out, you must keep on rubbing hard."

"There's six hundred and sixty-three, monsieur" (he says "monsieur" as
soon as he embarks on technical explanations), "counting the smart ones
in the fine offices, and the lanterns in the wood-yard, and the night
watchmen. You'll say to me, 'Why don't they have electricity that
lights itself?' It's 'cos that costs money and they get paraffin for
next to nothing, it seems, through a big firm 'at they're in with up
yonder. As for me, I'm always on my legs, from the morning when I'm
tired through sleeping badly, from after dinner when you feel sick with
eating, up to the evening, when you're sick of everything."

The bell has rung, and we go away in company. He has pulled off his
blue trousers and tunic and thrown them into a corner--two objects
which have grown heavy and rusty, like tools. But the dirty shell of
his toil did upholster him a little, and he emerges from it gaunter,
and horribly squeezed within the littleness of a torturing jacket. His
bony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottom
in long and mournful shoes, with hillocks, and resembling crocodiles;
and their soles, being soaked in paraffin, leave oily footprints,
rainbow-hued, in the plastic mud.

Perhaps it is because of this dismal companion towards whom I turn my
head, and whom I see trotting slowly and painfully at my side in the
rumbling grayness of the evening exodus, that I have a sudden and
tragic vision of the people, as in a flash's passing. (I do sometimes
get glimpses of the things of life momentarily.) The dark doorway to
my vision seems torn asunder. Between these two phantoms in front the
sable swarm outspreads. The multitude encumbers the plain that
bristles with dark chimneys and cranes, with ladders of iron planted