There was a different set of backs at the furniture sales, less patient and more excitable, though not less keen. Mostly they wore bead mantles and cloth jackets and fur ruffs, and were topped by side-away bonnets and hats that wouldn’t let you by. They twitched and argued a good deal, and let their faces say more than the faces of other crowds. But they were speaking backs, all the same, under mantle or jacket or plaid blouse. They, too, told the tale of youth or age, and the hope that hangs on gold in a stocking foot. Then, at the dances, there had been other backs again. The faces went by him under the lamps, but each was turned away from him towards another face. They swam in his gaze like faces drifting in a stream, and became one face of earnest, glowing youth. It was only the backs he remembered when all was done, the necks and the shining hair of the lasses, and the broad, strong shoulders of the lads. Weddings and clippings, of course, meant crowds as well; hot-pot suppers and Primrose gatherings ... whist-drives ... annual fairs. Election crowds, when folk gathered in the streets, and broke one another’s heads or other people’s glass. Church, where folks knelt in long, straight shafts of sun, or looked through the cool windows and thought of the waiting hay. Then there were buryings, buryings without end, at which he had walked in crowds with uncovered head or lent a shoulder to the coffins of innumerable squires. Some day, sooner or later, everybody walked in that particular crowd.... And once he had even seen a London crowd, but that was very long ago. A lawsuit over some foreshore rights was making a stir, and Kit had been called as a witness in the case. The crowd up there was past all knowledge and sense, and nobody knew each other or jerked a head. A policeman found him at a pavement edge, waiting, he said, for people to “get by.”