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 tomeet 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 fullgrown 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 generalinfection 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 crustuponcrust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compoundinterest .
The City looked unpromising enough, as Bella made her way along its gritty streets. Most of its moneymills were slackening sail, or had left off grinding for the day. The master-millers had already departed, and the journeymen were departing. There was a jaded aspecton the business lanes and courts, and the very pavements had a weary appearance, confusedby the tread of a million of feet. There must be hours of night to temper down the day’s distraction of sofeverish a place . Asyet the worry of the newlystopped whirling and grinding on the part of the money-mills seemed tolinger in the air, and the quiet was more like the prostration of a spent giant than the repose of one who was renewing his strength .
(Our Mutual Friend, Book III, Ch. 16, “The Feast of the Three Hobgoblins”)