London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in
Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the
streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet
long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke
lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with
flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning,
one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in
mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot
passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of
ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of
thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since
the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust
upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement,
and accumulating at compound interest.
