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In the daytime you become a fish, to wriggle over the ocean's floor amid strange flora and fauna, such as ash-cans and lamp-posts and venders' carts and cab-horses and sandwich-men. But at night you are neither fish, bird nor beast. The night was May thirteenth; never mind the year; the date should suffice: and a Walpurgis night, if you please, without any Mendelssohn to interpret it.
Never mind; the pavements are flooded with sunshine, and the folk are walking gaily, and the omnibuses roll along top-heavy, and there is a blue strip of sky over the Strand. Yes, Spring is here, and the violets are blooming in the old women's baskets. How happy everybody seems! Even the sandwich-men have lost their doleful air. The sap is stirring in their boards.
At the corner of Sloane Square I had an unexpected and rather dramatic reminder of my celebrity. As we emerged from the King's Road a procession of five or six sandwich-men suddenly appeared from the direction of Symons Street, shuffling dejectedly along at intervals of a few yards.
Your butcher cries "Buy, buy, buy!" your draper sends out bills and sandwich-men; but the publican would be scouted if he went out touting for custom. If a man asks for drink he knows quite well what he is doing, and if he takes too much it is because of some morbid taint or unlucky weakness.
"Collapse of Australia" stared from that vermilion placard. It began to dawn on me that I had undertaken rather a large order in showing this Oriental London life. "And you have not shown me any of your literati yet, or any of their houses." We were stopped in a block of omnibuses and cabs. A line of sandwich-men were straggling along between vehicles and the curb.
The first thing to be done is to free the aesthetic emotions from the tyranny of erudition. I was sitting once behind the driver of an old horse-omnibus when a string of sandwich-men crossed us carrying "The Empire" poster. The name of Genée was on the bill. How this pernicious nonsense is to be knocked out of people's heads I cannot guess.
In these days a new beauty is advertised like a new soap. They haven't given them sandwich-men in the streets, but that is about all that has been denied them. But Agatha has not had any special offer, and I know both she and her mother are a little frightened. Alix must come out next season, and they can't afford frocks for two.
First, there appeared suddenly all over Cambridge, the evening before the sale, just as the crowds of undergraduates and female relations began to circulate about after tea and iced strawberries, a quantity of sandwich-men, bearing the following announcement, back and front: TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. The household effects, furniture, books, etc., of the Hon. Frank Guiseley, including
Misery enough I have seen in New York's tenements; but deep as the shadows are in the winter picture of it, it has no such darkness as that. The newsboys and the sandwich-men warming themselves upon the cellar gratings in Twenty-third Street and elsewhere have oftener than not a ready joke to crack with the passer-by, or a little jig step to relieve their feelings and restore the circulation.
The continuous roar of traffic in the busy streets, the crowded tram-cars, the motors and taxis jostling the ancient bullock-carts, the surging crowds in the semi-Europeanised native quarters, even the pall of smoke that tells of many modern industrial activities are not quite so characteristic of new India as, when I was last there, the sandwich-men with boards inviting a vote for this or that candidate in the elections to the new Indian Councils.
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