Summary

Woolf continues to explore the secondhand bookshop, noting the various types of books available and the authors who composed them. She thinks about a poet who drowned in his prime and travelers who explored the world. She dwells on the English writers who colonized India and Africa, as well as the historians who chronicled it and the scholars who interpreted the works of the Ancient Greeks.

Woolf moves back outside, comparing the act of browsing books to that of hearing snippets of conversation on the street. She describes a conversation about a woman named Kate and a financial discussion between two men under the lamp post. She explains that, at this hour, it is difficult to hear anything as most of the people on the street are commuters coming home from work: "They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in...