Everything looked delightfully clean, and, considering the crowd, she was lucky to find a seat next to an intelligent and quiet-looking, middle-aged man, who turned out to be a foreman engaged upon great building works proceeding in the City. The speed increased, and the noise and the rattling of the cars increased in proportion--a condition of things she had not expected, and it was a relief when the train slowed down and made its first pause at Holland Park. Here a few workmen got in, but not a soul got out! Mrs. Rosamond, looking about her, noticed that her _companions de voyage_ were not in appearance such as she had expected at so early an hour. It is true they nearly all smoked--cigarettes mostly--some sticking to the old-fashioned short clay pipe charged with most pungent tobacco; but they did not swear or use strong language, they were not all dressed in corduroy, nor were their clothes dirty, neither did they universally carry huge “bass-bags” containing saws, and other sharp and nasty tools. Her neighbour, the foreman, with whom she soon got into a lively conversation, told her that most of the men (masons chiefly) were employed on a “big job” at Finsbury, and would travel to the Bank. He also volunteered the information that he lived in Caxton Road, close to the Shepherd’s Bush Station of the Tube; that he had to get his own breakfast at 4.30 or thereabouts, or wait until he got to the City, when he had it at a snug little coffee-shop in Moorfields; that he had used the Tube ever since its opening in 1900 day after day, starting by the first train in the morning, and returning, as his place and work suited, along the route at all hours, from five o’clock to eight, and sometimes (though seldom) by the last train from the Bank at 12.30 p.m.; and that the cars between the former hours--when people were leaving the City for the day--were more crowded than in the early morning, in fact crammed, with not even standing room. At Notting Hill Gate there was a rush of operatives. By this time the cars were packed, and the little woman perceived the uses of the sliding leather straps suspended overhead, to which the unlucky seatless ones, who filled up the whole of the gangway, held on like grim death, to avoid tumbling about as the train oscillated. At the Marble Arch some few persons, a dozen or so, tried to push in, but the five cars were _complet_, and so they continued, until, at the British Museum Station, a section of the passengers alighted, as also at Chancery Lane and the General Post Office. Then, after a run of 6½ miles from Shepherd’s Bush in twenty-four minutes, the Central “early workmen” pulled up at the Bank terminus at a platform resembling the others all along the line.