action it is necessary to get
up at half-past four and travel on the Underground by the first train
East, which is an adventure in itself. The first train East goes at
three minutes past five, and there are large numbers of people who
travel in it every day; by Charing Cross it is almost crowded. It is
full of Bolshevists; and I do not wonder. One sits with one's feet up
in a first-class carriage, clutching a nice cheap workman's ticket and
trying hard to look as if, like the Bolshevists, one did this every
day.

On arriving at the Monument Station one walks briskly past the
seductive announcement that "THE MONUMENT IS NOW OPEN," and plunges
into a world of fish. I have never been able to understand why fish
is so funny. On the comic stage a casual reference to fish is almost
certain to provoke a shout of laughter; in practice, and especially
in the mass, it is not so funny; it is like the Government, an
inexhaustible source of humour at a distance, and in the flesh
extraordinarily dull.

Over the small streets which surround the market hangs a heavy pall
of fishy vapour. The streets are full of carts; the carts are full of
fish. The houses in the streets are fish-dealers' places, more or less
full of fish. The pavements are full of fish-porters, carrying fish,
smelling of fish. Fragments of conversation are heard, all about
fish. Fish lie sadly in the gutters. The scales of fish glitter on the
pavements. A little vigorous swimming through the outlying fisheries
brings you to the actual market, which is even more wonderful. Imagine
a place like Covent Garden, and nearly as big, but entirely devoted to
fish. In the place of those enchanting perspectives of flower-stalls,
imagine enormous regiments of fish-stalls, paraded in close order and
groaning with halibut and conger-eel, with whiting and lobsters and
huge crabs. Round these stalls the wholesale dealers wade ankle-deep
in fish. Steadily, maliciously, the great fish slide off the stalls
on to the floor; steadily the dealers recover them and pile them up
on their small counters, or cast them through the air on to other
counters, or fling them into baskets in rage or mortification or sheer
bravado.

The dealers are men with business-faces, in long white coats,
surprisingly clean. Every now and then they stop throwing crabs into
baskets or retrieving halibut from the floor, and make little entries
in long note-books. I do not know exactly what entries they make, bu