Not for gold would he have gone behind these placards to the organs themselves; he preferred to gather from the placards alone what wonders of yesterday the excellent staid Telegraph had unaccountably missed.  But in the Financial Times he saw:  “Cohoon’s Annual Meeting.  Stormy Scenes.”  And he bought the Financial Times and put it into his pocket for his wife, because she had an interest in Cohoon’s Brewery, and he conceived the possibility of her caring to glance at the report.

The Simple Joy of Life

After crossing the South-Western Railway he got into the Upper Richmond Road, a thoroughfare which always diverted and amused him.  It was such a street of contrasts.  Any one could see that, not many years before, it had been a sacred street, trod only by feet genteel, and made up of houses each christened with its own name and each standing in its own garden.  And now energetic persons had put churches into it, vast red things with gigantic bells, and large drapery shops, with blouses at six-and-eleven, and court photographers, and banks, and cigar-stores, and auctioneers’ offices.  And all kinds of omnibuses ran along it.  And yet somehow it remained meditative and superior.  In every available space gigantic posters were exhibited.  They all had to do with food or pleasure.  There were York hams eight feet high, that a regiment could not have eaten in a month; shaggy and ferocious oxen peeping out of monstrous teacups in their anxiety to be consumed; spouting bottles of ale whose froth alone would have floated the mail steamers pictured on an adjoining sheet; and forty different decoctions for imparting strength.  Then after a few score yards of invitation to debauch there came, with characteristic admirable English common sense, a cure for indigestion, so large that it would have given ease to a mastodon who had by inadvertence swallowed an elephant.  And then there were the calls to pleasure.  Astonishing, the quantity of palaces that offered you exactly the same entertainment twice over on the same night!  Astonishing, the reliance on number in this matter of amusement!  Authenticated statements that a certain performer had done a certain thing in a certain way a thousand and one times without interruption were stuck all over the Upper Richmond Road, apparently in the sure hope that you would rush to see the thousand and second performance.  These performances were invariably styled original and novel.  All the remainder of free wall space was occupied by philanthropists who were ready to give away cigarettes at the nominal price of a penny a packet.