ment in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of
their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come
plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little
snowstorms.

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker,
contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with
the dirtier snow upon the ground, which last deposit had been ploughed
up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and wagons; furrows that
crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great
streets branched off, and made intricate channels, hard to trace, in the
thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest
streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, halt frozen,
whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all
the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were
blazing away to their dear heart's content. There was nothing very
cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of
cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer
sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

For the people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial and
full of glee, calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and
then exchanging a facetious snowball--better-natured missile far than
many a wordy jest--laughing heartily if it went right, and not less
heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open,
and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great,
round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of
jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the
street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced,
broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth
like Spanish friars, and winking, from their shelves, in wanton slyness
at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up
mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustering high in blooming
pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shop-keeper's
benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths
might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy
and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the
woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there
were Norfolk biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off t