Michaelmas term was lately over in London.The Lord Chancellor was sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall in implacable November weather.There was as much mud in the streets as if the waters had but it was newly retired from the face of the earth.It would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus in forty feet long or so.It was waddling like an elphantine lizard up Holborn Hill.There was smoke that was lowering down fron chimney-pots.It was making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as full-grown snowflakes which were gone in to mourning that one might imagine for the death of the sun.Dogs were undistinguishable in mire.Horses were scarcely better.They splashed to their very blinkers.Foot passengers were jastling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper.They lost their foot -hold at street-corners where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke.They added new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud.They struck at those points tenaciously to the pavement.They accumulasted at comppound interest.