As to street noises, the rumbling of wheels in the lane merely rushed in at the gateway in going past, and rushed out again: making the listening Mistress Affery feel as if she were deaf, and recovered the sense of hearing by instantaneous flashes. You should alike find rain, hail, frost, and thaw lingering in that dismal enclosure when they had vanished from other places and as to snow, you should see it there for weeks, long after it had changed from yellow to black, slowly weeping away its grimy life. The stars, to be sure, coldly watched it when the nights and the smoke were clear enough and all bad weather stood by it with a rare fidelity.
If the sun ever touched it, it was but with a ray, and that was gone in half an hour if the moonlight ever fell upon it, it was only to put a few patches on its doleful cloak, and make it look more wretched.
The debilitated old house in the city, wrapped in its mantle of soot, and leaning heavily on the crutches that had partaken of its decay and worn out with it, never knew a healthy or a cheerful interval, let what would betide.
