It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate¹ London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing², and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared³ in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be nightcreatures that had no business abroad under the sun; while the sun itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies⁴ of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing⁵ flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City — which call Saint Mary Axe⁶ — it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge⁷ of land northward⁸, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome⁹ of Saint Paul’s seemed to die hard; but this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole metropolis¹⁰ was a heap of vapour charged with muffled¹¹ sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.

At nine o’clock on such a morning, the place of business of Pubsey and Co. was not the liveliest object even in Saint Mary Axe — which is not a very lively spot — with a

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