—­“Charms of powerful trouble,
  Like a hell-broth, boil and bubble.”

I had buttoned myself snugly in my Petersham (may the tailor who invented that garment “sleep well” whenever he “wears the churchyard livery, grass-green turned up with brown!”) The snow—­the beautiful snow—­fell pure and noiselessly on the dirty pavement.  Ragged, blue-faced urchins were scrambling the pearly particles together, and, with all the joyous recklessness of healthier childhood, carrying on a war less fatal but more glorious than many that have made countless widows and orphans, and, perhaps, one hero.  Little round doll-like things, in lace and ribbons, were thumping second-door windows with their tiny hands, and crowing with ecstasy at the sight of the flaky shower.  “Baked-tater” cans and “roasted-apple” saucepan lids were sputtering and frizzing in impotent rage as they waged puny war with the congealed element.  Hackney charioteers sat on their boxes warped and whitened; whilst those strange amalgams of past and never-to-come fashions—­the clerks of London—­hurried about with the horrid consciousness of exposing their costliest garments to the “pelting of the pitiless storm.”  Evening stole on.  A London twilight has nothing of the pale grey comfort that is diffused by that gradual change from day to night which I have experienced when seated by the hearth or the open window of a rural home.  There it seems like the very happiness of nature—­a pause between the burning passions of meridian day and the dark, sorrowing loneliness of night; but in London on it comes, or rather down it comes, like the mystic medium in a pantomime—­it is a thing that you will not gaze on for long; and you rush instinctively from daylight to candle-light.  I stopped in front of an old-fashioned public-house, and soon (being a connoisseur in these matters) satisfied myself that if comfort were the desideratum, “The heart that was humble might hope for it here.”  I shook the snow from my “Petersham,” and seeing the word “parlour” painted in white letters on a black door, bent my steps towards it.  I was on the point of opening the door, when a slim young man, with a remarkable small quantity of hair, stopped my onward coarse by gurgling rather than ejaculating—­for the sentence seemed a continuous word—­

“Can’t-go-in-there-Sir.”

“Why not?” said I.”

“Puffs-Sir.”

“Puffs!”

“Yes-Sir,—­Tues’y night—­Puffs-meets-on-Tues’y,” and then addressing a young girl in the bar, delivered an order for “One-rum-one-bran’y-one gin-no-whisky-all-’ot,” which I afterwards found to signify one glass of each of the liqueurs.

I was about to remonstrate against the exclusiveness of the “Puffs,” when recollecting the proverbial obduracy of waiters, I contented myself with buttoning my coat.  My annoyance was not diminished by hearing the hearty burst of merriment called forth by some jocular member of this terra incognita, but rendered still more distressing by the appearance of the landlord, who emerged from the room, his eyes streaming with those tears that nature sheds over an expiring laugh.