THE SWEAT OF AN HONEST MAN'S BROW Mr Mortimer Lightwood and Mr Eugene Wrayburn took a coffee-house dinner together in Mr Lightwood's office.

They had newly agreed to set up a joint establishment together.

They had taken a bachelor cottage near Hampton, on the brink of the Thames, with a lawn, and a boat-house; and all things fitting, and were to float with the stream through the summer and the Long Vacation.
It was not summer yet, but spring; and it was not gentle spring ethereally mild, as in Thomson's Seasons, but nipping spring with an easterly wind, as in Johnson's, Jackson's, Dickson's, Smith's, and Jones's Seasons.

The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit.

Every street was a sawpit, and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding him and choking him.
That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows, gyrated here and there and everywhere.