of time supervened. Amazement, when he looked at my
watch, struck him dumb. Ten minutes later we were in yellow fog, then in
brown. Temple stared at both windows and at me; he jumped from his seat
and fell on it, muttering, 'No; nonsense! I say!' but he had accurately
recognized London's fog. I left him unanswered to bring up all his
senses, which the railway had outstripped, for the contemplation of this
fact, that we two were in the city of London.

CHAPTER XI

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. Then, because I next conceived it a
foreign kind of place, different altogether from that home growth of
ours, the Tower of London, I topped it with a multitude of domes of
pumpkin or turban shape, resembling the Kremlin of Moscow, which had once
leapt up in the eye of Winter, glowing like a million pine-torches, and
flung shadows of stretching red horses on the black smoke-drift. But what
was the Kremlin, that had seen a city perish, to this Bench where my
father languished! There was no comparing them for tragic horror. And the
Kremlin had snow-fields around it; this Bench was caught out of sight,
hemmed in by an atmosphere thick as Charon breathed; it might as well be
underground.

'Oh! it's London,' Temple went on, correcting his incorrigible doubts
about it. He jumped on the platform; we had to call out not to lose one
another. 'I say, Richie, this is London,' he said, linking his arm in
mine: 'you know by the size of the station; and besides, there's the fog.
Oh! it's London. We've overshot it, we're positively in London.'

I could spare no sympathy for his feelings, and I did not respond to his
inquirin