This intermingling of white fog and black smoke speedily produced that infernal compound which makes the lives of five millions of people almost intolerable. Stagnation of trade, interruption of business, stoppage of traffic, depression of spirits, and serious injury to health ensued. Every Londoner was reduced to a state of utter gloom and wretchedness, and some two millions of the poorer sort of citizens “bitterly thought of the morrow,” and feared that the time-honoured Show of the following day--which, with all its absurdities and all its anachronisms, still breaks the monotony of countless lives, and rejoices the hearts of multitudes of toilers who have little else to rejoice them--would be a failure and a disappointment. The ex-Lord Mayor felt glad that he was going out of office, and could enjoy the society of worthy Mrs. Buggins at the domestic hearth at Wimbledon, instead of at the dusky Mansion House; and the incoming Lord Mayor sighed involuntarily when he reflected that, on the day ensuing, as he passed them at noontide by gas-light, he would appear to his fellow-citizens, and subjects of one year, as a man suffering from a severe attack of the jaundice. The incoming Lady Mayoress, who was afflicted, poor thing, with neuralgia in the face, dreaded exposure next day in the raw fog on the embankment in her state coach; and her Ladyship’s “Maids of Honour”--buxom, strapping wenches from Finsbury Square, who laid in a stock of health and jolly red cheeks when they went every year for six weeks’ sea-bathing to Margate--devised (by gas-light) all sorts of pretty things in swansdown to protect their fat shoulders from the cold during next day’s procession. My Lord Scamperdown at the “Carlton”--and he, to be sure, was a pretty tough old customer--avowed publicly that “that fog was more than any fellah alive could stand,” and swore he’d be off to Cadiz, or Cairo, or Castellamare; and all the men within earshot wished they were Lord Scamperdown, and could follow his Lordship’s noble example. Foodles, too, of the “Reform,” who had failed the previous week for something over the respectable sum of £200,000, committed suicide. The “intelligent British Jury,” who ought to have known all about it, found as their verdict that Foodles had committed “the rash act in aberration of mind, occasioned by miasmatic vapours acting upon an excitable temperament,” and would have separated, quite happy at having thus secured Christian burial for Foodles (who, between ourselves, was the most stony-hearted old heathen imaginable), had not the Coroner--whose wife had just presented him (for the second time) with twins, both of whom were doing well, and who lived near the Lambeth Potteries--remarked, in a hollow voice, that “he hoped he might not himself be the _next_ victim to a combination of fog and coal-smoke.” That was a very unpleasant observation to make, and so the Jury felt it.