“Here, sir! coming!” responded a voice from the bottom of one of the long mugs at a street breakfast stall, which the fog almost concealed from their view, and presently an urchin in a drab coat and blue collar came towing a wretched, ewe-necked, hungry-looking, roan rosinante along from where he had been regaling himself with a mug of undeniable bohea, sweetened with a composition of brown sugar and sand.

“Now be after getting up,” said Jorrocks, “for time and the Surrey ’ounds wait for no man.  That’s not a werry elegant tit, but still it’ll carry you to Croydon well enough, where I’ll put you on a most undeniable bit of ’orse-flesh—­a reg’lar clipper.  That’s a hack—­what they calls three-and-sixpence a side, but I only pays half a crown.  Now, Binjimin, cut away home, and tell Batsay to have dinner ready at half-past five to a minute, and to be most particular in doing the lamb to a turn.”

The Yorkshireman having adjusted himself in the old flat-flapped hack saddle, and got his stirrups let out from “Binjimin’s” length to his own, gathered up the stiff, weather-beaten reins, gave the animal a touch with his spurs, and fell into the rear of Mr. Jorrocks.  The morning appeared to be getting worse.  Instead of the grey day-dawn of the country, when the thin transparent mist gradually rises from the hills, revealing an unclouded landscape, a dense, thick, yellow fog came rolling in masses along the streets, obscuring the gas lights, and rendering every step one of peril.  It could be both eat and felt, and the damp struck through their clothes in the most summary manner.  “This is bad,” said Mr. Jorrocks, coughing as he turned the corner by Drury Lane, making for Catherine Street, and upset an early breakfast and periwinkle stall, by catching one corner of the fragile fabric with his toe, having ridden too near to the pavement.  “Where are you for now? and bad luck to ye, ye boiled lobster!” roared a stout Irish wench, emerging from a neighbouring gin-palace on seeing the dainty viands rolling in the street.  “Cut away!” cried Jorrocks to his friend, running his horse between one of George Stapleton’s dust-carts and a hackney-coach, “or the Philistines will be upon us.”  The fog and crowd concealed them, but “Holloa! mind where you’re going, you great haw-buck!” from a buy-a-hearth-stone boy, whose stock-in-trade Jorrocks nearly demolished, as he crossed the corner of Catherine Street before him, again roused his vigilance.  “The deuce be in the fog,” said he, “I declare I can’t see across the Strand.  It’s as dark as a wolf’s mouth.—­Now where are you going to with that meazly-looking cab of yours?—­you’ve nearly run your shafts into my ’oss’s ribs!” cried he to a cabman who nearly upset him.  The Strand was kept alive by a few slip-shod housemaids, on their marrow-bones, washing the doorsteps, or ogling the neighbouring pot-boy on his morning errand for the pewters.  Now and then a crazy jarvey passed slowly by, while a hurrying mail, with a drowsy driver and