5. London (Cont.)

In the evening of the same day, I happened to witness London’s popular revelry, and I confess I had never seen anything like it. Illumination blazed forth, and immense masses of people poured into the streets, moving as one continuous element. The English are generally a serious and solid people, but on this evening everything turned into endless merriment and childish pranks. The male element was armed with some sort of infernal devices, which at contact with the fair sex produced piercing cracks, causing cries among timid maidens; while the fair sex was armed with hand-held fountains, which sprayed people’s faces with cold streams—anyone whom the beauties chose as a victim of their pranks. All this made noise, shouted, laughed and guffawed, seized with irresistible bursts of mischief and merriment. Never had I seen such carefree childishness in the popular masses, and still less could I have supposed that the inhabitants of gloomy and foggy London could indulge in such endless pranking merriment. But remarkably, in this countless mass of people, seized with merriment, there was absolutely no trace of the “merry” in our Russian sense. All was merry but decorous, playful but not disrespectful, exuberant but not drunk, and, naturally, there was not a word of arrests or police reports.