above the street. If you look closer you will see that three elderly men
at a little distance from each other run spiders along the pavement as
if the street were their parlour, and here, against the wall, a woman
stares at nothing, boot-laces extended, which she does not ask you to
buy. The posters are theirs too; and the news on them. A town destroyed;
a race won. A homeless people, circling beneath the sky whose blue or
white is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel filings and horse dung
shredded to dust.

There, under the green shade, with his head bent over white paper, Mr.
Sibley transferred figures to folios, and upon each desk you observe,
like provender, a bunch of papers, the day's nutriment, slowly consumed
by the industrious pen. Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribed
hung empty all day in the corridors, but as the clock struck six each
was exactly filled, and the little figures, split apart into trousers or
moulded into a single thickness, jerked rapidly with angular forward
motion along the pavement; then dropped into darkness. Beneath the
pavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with yellow light for
ever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon enamel
plates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses of
the upper. "Marble Arch--Shepherd's Bush"--to the majority the Arch and
the Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at one
point--it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road--does the
name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down
to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones,
there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom.

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to
the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown
mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no,