nine o'clock
There are trams , too , which take one to delightful places , though the seats on top extend lengthwise , after the old ` knifeboard pattern , ' and one does not get so good a view of the country as from the ` garden seats ' on the roof of the omnibus ; still there is nothing we like better on a warm morning than a good outing on the Vinolia tram that we pick up in Shaftesbury Avenue . There is a street running from Shaftesbury Avenue into Oxford Street , which was once the village of St. Giles , one of the dozens of hamlets swallowed up by the great maw of London , and it still looks like a hamlet , although it has been absorbed for many years . We constantly happen on these absorbed villages , from which , not a century ago , people drove up to town in their coaches . If you wish to see another phase of life , go out on a Saturday evening , from nine o'clock on to eleven , starting on a Beecham 's Pill ` bus , and keep to the poorer districts , alighting occasionally to stand with the crowd in the narrower thoroughfares . It is a market night , and the streets will be a moving mass of men and women buying at the hucksters ' stalls . Everything that can be sold at a stall is there : fruit , vegetables , meat , fish , crockery , tin-ware , children 's clothing , cheap toys , boots , shoes , and sun-bonnets , all in reckless confusion . The vendors cry their wares in stentorian tones , vying with one another to produce excitement and induce patronage , while gas-jets are streaming into the air from the roofs and flaring from the sides of the stalls ; children crying , children dancing to the strains of an accordion , children quarrelling , children scrambling for the refuse fruit .