“My mood, I say, was one of exaltation.  I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind.  I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.

“But hardly had I emerged upon Great Portland Street, however (my lodging was close to the big draper’s shop there), when I heard a clashing concussion and was hit violently behind, and turning saw a man carrying a basket of soda-water syphons, and looking in amazement at his burden.  Although the blow had really hurt me, I found something so irresistible in his astonishment that I laughed aloud.  ‘The devil’s in the basket,’ I said, and suddenly twisted it out of his hand.  He let go incontinently, and I swung the whole weight into the air.

“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 covered the road was freezing.  Foolish as it seems to me now, I had not reckoned that, transparent or not, I was still amenable to the weather and all its consequences.

“Then suddenly a bright idea came into my head.  I ran round and got into the cab.  And so, shivering, scared, and sniffing with the first intimations of a cold, and with the bruises in the small of my back growing upon my attention, I drove slowly along Oxford Street and past Tottenham Court Road.  My mood was as different from that in which I had sallied forth ten minutes ago as it is possible to imagine.  This invisibility indeed!  The one thought that possessed me was—­how was I to get out of the scrape I was in.