I walked with eyes downcast into the station.  I had determined to take the train from Knype to Shawport, a distance of three miles, and then to walk up the hill from Shawport through Oldcastle Street to Bursley.  I hoped that by such a route at such an hour, I should be unlikely to meet acquaintances, of whom, in any case, I had few.  My hopes appeared to be well founded, for the large booking-hall at the station was thronged with a multitude entirely strange to me—­workmen and workwomen and workgirls crowded the place.  The first-class and second-class booking-windows were shut, and a long tail of muscular men, pale men, stout women, and thin women pushed to take tickets at the other window.  I was obliged to join them, and to wait my turn amid the odour of corduroy and shawl, and the strong odour of humanity; my nostrils were peculiarly sensitive that morning.  Some of the men had herculean arms and necks, and it was these who wore pieces of string tied round their trousers below the knee, disclosing the lines of their formidable calves.  The women were mostly pallid and quiet.  All carried cans, or satchels, or baskets; here and there a man swung lightly on his shoulder a huge bag of tools, which I could scarcely have raised from the ground.  Everybody was natural, direct, and eager; and no one attempted to be genteel or refined; no one pretended that he did not toil with his hands for dear life.  I anticipated that I should excite curiosity, but I did not.  The people had a preoccupied, hurried air.  Only at the window itself, when the ticket-clerk, having made me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of his lair to get my ticket, did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and inimical interest in this drone who caused delay to busy people.

It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same on the down-platform.  I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full tide of nature.  The porters cried in a different tone from what they employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains generally, were alongside.  They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at one with the passengers.  I alone was a stranger.

’These are the folk!  These are the basis of society, and the fountain of our wealth and luxury!’ I thought; for I was just beginning, at that period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social organism, and my ideas were hot and crude.  I was aware of these people on paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable directness.  They frightened me with their vivid humanity.