Thursday was a day of severe trial to the flesh
of all Londoners. - The morning trains were late, the cabs were not at all, the slush was ancle deep, the wind was furious, the snow was being
shovelled off the houses on to your hat or umbrella,—in short, life was purely a trust, and a very heavy one, without allevia- tions. The cabs are evidently like Sir Robert Peel's Bank Act of 1844. They fail precisely at the emergency for which they are specially provided, diffusing a general panic and discredit through- out society,—just as if the ships were all to strike work on occasion of a universal flood. When the slush on the foot-paths began to abate under the efforts of the army of men who were employed in shovelling it into dangerously dense hillocks in the streets, in which carriages and omnibuses subsequently stuck help- less, the cabs returned to life, having desisted only so long as the anguish to foot passengers was at its maximum. London covered with a uniform dirty paste six inches deep, on pavement and roadway alike, is a place of suffering such as Dante has scarcely conceived or Gustave Dor6 delineated.
