The newsboys, as he went, were crying themselves hoarse along the
footways: "Special edition. Shocking murder of an M.P." That was
the funeral oration of one friend and client; and he could not
help a certain apprehension lest the good name of another should
be sucked down in the eddy of the scandal. It was, at least, a
ticklish decision that he had to make; and self-reliant as he was
by habit, he began to cherish a longing for advice. It was not to
be had directly; but perhaps, he thought, it might be fished for.
Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with
Mr. Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at
a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a
particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the
foundations of his house. The fog still slept on the wing above
the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and
through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the
procession of the town's life was still rolling in through the
great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. But the room was
gay with firelight. In the bottle the acids were long ago
resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour
grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn
afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to
disperse the fogs of London.
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