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"But a fool of a cabman, standing outside a public house, made a
sudden rush for this, and his extending fingers took me with
excruciating violence under the ear. I let the whole down with a
smash on the cabman, and then, with shouts and the clatter of feet
about me, people coming out of shops, vehicles pulling up, I
realised what I had done for myself, and cursing my folly, backed
against a shop window and prepared to dodge out of the confusion. In
a moment I should be wedged into a crowd and inevitably discovered.
I pushed by a butcher boy, who luckily did not turn to see the
nothingness that shoved him aside, and dodged behind the cab-man's
four-wheeler. I do not know how they settled the business, I hurried
straight across the road, which was happily clear, and hardly
heeding which way I went, in the fright of detection the incident
had given me, plunged into the afternoon throng of Oxford Street.
"I tried to get into the stream of people, but they were too thick
for me, and in a moment my heels were being trodden upon. I took to
the gutter, the roughness of which I found painful to my feet, and
forthwith the shaft of a crawling hansom dug me forcibly under the
shoulder blade, reminding me that I was already bruised severely. I
staggered out of the way of the cab, avoided a perambulator by a
convulsive movement, and found myself behind the hansom. A happy
thought saved me, and as this drove slowly along I followed in its
immediate wake, trembling and astonished at the turn of my
adventure. And not only trembling, but shivering. It was a bright
day in January and I was stark naked and the thin slime of mud that
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