It was like a muddled dream--people seemed to have no reason for what they did or shouted; they just ebbed and flowed, jostled and jambed, ran hither and thither, sang and laughed and swore. Rose looked round her to see if she could recognise anyone; now and then a face glowed on her in the torch-light, then died away, once she thought she saw the back of a tradesman's daughter whom she knew--but her chief feeling was of an utter isolation with her loved one, as if he and she stood alone on some sea-pounded island against which the tides of the world roared in vain. At last the crowd began to move. The band had crushed through to the front of it, and was braying Rule Britannia up Playden Hill; then came the waggons, then the stout champions of freedom, singing at the pitch of their lungs: "Soles, plaice, and dabs, Rate, skate, and crabs. God save the Queen!" The stars winked on the black zenith, while troubled winds sped and throbbed over the fields that huddled in mystery and silence on either side of the road--where noise and skirmish and darting lights, with the odours of warm human bodies, and the thudding and scrabbling of a thousand feet, proclaimed the People's holiday. They flowed through Playden like a torrent through an open sluice, sweeping up and carrying on all sorts of flotsam--villagers from cottage doors, ploughboys from the farms down by the Military Canal, gipsies from Iden Wood ... a mixed multitude, which the central mass absorbed, till all was one steaming and shouting blackness. The first gate was at Mockbeggar, where the road to Iden joins that which crosses the Marsh by Corkwood and Baron's Grange. In a minute it was off its hinges, and swealing in tar, while lusty arms pulled twigs, branches, even whole bushes out of the hedges to build its pyre. Rose shrank close to Handshut, so close that the clover scents of her laces were drowned in the smell of the cowhouse that came from his clothes. She found herself liking it, drinking in that soft, mixed, milky odour ... till a cloud of stifling tar-smoke swept suddenly over them, and she reeled against him suffocating, while all round them people choked and gasped and sneezed. The fire was lighted, a great crimson tongue screamed up in front of two motionless poplars, leaped as high as their tops, then spread fan-shaped, roaring. Men and women joined hands and danced round the blaze--in the distance, above the surging pack of heads, Rose could see them jumping and capering, with snatches of song that became screams every minute.