There Are Trams, Too, Which Take One To Delightful Places, Though
The Seats On Top Extend Lengthwise, After The Old
'knifeboard
pattern,' and one does not get so good a view of the country as from
the 'garden seats'
On the roof of the omnibus; still there is
nothing we like better on a warm morning than a good outing on the
Vinolia tram that we pick up in Shaftesbury Avenue. There is a
street running from Shaftesbury Avenue into Oxford Street, which was
once the village of St. Giles, one of the dozens of hamlets
swallowed up by the great maw of London, and it still looks like a
hamlet, although it has been absorbed for many years. We constantly
happen on these absorbed villages, from which, not a century ago,
people drove up to town in their coaches.
If you wish to see another phase of life, go out on a Saturday
evening, from nine o'clock on to eleven, starting on a Beecham's
Pill 'bus, and keep to the poorer districts, alighting occasionally
to stand with the crowd in the narrower thoroughfares.
It is a market night, and the streets will be a moving mass of men
and women buying at the hucksters' stalls. Everything that can be
sold at a stall is there: fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, crockery,
tin-ware, children's clothing, cheap toys, boots, shoes, and sun-
bonnets, all in reckless confusion. The vendors cry their wares in
stentorian tones, vying with one another to produce excitement and
induce patronage, while gas-jets are streaming into the air from the
roofs and flaring from the sides of the stalls; children crying,
children dancing to the strains of an accordion, children
quarrelling, children scrambling for the refuse fruit.
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