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62
OUR GIRLS

in bales. And here is a slip of a girl, on the front-board of a two-horse van, whistling her way through the heaving throng, with a ton or two of leather skins behind her which she is taking from the tanneries of Bermondsey to the railway station for Northampton, to be made into boots for soldiers.

On the river below the tide of war-traffic is no less urgent. Barges, barges, barges, some tugged, some going by motor-power, some under their own sail, coming down stream from the direction of the Houses of Parliament to where the grey walls of the Tower stand four-square against the eastern sky, some of them laden with milk and meat, others with planks to be made into shell-boxes near Dagenham Dock, and others with pit props for the trenches—bringing lacerating visions of denuded valleys, where bluebells were nodding under the shade of sycamores only a little while ago.

Or, better still, let us stand on Westminster Bridge at midnight, where to