"London. Michaelmas term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus forty feet long or so waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering ftdown from chimney-pots making a soft black drizzle flwith flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown flsnowflakes gone into mourning one might imagine for the death of the sun. Dogs undistinguishable in mire. Horses scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers."