WINTER IN LONDON.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1715, 11 January 1905, Page 60

WINTER IN LONDON.

(From Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, November 25. Winter began in London last. Tuesday morning. Tlie calendars may not say so, but one realised the fact at once on getting out of bed. The temperature -was down below freezing point; the first snow of the season covered the ground outside, and a biting wind from the eastward sent the shivering Londoners crouching over their fires. Hie snowfall in the metropolis was a mild affair, however, compared with the huge drifts experienced in Scotland and the North of England. In some places the blizzard, which raged on Tuesday and Wednesday, is reckoned to be the worst that has been known for thirty years Trains have been snowed-up, hamlet® isolated, telegraph wires blown down, and trade dislocated all over the kingdom. In London the snow has given casual employment to several hundred “out-of-works” in cleaning up the pavements, but on the other hand it must have thrown something like ten thousand artisans temporarily out of work. To the poor, ana especially to the homeless, such -weather as we have had this week is a dreadful penance. “A green Yule makes a fat kirkyard,” runs the old saying; but a white Yule also claims a heavy toll of suffering and death. One of the papers seeks consolation in the reflection _ that the rigours of the Einglisn climate have made the race the hardiest colonists in the world. “The English weather,” it declares, “is the real founder of the British Empire.” On that reasoning we may look forward to seeing the Laplanders or the Patagonians inherit the earth!

London snow soon resolves itself into London slush —a fearsome compound which must be waded through to be appreciated. It soaks your boots, spatters your clothes, spoils your clean collar, and converts the asphalt pavement into a malodorous mud-bath. Only in the earliest morning hours, ere the mighty stream of traffic has stained the white radiance of the snow mantle., does London wear that look of peaceful serenity which you see on frosted Christmas cards. And yet it has its picturesque moments even at the height of a November blizzard. When the theatres pour forth their thousands into the blackness of the night, and snowflakes swirl and dance in the rays of the arclamps, failing in silvery spangles on the gay opera-cloaks of the ladies; when every 'busman and cab-driver is for the nonce a snow-man, gleaming white as to hat, beard, and apron; when travellers on the 'bus-tops sit, ill at ease, on cushions of the same beautiful white snow, and pedestrians measure their length in the midst of it—why, then the scene is picturesque enough, and so, for that matter, is the language! Tom Hood hit off the conditions of a November day in London as well as anyone. A couple of his verses:— No sun, no moon ! No morn, no noon, No dawn, no dusk, no proper time of day; No sky, no earthly view, No distance looking blue, No road, no street, no “ t’other side the way.” No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member, No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruit, no flowers, no birds no leaves, November !