The New Year's Light 



of cloud ; the wet road gleams white at evening, 

 reflecting the increase of light, and the silver reeds 

 of old dry fennel and cow-parsley stand newly 

 conspicuous by its side. 



The whiter light seems to catch from the walls of 

 stone buildings a prevailing hardness and greyness, 

 just as all roofs and walls in October seemed to 

 exhale the same darkness as the air, itself in decay. 

 This responsiveness to the season and the weather 

 is particularly conspicuous in towns built of soft 

 and crumbling stone ; but it is noticeable wher- 

 ever the stone is not too hard or the air too pure. 

 In London the sooty atmosphere makes red and 

 even yellow brick susceptible in time to the same 

 changes of the sky. The cloud-rack over the wet 

 January street becomes charged with enough light 

 to illumine a visible grey on the pigeons' wings 

 shooting high above ; and the house-fronts answer 

 to their own smirched doves as the ash-boughs in 

 country copses to the wings of the wood-pigeons. 



By February there is a further change in the face 

 of the sky. The brownness of the winter storm- 

 vapours has become a firm, soft grey ; their chaotic 

 vagueness has been replaced by the even layers into 

 which the year first parts the rack of winter before 

 rolling it from the face of heaven. It is the oppo- 

 site process to the thickening of mackerel clouds in 

 the still skies of October, till at last no sunshine 

 came through. Yet the February sky does not, 

 as a rule, reform the rounded cloudlets of autumn, 

 but draws itself into these long, even layers, between 

 which, as through the openings in a southern sun- 



