houses with windows boarded up, fried-fish shops,
low public-houses, houses without doors. There were more men here than
women, and those men were wheeling barrows full of rags and bottles, or
not even full of rags and bottles; or they were standing by the
public-houses gossiping or quarrelling in groups of three or four; or
very slowly walking in the gutters, or on the pavements, as though trying
to remember if they were alive. Then suddenly some young man with gaunt
violence in his face would pass, pushing his barrow desperately, striding
fiercely by. And every now and then, from a fried-fish or hardware shop,
would come out a man in a dirty apron to take the sun and contemplate the
scene, not finding in it, seemingly, anything that in any way depressed
his spirit. Amongst the constant, crawling, shifting stream of passengers
were seen women carrying food wrapped up in newspaper, or with bundles
beneath their shawls. The faces of these women were generally either
very red and coarse or of a sort of bluish-white; they wore the
expression of such as know themselves to be existing in the way that
Providence has arranged they should exist. No surprise, revolt, dismay,
or shame was ever to be seen on those faces; in place of these emotions a
drab and brutish acquiescence or mechanical coarse jocularity. To pass
like this about their business was their occupation each morning of the
year; it was needful to accept it. Not having any hope of ever, being
different, not being able to imagine any other life, they were not so
wasteful of their strength as to attempt either to hope or to imagine.
Here and there, too, very slowly passed old men and women, crawling
along, like winter bees who, in some strange and evil moment, had
forgotten to die in the sunlight of their toil, and, too old to be of
use, had been chivied forth from their hive to perish slowly in the cold
twilight of their days.

Down the centre of the street Thyme saw a brewer's dray creeping its way
due south under the sun. Three horses drew it, with braided tails and
beribboned manes, the brass glittering on their harness. High up, like a
god, sat the drayman, his little slits of eyes above huge red cheeks
fixed immovably on his horses' crests. Behind him, with slow, unceasing
crunch, the dray rolled, piled up with hogsheads, whereon the drayman's
mate lay sleeping. Like the slumbrous image of some mighty unrelenting
Power, it passed, proud that its monstro