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sees the customers and shopmen crowding in the doorways of the shops,
the faces that came and went at the windows, the little street boys
running and shouting, the policemen taking it all quite stiffly and
calmly, the workmen knocking off upon scaffoldings, the seething
miscellany of the little folks. They shouted to him, vague
encouragement, vague insults, the imbecile catchwords of the day, and he
stared down at them, at such a multitude of living creatures as he had
never before imagined in the world.
Now that he had fairly entered London he had had to slacken his pace
more and more, the little folks crowded so mightily upon him. The crowd
grew denser at every step, and at last, at a corner where two great ways
converged, he came to a stop, and the multitude flowed about him and
closed him in.
There he stood, with his feet a little apart, his back to a big corner
gin palace that towered twice his height and ended In a sky sign,
staring down at the pigmies and wondering--trying, I doubt not, to
collate it all with the other things of his life, with the valley among
the downlands, the nocturnal lovers, the singing in the church, the
chalk he hammered daily, and with instinct and death and the sky, trying
to see it all together coherent and significant. His brows were knit. He
put up his huge paw to scratch his coarse hair, and groaned aloud.
"I don't see It," he said.
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