about it as we look
out through windows, which no instinct now prompts us to throw
open, as it has done every day for the last month.

But it is only when we open our doors and issue into the street,
that the hateful reality comes right home to us. All moisture,
and softness, and pleasantness has gone clean out of the air
since last night; we seem to inhale yards of horse hair instead
of satin; our skins dry up; our eyes, and hair, and whiskers, and
clothes are soon filled with loathsome dust, and our nostrils
with the reek of the great city. We glance at the weather-cock on
the nearest steeple, and see that it points N.E. And so long as
the change lasts, we carry about with us a feeling of anger and
impatience, as though we personally were being ill-treated. We
could have borne with it well enough in November; it would have
been natural, and all in the days work in March; but now, when
Rotten Row is beginning to be crowded, when long lines of
pleasure vans are leaving town on Monday mornings for Hampton
Court or the poor remains of dear Epping Forest, when the
exhibitions are open, or about to open, when the religious public
is up, or on its way up, for May meetings, when the Thames is
already sending up faint warnings of what we may expect as soon
as his dirty old life's blood shall have been thoroughly warmed
up, and the "Ship", and "Trafalgar", and the "Star and Garter"
are in full swing at the antagonistic poles of the cockney
system, we do feel that this blight which has come over us and
everything is an insult, and that while it lasts, as there is
nobody who can be made particularly responsible for it, we are
justified in going about in general disgust, and ready to quarrel
with anybody we may meet on the smallest pretext.

This sort of east-windy state is perhaps the best physical
analogy for that mental one in which our hero now found himself.
The real crises was over; he had managed to pass through the eye
of the storm, and drift for the present at least into the skirts
of it, where he lay rolling under bare poles, comparatively safe,
but without any power as yet to get the ship well in hand, and
make her obey her helm. The storm might break over him again at
any minute, and would find him almost as helpless as ever.

For he could not follow Drysdale's advice at once, and break off
his visits to "The Choughs" altogether. He went back again after
a day or two, but only for short visits; he never stayed beh