Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown
vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw,
rusty-red iron cluking on pointless carts, high white wool-
packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling
on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels; jingle, jingle,
jingle! An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too,of
colour; flecks of colour champed, as it were, like bits in the horses'
teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people
winding like the curves on fast-flowing water. This is the vortex and
whirlpool, the centre of human life today on the earth. Now the tide rises
and now it sinks, but the flow of these rivers always continues. Here it
seethes and whirls, not for an hour only, but for all present time, hour by
hour, day by day, year by year.

Here it rushes and pushes, the atoms triturate and grind, and,
eagerly thrusting by, pursue their separate ends. Here it
appears in its unconcealed personality, indifferent to all else
but itself, absorbed and rapt in eager self, devoid and stripped
of conventional gloss and politeness, yielding only to get its own way;
driving, pushing, carried on in a stress of feverish force like a bullet,
dynamic force apart from reason or will, like the force that lifts the tides
and sends the clouds onwards. The friction of a thousand interests evolves a
condition of electricity in which men are moved to and fro without
considering their steps. Yet the agitated pool of life is stonily
indifferent, the thought is absent or preoccupied, for it is evident that
the mass are unconscious of the scene in
which they act.

But it is more sternly real than the very stones, for all these
men and women that pass through are driven on by the push of