Like a hell-broth, boil and bubble."

I had buttoned myself snugly in my Petersham (may the tailor who invented
_that_ garment "sleep well" whenever he "wears the churchyard livery,
grass-green turned up with brown!") The snow--the beautiful snow--fell
pure and noiselessly on the dirty pavement. Ragged, blue-faced urchins
were scrambling the pearly particles together, and, with all the joyous
recklessness of healthier childhood, carrying on a war less fatal but more
glorious than many that have made countless widows and orphans, and,
_perhaps, one_ hero. Little round doll-like things, in lace and ribbons,
were thumping second-door windows with their tiny hands, and crowing with
ecstasy at the sight of the flaky shower. "Baked-tater" cans and
"roasted-apple" saucepan lids were sputtering and frizzing in impotent
rage as they waged puny war with the congealed element. Hackney
charioteers sat on their boxes warped and whitened; whilst those strange
amalgams of past and _never-to-come_ fashions--the clerks of
London--hurried about with the horrid consciousness of exposing their
costliest garments to the "pelting of the pitiless storm." Evening stole
on. A London twilight has nothing of the pale grey comfort that is
diffused by that gradual change from day to night which I have experienced
when seated by the hearth or the open window of a rural home. There it
seems like the very happiness of nature--a pause between the burning
passions of meridian day and the dark, sorrowing loneliness of night; but
in London on it comes, or rather down it comes, like the mystic medium in
a pantomime--it is a thing that you will not gaze on for long; and you
rush instinctively from daylight to candle-light. I stopped in front of an
old-fashioned public-house, and soon (being a connoisseur in these
matters) satisfied myself that if comfort were the desideratum, "The heart
that was humble might hope for it here." I shook the snow from my
"Petersham," and seeing the word "parlour" painted in white letters on a