The ill-paved streets were too often littered with the refuse which careless householders, reckless of fines, flung into the open way. In wet weather the rain roared along the kennel, converting all the accumulated filth of the thoroughfare into loathsome mud. The gutter-spouts, which then projected from every house, did not always cast their cataracts clear of the pavement, but sometimes soaked the unlucky passer-by who had not kept close to the wall. Umbrellas were the exclusive privilege of women; men never thought of carrying them. Those whose business or pleasure called them abroad in rainy {71} weather, and who did not own carriages, might hire one of the eight hundred two-horsed hackney carriages; jolting, uncomfortable machines, with perforated tin sashes instead of window-glasses, and grumbling, ever-dissatisfied drivers. There were very few sedan chairs; these were still a comparative novelty for general use, and their bearers were much abused for their drunkenness, clumsiness, and incivility. The streets were always crowded. Coaches, chairs, wheelbarrows, fops, chimney-sweeps, porters bearing huge burdens, bullies swaggering with great swords, bailiffs chasing some impecunious poet, cutpurses, funerals, christenings, weddings, and street fights, would seem from some contemporary accounts to be invariably mixed up together in helpless and apparently inextricable confusion. The general bewilderment was made more bewildering by the very babel of street cries bawled from the sturdy lungs of orange-girls, chair-menders, broom-sellers, ballad-singers, old-clothes men, and wretched representatives of the various jails, raising their plaintive appeal to "remember the poor prisoners." The thoroughfares, however, would have been in still worse condition but for the fact that so much of the passenger traffic of the metropolis was done by water and not by land. The wherries on the Thames were as frequent as the gondolas on the canals of Venice. Across the river, down the river, up the river, passengers hurried incessantly in the swift little boats that plied for hire, and were rowed by one man with a pair of sculls, or two men with oars. Despite the numbers of the river steamers at present, and the crowds who take advantage of them, it may well be doubted whether so large a proportion of the passenger traffic of London is borne by the river in the days of Queen Victoria as there was in the days of Queen Anne.