The dark shadow to his right hand was that of the Abbey. He held his breath with awe, but he was in no mood for the silence and darkness. He followed the roar and crush of the crowd through a dark, broad, vacant street or two until he emerged into another kind of blaze and din, into the tumult and bustle and noise and commotion of the Strand. Here the shops, the lights, the wild confusion of traffic, the hoarse cries, the flare and glare and riot, the wild medley of life, the wretched figures in squalid groups, the gentlemen passing with evening dress under their overcoats, the ragged and shouting vendors of the newspapers, the crowds rushing to the theatres, the other crowds that hung upon their steps and importuned them with unnecessary services, ended in turning altogether John’s young and unaccustomed brain. He was hustled by the ceaseless stream of people rushing past him in both ways, coming and going, and after a while felt himself like a straw upon a river, carried along without knowing where he was going, tossed into a corner, seized again by the stream, swept away breathless, with a strange pleasure and wonder and disgust and incomprehension. He was doing nothing but gazing, looking on wondering where they were all going, what they all meant, what need there was to hurry so, to shout so; and yet he felt as if he too were living, as he never before had lived all his life. Strange illusion; an older man perhaps would have concluded that here was no real life at all, but only a fantastic, half-conscious dream. Half the people streaming along were doing it by no will of their own, but only because of the treadmill action of habit, which made them fancy this way of spending the evening the natural thing to do--and that to go somewhere, to do something, as they said--that is to frequent noisy places in which the depth of dulness was touched, yet where rampant folly extracted a strained laugh--or to bustle out and in of swinging doors, and exchange jests at bars, and rub shoulders with crowds, coming and going--was life. It was life indeed for the poor hangers-on greedy for pence or sixpences, to the poor hawkers of miserable merchandises, to the servants of the crowd. To them it was fatigue, cold, disappointment, weary waiting, miserable snatches at recompense, eager greed, and accumulation and gain; bread, perhaps to poor little children in squalid rooms somewhere about, or whisky at the street corners--at all events, a real yet possible existence, the only one of which they were conscious or capable. The more wretched in such scenes have the advantage of the less. The newspaper boy, the girl with her poor basket of faded flowers, the hundred other vassals of the crowd are real in their poor work and competition. It is their masters, the lords of unrule, who are the ghosts.