knitting-needle

— If you go down the bridge-steps, you seem to have dropped as through a trap from tumult into stagnation. You meet one person heavily dragging his feet up the steps; on a landing a ragged, cowering tramp is dozing; at the bottom of the steps the street seller of fruit and ginger-beer plies her knitting-needles as self-absorbedly as if she were sitting at a cottage-door with lime trees rustling, instead of London traffic rumbling, overhead.