London disappointed me in one regard--when I opened my eyes that
morning there was no fog. There was not the slightest sign of a
fog. I had expected that my room would be full of fog of about
the consistency of Scotch stage dialect--soupy, you know, and thick
and bewildering. I had expected that servants with lighted tapers
in their hands would be groping their way through corridors like
caves, and that from the street without, would come the hoarse-voiced
cries of cabmen lost in the enshrouding gray. You remember Dickens
always had them hoarse-voiced.

This was what I confidently expected. Such, however, was not to
be. I woke to a consciousness that the place was flooded with
indubitable and undoubted sunshine. To be sure, it was not the
sharp, hard sunshine we have in America, which scours and bleaches
all it touches, until the whole world has the look of having just
been clear-starched and hot-ironed. It was a softened, smoke-edged,
pastel-shaded sunshine; nevertheless it was plainly recognizable
as the genuine article.

Nor was your London shadow the sharply outlined companion in black
who accompanies you when the weather is fine in America. Your
shadow in London was rather a dim and wavery gentleman who caught
up with you as you turned out of the shaded by-street; who went
with you a distance and then shyly vanished, but was good company
while he stayed, being restful, as your well-bred Englishman nearly
always is, and not overly aggressive.

There was no fog that first morning, or the next morning, or any
morning of the twenty-odd we spent in England. Often the weather
was cloudy, and occasionally it was rainy; and then London would