Chapter 1
In Chancery
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 down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle,
with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into
mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs,
indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to
their very blinkers. Foot-passengers, jostling one another’s
umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their
foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other footpassengers
have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if
this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust
of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest.