e times dark since last
I wrote, and the darkness seeming each time as it settles more
loathsome, at last stopping my reading in mere blindness. One lurid
gleam of white cumulus in upper lead-blue sky, seen for half a
minute through the sulphurous chimney-pot vomit of blackguardly
cloud beneath, where its rags were thinnest.

_Thursday, 22d Feb. 1883._

Yesterday a fearfully dark mist all afternoon, with steady, south
plague-wind of the bitterest, nastiest, poisonous blight, and
fretful flutter. I could scarcely stay in the wood for the horror
of it. To-day, really rather bright blue, and bright semi-cumuli,
with the frantic Old Man blowing sheaves of lancets and chisels
across the lake--not in strength enough, or whirl enough, to raise
it in spray, but tracing every squall's outline in black on the
silver gray waves, and whistling meanly, and as if on a flute made
of a file.

_Sunday, 17th August, 1879._

Raining in foul drizzle, slow and steady; sky pitch-dark, and I
just get a little light by sitting in the bow-window; diabolic
clouds over everything: and looking over my kitchen garden
yesterday, I found it one miserable mass of weeds gone to seed, the
roses in the higher garden putrefied into brown sponges, feeling
like dead snails; and the half-ripe strawberries all rotten at the
stalks."

6. And now I come to the most important sign of the plague-wind and
the plague-cloud: that in bringing on their peculiar darkness, they
_blanch_ the sun instead of reddening it. And here I must note
briefly to you the uselessness of observation by instruments, or
machines, instead of eyes. In the first year when I had begun to
notice the specialty of the plague-wind, I went of course to the
Oxford observatory to consult its registrars. They have their
anemometer always on the twirl, and can tell you the force, or at
least the pace, of a gale,[19] by day or night. But the anemometer
can only record for you how often it has been driven round, not at
all whether it went round _steadily_, or went round _trembling_.
And on that point depends the entire question whether it is a
plague breeze or a healthy one: and what's the use of telling you
whether the wind's strong or not, when it can't tell you whether
it's a strong medicine, or a strong poison?

But again--you have your _sun_-measure, and can tell exactly at any
moment how strong, or how weak, or how wa