When I finally struggled free, the first thing I saw was the road packed with darting waggons, then, over the road from King's Cross, and three times the size, St Pancras. I could not believe there had ever been so many bricks in the world – it must have had more than the Eskdale viaduct and I knew for a fact there were more than five million in that. The clock said five to three; I turned back and looked at the clock on King's Cross, and that said five after, and I thought: now, that is strange, because it was impossible to imagine either the Midland or the Great Northern making a bloomer over the time, of all things, but one of them must have, and it seemed that I was only getting in everybody's way by standing there and fretting over it.

Then I spied a stream of hansoms pouring out of a little arch at the bottom of St Pancras like beetles from under a stone, and decided I would take one for the first time in my life. But as soon as I stepped into the road between King's Cross and St Pancras, I was put into another cab – one of a completely separate lot – by a lad who had lately been holding a horse's head and eating a fish. Now he was tipping his head back, and, blowing spinning bits of fish into the air from his mouth, saying, 'If this keeps up, we might be in with a fighting chance, eh, guv?'

He was talking about the sun. It had been raining in Yorkshire but the day was set fair in London, and I might just as well have stepped off a boat train, such was the newness and strangeness of it all. 'Where you off to?' shouted the fish-eating kid.

I said, 'Waterloo,' sounding not like myself, but even the horse seemed to have heard of the place for he set off without coaxing.

There were just too many people in London, and that was all about it. Sooner or later, I thought as we rolled away from King's Cross, they will have to bring this madness to a halt and get everything put straight. All the buses were marked 'Vanguard' and there was no end of motor cars. There was no end of everything else either, so that after a sprint of a start we soon settled down to a crawl, and I added a second half crown to the one I already had in my hand for the fare, fearing the price might be to do with time spent as well as distance covered.