gray, held high, and a straight well-fitted figure dressed in such
keeping that there was nothing for the eye to dwell on in her various
black. She looked not only authoritative; people often do that with us;
she looked authorized; she had been empowered by the vested rights and
interests to look so her whole life; one could not be mistaken in her,
any more than in the black trees and their electric-green buds in the
high-fenced square, or in the vast, high, heavy, handsome houses where,
in the cellary or sepulchral cold, she would presently resume the
rheumatic pangs of which the comparative warmth of the outer air had
momentarily relieved her stately bulk.

But what is this? While I am noting the terrors of the English clime,
they have all turned themselves into allures and delights. There have
come three or four days, since I arrived in London, of so fine and
mellow a warmth, of skies so tenderly blue, and so heaped with such soft
masses of white clouds, that one wonders what there was ever to complain
of. In the parks and in the gardened spaces which so abound, the leaves
have grown perceptibly, and the grass thickened so that you can smell
it, if you cannot hear it, growing. The birds insist, and in the air is
that miraculous lift, as if nature, having had this banquet of the year
long simmering, had suddenly taken the lid off, to let you perceive with
every gladdening sense what a feast you were going to have presently in
the way of summer. From the delectable vision rises a subtile haze,
which veils the day just a little from its own loveliness, and lies upon
the sighing and expectant city like the substance of a dream made
visible. It has the magic to transmute you to this substance yourself,
so that while you dawdle afoot, or whisk by in your hansom, or rumble
earthquakingly aloft on your omnibus-top, you are aware of being a part,
very dim, very subtile, of the passer's blissful consciousness. It is
flattering, but you feel like warning him not to go in-doors, or he will