A WET NIGHT IN LONDON. 265 



good old Norman oak, such as you may sometimes 

 find in very old country clim-ches that have not been 

 restored, such as yet exist in Westminster Hall, 

 temp. Rufus or Stephen, or so. Genuine old wood- 

 work, worth your while to go and see. Take a 

 sketch-book and make much of the ties and angles 

 and bolts ; ask Whistler or Macbeth, or some one to 

 etch them, get the Royal Antiquarian Society to pay 

 a visit and issue a pamphlet ; gaze at them reverently 

 and earnestly, for they are not easily to be matched 

 in London. Iron girders and spacious roofs are the 

 modern fashion ; here we have the Middle Ages well- 

 preserved — slam ! the door is banged-to, onwards, 

 over the invisible river, more red signals and rain, 

 and finally the terminus. Five hundred well-dressed 

 and civilized savages, wet, cross, weary, all anxious 

 to get in — eager for home and dinner ; five hundred 

 stiffened and cramped folk equally eager to get out — 

 mix on a narrow platform, with a train running off 

 one side, and a detached engine gliding gently after 

 it. Push, wriggle, wind in and out, bumps from 

 portmanteaus, and so at last out into the street. 



Now, how are you going to get into an omnibus ? 

 The street is "up," the traffic confined to half a 

 narrow thoroughfare, the little space available at the 

 side crowded with newsvendors whose contents bills 

 are spotted and blotted with wet, crowded, too, with 

 young girls, bonnetless, with aprons over their heads, 

 whose object is simply to do nothing — just to stand 

 in the rain and chaff; the newsvendors yell their 

 news in your ears, then, finding you don't purchase, 

 they *' Yah ! " at you ; an aged crone begs you to buj- 



