.

THE GREAT FOG AND THE FIRE AT MIDNIGHT.
It was London city, and the Bench was the kernel of it to me.

I throbbed with excitement, though I sat looking out of the windows into the subterranean atmosphere quite still and firm.

When you think long undividedly of a single object it gathers light, and when you draw near it in person the strange thing to your mind is the absence of that light; but I, approaching it in this dense fog, seemed to myself to be only thinking of it a little more warmly than usual, and instead of fading it reversed the process, and became, from light, luminous.

Not being able, however, to imagine the Bench a happy place, I corrected the excess of brightness and gave its walls a pine-torch glow; I set them in the middle of a great square, and hung the standard of England drooping over them in a sort of mournful family pride.