Chapter 34

BOOK THE THIRD

A LONG LANE

Chapter 1

LODGERS IN QUEER STREET

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark.
Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was
blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty
spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible,
and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a
haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-
creatures that had no business abroad under the sun; while the sun
itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through
circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were
collapsing 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 Axe--it was rusty-black. From any point of
the high ridge of land northward, 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 dome of Saint
Paul's seemed to die hard; but this was not perceivable in the
streets at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of
vapour charged with muffled 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 sobbing gaslight in the counting-
house window, and a burglarious stream of fog creeping in to
strangle it through the keyhole of the main door. But the light
went out, and the main door opened, and Riah came forth with a
bag under his arm.

Almost in the act of coming out at the door, Riah went into the fog,
and was lost to the eyes of Saint Mary Axe. But the eyes of this
history can follow him westward, by Cornhill, Cheapside, Fleet
Street, and the Strand, to Piccadilly and the Albany. Thither he
went at his grave and measured pace, staff in hand, skirt at heel;
and more than one head, turning to look back at his venerable
figure already lost in the mist, supposed it to be some ordinary
figure indistinctly seen, which fancy and the fog had worked into
that passing likeness.

Arrived at the house in which his master's chambers were on the
second floor, Riah proceeded up the stairs, and paused at
Fascination Fledgeby's door. Making free with neither bell nor
knocker, he struck upon the door with the top of his staff, and,
having listened, sat down on the threshold. It was characteristic of
his habitual submission, that he sat down