LONDON IN A FOG.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 592, 12 May 1876, Page 3

LONDON IN A FOG.

(Daily News.) The dark veil that overhung the city on February 11th from morning to night wus sufficiently exceptional to merit some kind of notice. It was, in fact, one of the densest and most disagreeable fogs with which London has been visited for many a day, and, combined with a severe frost, it. rendered street travelling almost as dangerous as it was difficult. Though late on the previous night there were signs of its coming, the white mist of a hoar frost had not changed to the murky cloud with which we are too familiar until after daybreak. Then, however, it speedily wrapped the city in darkness, and extended far away over the surrounding suburbs. By the hour when the activity of business life usually begins, all the thoroughfares were shrouded in gloom deeper than that of a moonless night. Where the streets open down to the river, fitful rays now and then struggled to assert themselves, but only succeeded in casting a dreary cloud across the prevailing dulness of the sky, like the faint gieam of a dying flame reflected on a column of smoke. Through the streets muffled figures moved like restless shadows, and almost as noiselessly, for the fog seemed to deideu sound nearly as much as it obscured the light. It was London by night without the night life of London. The people seemed to lose individuality as the places did, and the impression on the mind was thai of a weary succession of similar figures plodding through a monotonous line of thoroughfares without variety. All the marked features had disappeared. The Strand was like Piccadilly ; Fleet street like the Strand; and Cheapside like Fleet street, the only difference being that of the increasing roll of traffic, or the deepeniue shadow, as one exchanged the broad ways of the west for the narrow and devious defiles of the east. Ludgate circus might have been Trafalgar square for all the character that was left in either. Standing at the end of Fleet street, and endeavouring to evolve some familiar form out of the darkness one only got a confused picture of blinking lights relieved against a dud, black, wall, and only the appearance and disappearance of these lights marked the difference between the roadways and the houses. In St Paul's Churchyard not a column or a pediment of the great Cathedral oould be seen at times from the top of Ludgatehill. Standing within a few yards of the pile an hour after noon, you would have looked iu vain for a trace of its existence. No gleam of sunlight striking athwart the fog spaikled on the glided vane ; or if it did, the intervening curtain was too dense to let a reflected ray through. From eud to end of the city streets gas was flaring in the shopwindows, but it failed to throw a light beyond the pavement, and from the opposite side of the way each window looked as if many thicknesses of dingy yellow gauze had been drawn across it. How the police managed to regulate the tralfic from many quarters that converges in front of the Exchange must remain a mystery. There was little apparent diminution of the incessant stream of vehicles that one may sec there at the same hour any clay, and yet they fell into their planes without confusion, and with no more than the usual number of rough but harmless collisions. Towards the riverside, though the darkness was not so deep, the fog seemed scarcely less dense. Looking over the parapet of London bridge, one could hardly realise that a broad and rapid river was flowing silently beneath. The eye seemed to be g' zing rather into impenetrable and interminable depths of murky vapour, No noise of ijusy steamboats throbbed on ihe air, lor none could ply in such a fog. Occasionally a bnrge, rising on the tide, its d?cks and gunwales white with rime, would flash suddenly out from this vapour, shoot the arch, and then swiftly

and silently disappear, as if sliding down an unseen plane. With this exception the river traffic was for a while entirely suspended, while that on land seemed to be going on with little interruption. During the afternoon the fog lifted considerably, and left the city in comparative light, but it had only changed its place. From four to six o'clock some of the suburbs were enveloped iu a curtain of yellow mist, which the struggling street lamps utterly failed to illumine, and as night came on the traffic was in many parts entirely stopped, while in others trams and omnibuses could only move at a footpace.