase of life, go out on a Saturday evening,
from nine o'clock on to eleven, starting on a Beecham's Pill 'bus, and
keep to the poorer districts, alighting occasionally to stand with the
crowd in the narrower thoroughfares.

It is a market night, and the streets will be a moving mass of men and
women buying at the hucksters' stalls. Everything that can be sold at
a stall is there: fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, crockery, tin-ware,
children's clothing, cheap toys, boots, shoes, and sun-bonnets, all in
reckless confusion. The vendors cry their wares in stentorian tones,
vying with one another to produce excitement and induce patronage, while
gas-jets are streaming into the air from the roofs and flaring from the
sides of the stalls; children crying, children dancing to the strains of
an accordion, children quarrelling, children scrambling for the refuse
fruit. In the midst of this spectacle, this din and uproar, the women
are chaffering and bargaining quite calmly, watching the scales to see
that they get their full pennyworth or sixpennyworth of this or that. To
the student of faces, of manners, of voices, of gestures; to the person
who sees unwritten and unwritable stories in all these groups of men,
women, and children, the scene reveals many things: some comedies, many
tragedies, a few plain narratives (thank God!) and now and then--only
now and then--a romance. As to the dark alleys and tenements on the
fringe of this glare and brilliant confusion, this Babel of sound and
ant-bed of moving life, one can only surmise and pity and shudder;
close one's eyes and ears to it a little, or one could never sleep for
thinking of it, yet not too tightly lest one sleep too soundly, and
forget altogether the seamy side of things. One can hardly believe that
there is a seamy side when one descends from his travelling observatory
a little later, and stands on Westminster Bridge, or walks along the
Th