me, plunged into the afternoon throng of Oxford Street.

"I tried to get into the stream of people, but they were too thick
for me, and in a moment my heels were being trodden upon. I took to
the gutter, the roughness of which I found painful to my feet, and
forthwith the shaft of a crawling hansom dug me forcibly under the
shoulder blade, reminding me that I was already bruised severely. I
staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a perambulator by a
convulsive movement, and found myself behind the hansom. A happy
thought saved me, and as this drove slowly along I followed in its
immediate wake, trembling and astonished at the turn of my
adventure. And not only trembling, but shivering. It was a bright
day in January and I was stark naked and the thin slime of mud that
covered the road was freezing. Foolish as it seems to me now, I had
not reckoned that, transparent or not, I was still amenable to the
weather and all its consequences.

"Then suddenly a bright idea came into my head. I ran round and got
into the cab. And so, shivering, scared, and sniffing with the first
intimations of a cold, and with the bruises in the small of my back
growing upon my attention, I drove slowly along Oxford Street and
past Tottenham Court Road. My mood was as different from that in
which I had sallied forth ten minutes ago as it is possible to
imagine. This invisibility indeed! The one thought that possessed
me was--how was I to get out of the scrape I was in.

"We crawled past Mudie's, and there a tall woman with five or six
yellow-labelled books hailed my cab, and I sprang out just in time
to escape her, shaving a railway van narrowly in my flight. I made
off up the roadway to Bloomsbury Square, intending to strike north
past the Museum and so get into the quiet district. I was now
cruelly chilled, and the strangeness of my situation so unnerved me
that I whimpered as I ran. At the northward corner of the Square a
little white dog ran out of the Pharmaceutical Society's offices,
and incontinently made for me, nose down.

"I had never realised it before, but the nose is to the mind of a
dog what the eye is to the mind of a seeing man. Dogs perceive the
scent of a man moving as men perceive his vision. This brute began
barking and leaping, showing, as it seemed to me, only too plainly
that he was aware of me. I crossed Great Russell Street, glancing
over my shoulder as I did so, and went some way along Montague
Street before I