In Which Mr Headstone Contemplates The Cold From The Comfort Of His Fireside

London. The month of January lately over, and Mr Headstone is sitting in his room in front of a fire, his head inclined towards the door as if at any moment he expects a double knock. Outside it is bitterly cold and there is as much snow and ice in the streets as if the ancient glaciers had but recently retreated from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a polar bear, robed like a lord in white fur, lumbering down the Strand. Dogs shiver in doorways, their common coats poor protection from the cold. Horses, scarcely better, pull their loads over frozen cobbles, their nostrils steaming with white vapour. Foot passengers, wrapped up in coats and scarves and mufflers, their faces (being the only extremity exposed to the elements) as hard as iron, slipping and sliding on the glassy pavements, colliding at street corners and tumbling like skittles. It is weather for neither man nor beast, and so Mr Headstone - claiming an association with one of those species - is making himself comfortable by the fireside with the intention of whiling away the afternoon in the perusal of Mr Dickens's second work, Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy's Progress. Frost everywhere. Frost on the highest windows of the grandest town house, frost on the dirty panes of the lowest hovel in Little Saffron Hill; frost glazing the globes of the pawnbroker's sign, frost creeping like a frozen spider web over the plate-glass window of the gin palace, frost stiffening the hemp rigging of the tall ships berthed at Greenwich, frost whitening the lawns of the great parks, their green youth turning venerable with cold. Frost pinching the toes and fingers of the baker's boy running swiftly through the streets with another order of crumpets for Mr Headstone.