“And how did you like the procession, mate?” I asked an old man on a bench in Green Park.

“‘Ow did I like it?  A bloomin’ good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a sleep, wi’ all the coppers aw’y, so I turned into the corner there, along wi’ fifty others.  But I couldn’t sleep, a-lyin’ there an’ thinkin’ ’ow I’d worked all the years o’ my life an’ now ’ad no plyce to rest my ’ead; an’ the music comin’ to me, an’ the cheers an’ cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an’ wanted to blow out the brains o’ the Lord Chamberlain.”

Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could he, but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and them was no more discussion.

As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light.  Splashes of colour, green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and “E.  R.,” in great crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was everywhere.  The crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of thousands, and though the police sternly put down mafficking, drunkenness and rough play abounded.  The tired workers seemed to have gone mad with the relaxation and excitement, and they surged and danced down the streets, men and women, old and young, with linked arms and in long rows, singing, “I may be crazy, but I love you,” “Dolly Gray,” and “The Honeysuckle and the Bee”—­the last rendered something like this:-

   “Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
   Oi’d like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see.”

I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the illuminated water.  It was approaching midnight, and before me poured the better class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous streets and returning home.  On the bench beside me sat two ragged creatures, a man and a woman, nodding and dozing.  The woman sat with her arms clasped across the breast, holding tightly, her body in constant play—­now dropping forward till it seemed its balance would be overcome and she would fall to the pavement; now inclining to the left, sideways, till her head rested on the man’s shoulder; and now to the right, stretched and strained, till the pain of it awoke her and she sat bolt upright.  Whereupon the dropping forward would begin again and go through its cycle till she was aroused by the strain and stretch.

Every little while boys and young men stopped long enough to go behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts.  This always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as it flooded past.

This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness exhibited on every hand.  It is a commonplace, the homeless on the benches, the poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless.  Fifty thousand people must have passed the bench while I sat upon it, and not one, on such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the King, felt his heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say to the woman:  “Here’s sixpence; go and get a bed.”  But the women, especially the young women, made witty remarks upon the woman nodding, and invariably set their companions laughing.