"
I was not quite so happy when the hospital nurse left me. The parcel on
my wrist was feeling heavier than before, and my feet were beginning to
drag. But I tried to keep a good heart as I faced the crowded
thoroughfares--Newgate with its cruel old prison, the edge of St.
Paul's, and the corner of St. Martin's-le-Grand, and so on into
Cheapside.
Cheapside itself was almost impassable. Merchants, brokers, clerks, and
city men generally in tall silk hats were hurrying and sometimes running
along the pavement, making me think of the river by my father's house,
whose myriad little waves seemed to my fancy as a child to be always
struggling to find out which could get to Murphy's Mouth the first and
so drown itself in the sea.
People were still very kind to me, though, and if anybody brushed me in
passing he raised his hat; and if any one pushed me accidentally he
stopped to say he was sorry.
Of course baby was the talisman that protected me from harm; and what I
should have done without her when I got to the Mansion house I do not
know, for that seemed to be the central heart of all the London traffic,
with its motor-buses and taxi-cabs going in different directions and its
tremendous tides of human life flowing every way.
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