Page:Letters from England.djvu/25

 roads and groves and crescents up to the wretched street in Notting Hill, where I am writing this: all of them streets of Two Pillars, streets of Similar Railings, streets of Seven Steps In Front of Each House, and so on; now here, a sort of desperate series of variations on the sound “i” proclaims the milkman, a woeful “ieiei” merely denotes firewood, “uó” is the coalman’s war-cry, and the ghastly yell of a delirious sailor announces that a youth is hawking five cabbage heads in a perambulator. And by night the cats make love as savagely as on the roofs of Palermo, in spite of all reports about English Puritanism. Only the people here are quieter than elsewhere; they talk to each other half-heartedly, and their aim is to get home with the least possible delay. And that is the strangest thing about the English streets: here you do not see respectable ladies telling each other on the kerb what happened at the Smiths or the Greens, nor courting couples strolling arm-in-arm like sleep-walkers, nor worthy citizens seated on their doorstep