Thursday was, on the whole, the most disagreeable day we
remember in London for fourteen years. The thermometer, which marked 10 degrees of frost in the open air, could scarcely be raised above 500 indoors, the streets were as slippery as glass, and there was thin, irritating, slushy snow about. The air was so thick with mist that gas would scarcely burn, and to crown all, a deep, black bank of fog hung over the city like a pall. The fog did not descend, but the darkness, which in the Strand was too deep to allow any one to read, lasted the whole day, a most unusual event, and the streets looked almost spectral. The effect was not like that of night, but of some new con- dition of being, in which either the atmosphere had lost its power of transmitting light, or the eye had lost its power of perceiving objects. Few carriages were visible, the cabs crawled, and the pedestrians slunk About as if they were
afraid at every turn of being run over. it was a day to have made the heart of a Laplander rejoice that he had at last found a climate much worse than his own, and to have justified S. Vis- conti, the Engineer, in his conclusion that London would be a beautiful city if its inhabitants could only see it ; a day on which a great fire would hardly have seemed a calamity.
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