So the eleven-five car started sooner than it might have done. As it was spattering with rain, I boarded it, sharing the conductor's forlorn hope, but taking care to sit at the extreme fore-end inside. In the broad street the market clamored and flared, its lights and shadows flickering and fading about the long churchyard and the steeple in the midst thereof; and toward the distant lights, the shining road sparkled in long reaches, like a blackguard river. A gap fell here and there among the lights where a publican put his gas out; and at these points the crowds thickened. A quiet mechanic came in, and sat near a decent woman with children, a bundle, a basket, and a cabbage. Thirty yards on the car rumbled, and suddenly its hinder end was taken in a mass of people--howling, struggling, and blaspheming--who stormed and wrangled in at the door and up the stairs. There were lads and men whooping and flushed, there were girls and women screaming choruses; and in a moment the seats were packed, knees were taken, and there was not an inch of standing room. The conductor cried, "All full!" and tugged at his bell-strap, whereunto many were hanging by the hand; but he was swept from his feet, and made to push hard for his own place. And there was no more foothold on the back platform nor the front, nor any vacant step upon the stairway; and the roof was thronged; and the rest of the crowd was fain to waylay the next car. This one moved off slowly, with shrieks and howls that were racking to the wits. From divers quarters of the roof came a bumping thunder as of cellar-flapping clogs. Profanity was sluiced down, as it were by pailfuls, from above, and was swilled back as it were in pailfuls from below. Blowses in feathered bonnets bawled hilarious obscenity at the jiggers. A little maid with a market-basket, hustled and jostled and elbowed at the far end, listened eagerly and laughed when she could understand; and the quiet mechanic, whose knees had been invaded by an unsteady young woman in a crushed hat, tried to look pleased. My own knees were saved from capture by the near neighborhood of an enormous female, seated partly on the seat and partly on myself, snorting and gulping with sleep, her head upon the next man's shoulder. (To offer your seat to a standing woman would, as beseems a foreign antic, have been visited by the ribaldry of the whole crowd.) In the midst of the riot the decent woman sat silent and indifferent, her children on and about her knees. Further along, two women ate fish with their fingers and discoursed personalities in voices which ran strident through the uproar, as the odor of their snack asserted itself in the general fetor. And opposite the decent woman there sat a bonnetless drab, who said nothing, but looked at the decent woman's children as a shoeless brat looks at the dolls in a toyshop window.