t, and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning,
where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk
and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement
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 waggons; 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, half 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 hearts' content. There was nothing very
cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet there was 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, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were
bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence, to dangle
from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they
passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy a