rumbles forward with a sound of thunder, and the motion of a steamer
when they put the table-racks on. Seen from the pavement, or from the
top of another omnibus, it is of barbaric majesty; not, indeed, in the
single example, but as part of the interminable line of omnibuses coming
towards you. Then its clumsiness is lost in the collective uncouthness
which becomes of a tremendous grandeur. The procession bears onward
whole populations lifted high in the air, and swaying and lurching with
the elephantine gait of things which can no more capsize than they can
keep an even pace. Of all the sights of London streets, this procession
of the omnibuses is the most impressive, and the common herd of
Londoners of both sexes which it bears aloft seems to suffer a change
into something almost as rich as strange. They are no longer ordinary or
less than ordinary men and women bent on the shabby businesses that
preoccupy the most of us; they are conquering princes, making a progress
in a long triumph, and looking down upon a lower order of human beings
from their wobbling steeps. It enhances their apparent dignity that they
whom they look down upon are not merely the drivers of trucks and wagons
of low degree, but often ladies of title in their family carriages,
under the care of the august family coachman and footman, or gentlemen
driving in their own traps or carts, or fares in the hansoms that steal
their swift course through and by these ranks; the omnibuses are always
the most monumental fact of the scene. They dominate it in bulk and
height; they form the chief impulse of the tremendous movement, and it
is they that choke from time to time the channel of the mighty torrent,
and helplessly hold it in the arrest of a _block_.

[Illustration: A BLOCK IN THE STRAND.]

No one can forecast the moment when, or the place where, a block may
happen; but mostly it occurs in mid-afternoon, at the intersection of