While in London Miss Addams saw much of the life of the great city from the top of an omnibus. Once she was taken with a number of tourists to see the spectacle of the Saturday night auction of fruits and vegetables to the poor of the East Side, and the lurid picture blotted out all the picturesque impressions, full of pleasant human interest and historic association, that she had been eagerly enjoying during this first visit to London town. Always afterwards, when she closed her eyes, she could see the scene; it seemed as if it would never leave her. In the flare of the gas-light, which made weird and spectral the motley, jostling crowd and touched the black shadows it created into a grotesque semblance of life, she saw wrinkled women, desperate-looking men, and pale children vying with each other to secure with their farthings and ha'pennies the vegetables held up by a hoarse, red-faced auctioneer. One haggard youth sat on the curb, hungrily devouring the cabbage that he had succeeded in bidding in. Her sensation-loving companions on the bus stared with mingled pity and disgust; but the girl who saw what she looked on with the inward eye of the heart turned away her face. The poverty that she had before seen had not prepared her for wretchedness like this. "For the following weeks," she said, "I went about London furtively, afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose this hideous human need and suffering. In time, nothing of the great city seemed real save the misery of its East End." [Illustration: Polk Street façade of Hull-House buildings] [Illustration: A corner of the Boys' Library at Hull-House] This first impression of London's poverty was, of course, not only lurid, but quite unfair. She knew nothing of the earnest workers who were devoting their lives to the problem of giving the right kind of help to those who, through weakness, ignorance, or misfortune, were not able to help themselves. When, five years later, she visited Toynbee Hall, she saw effective work of the kind she had dimly dreamed of ever since, as a little girl, she had wanted to build a beautiful big house among the ugly little ones in the city. Here in the heart of the Whitechapel district, the most evil and unhappy section of London's East End, a group of optimistic, large-hearted young men, who believed that advantages mean responsibilities, had come to live and work. While trying to share what good birth, breeding, and education had given them with those who had been shut away from every chance for wholesome living, they believed that they in turn might learn from their humble neighbors much that universities and books cannot teach. "I have spent too much time in vague preparation for I knew not what," said Jane Addams. "At last I see a way to begin to live in a really real world, and to learn to do by doing."