nting, the sun is. But the
sun-measurer can't tell you whether the rays are stopped by a dense
_shallow_ cloud, or a thin _deep_ one. In healthy weather, the sun
is hidden behind a cloud, as it is behind a tree; and, when the
cloud is past, it comes out again, as bright as before. But in
plague-wind, the sun is choked out of the whole heaven, all day
long, by a cloud which may be a thousand miles square and five
miles deep.

And yet observe: that thin, scraggy, filthy, mangy, miserable
cloud, for all the depth of it, can't turn the sun red, as a good,
business-like fog does with a hundred feet or so of itself. By the
plague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round
the world; in a London fog the air itself is pure, though you
choose to mix up dirt with it, and choke yourself with your own
nastiness.

Now I'm going to show you a diagram of a sunset in entirely pure
weather, above London smoke. I saw it and sketched it from my old
post of observation--the top garret of my father's house at Herne
Hill. There, when the wind is south, we are outside of the smoke
and above it; and this diagram, admirably enlarged from my own
drawing by my, now in all things best aide-de-camp, Mr.
Collingwood, shows you an old-fashioned sunset--the sort of thing
Turner and I used to have to look at,--(nobody else ever would)
constantly. Every sunset and every dawn, in fine weather, had
something of the sort to show us. This is one of the last pure
sunsets I ever saw, about the year 1876,--and the point I want you
to note in it is, that the air being pure, the smoke on the
horizon, though at last it hides the sun, yet hides it through gold
and vermilion. Now, don't go away fancying there's any exaggeration
in that study. The _prismatic_ colors, I told you, were simply
impossible to paint; these, which are transmitted colors, can
indeed be suggested, but no more. The brightest pigment we have
would look dim beside the truth.

I should have liked to have blotted down for you a bit of
plague-cloud to put beside this; but Heaven knows, you can see
enough of it now-a-days without any trouble of mine; and if you
want, in a hurry, to see what the sun looks like through it, you've
only to throw a bad half-crown into a basin of soap and water.

Blanched Sun,--blighted grass,--blinded man.--If, in conclusion,
you ask me for any conceivable cause or meaning of these things--I
can tell you none, according to your modern beliefs; but