ting a bushel of smoke per second, had been
disgorging themselves for at least six hours of the passing day, and
they now produced a sombre tinge, which filled an angle of the horizon
equal to 70 deg., or in bulk twenty-five miles long, by two miles high. As
this cloud goes forward it diverges like a fan, becoming constantly
rarer; hence it is seldom perceived at its extremity, though it has
been distinguished near Windsor. As the wind changes, it fills by
turns the whole country within twenty or thirty miles of London; and
over this area it deposits the volatilized products of three thousand
chaldrons, or nine millions of pounds of coals per day, producing
peculiar effects on the country. In London this smoke is found to
blight or destroy all vegetation; but, as the vicinity is highly
prolific, a smaller quantity of the same residua may be salutary, or
the effect may be counteracted by the extra supplies of manure which
are afforded by the metropolis. Other phenomena are produced by its
union with fogs, rendering them nearly opaque, and shutting out the
light of the sun; it blackens the mud of the streets by its deposit of
tar, while the unctuous mixture renders the foot-pavement slippery;
and it produces a solemn gloom whenever a sudden change of wind
returns over the town the volume that was previously on its passage
into the country. One of the improvements of this age, by which the
next is likely to benefit, has been its contrivances for more perfect
combustion; and for the condensation and sublimation of smoke. The
general adoption of a system of consuming the smoke would render the
London air as pure as that of the country, and diminish many of the
nuisances and inconveniences of a town residence. It must in a future
age be as difficult to believe that the Londoners could have resided
in the dense atmosphere of coal-smoke above described, as it is now
hard to conceive that our ancestors endured houses without the
contrivance of chimneys, from which consequently the smoke of fires
had no means of escape but by the open doors and windows, or through a
hole in the roof!

On the left I passed the entrance into the tastefully planned, but
very useless, park of the justly esteemed #Earl Spencer#. It contains
about seven hundred acres, disposed so as to please the eye of a
stranger, but which, like all _home-spots_, soon lose, from their
familiarity, the power of delighting a constant occupant. Why then
appropriate so