voice was raised or a door was shut,--echoes, not confined to the
many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till
they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the
Norman arches were half-buried in the earth.

You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the
dead winter time.

When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going down
of the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that the forms of
things were indistinct and big--but not wholly lost. When sitters
by the fire began to see wild faces and figures, mountains and
abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals. When people in the
streets bent down their heads and ran before the weather. When
those who were obliged to meet it, were stopped at angry corners,
stung by wandering snow-flakes alighting on the lashes of their
eyes,--which fell too sparingly, and were blown away too quickly,
to leave a trace upon the frozen ground. When windows of private
houses closed up tight and warm. When lighted gas began to burst
forth in the busy and the quiet streets, fast blackening otherwise.
When stray pedestrians, shivering along the latter, looked down at
the glowing fires in kitchens, and sharpened their sharp appetites
by sniffing up the fragrance of whole miles of dinners.

When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on
gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. When
mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung
above the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on rocks and
headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birds
breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead. When