Charles Dickens

It is London and today is Michaelmas term. Lord Chancelor is sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. The weather is a typcial November weather and there are too much mud in the streets of London. Smoke is lowering down from the chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes. In the streets, the dogs are indistinguisible in mire and the horses are scarcely splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers are jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper and losing their foot-hold at street-corners. Tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement.