midday
In some apparent allusion to an Indian story of a married couple who successfully made their way , he accounts for their solid and resistless advance , resembling that of -- The doubly-wedded man and wife , Pledged to each other and against the world With mutual union . One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian citizens facing South-westward , as being drawn by devout attraction to our nourishing luminary : at the hour , mark , when the Norland cloud-king , after a day of wild invasion , sits him on his restful bank of bluefish smack-o ' - cheek red above Whitechapel , to spy where his last puff of icy javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about the circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of Admirals at the head of the Strand , with illumination of smoke-plumed chimneys , house-roofs , window-panes , weather-vanes , monument and pedimental monsters , and omnibus umbrella . One would fair believe that they advance admireing ; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams . No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business -LRB- from coal-dust to sparks , rushing , as it were , on respiratory blasts of an enormous engine 's centripetal and centrifugal energy -RRB- , their step is leisurely to meet the rosy Dinner , which is ever a see-saw with the God of Light in his fall ; the mask of the noble human visage upon them is not roughened , as at midday , by those knotted hard ridges of the scrambler 's hand seen from forehead down to jaw ; when indeed they have all the appearance of sour scientific productions . And unhappily for the national portrait , in the Poem quoted , the Rajah 's Minister chose an hour between morning and meridian , or at least before an astonished luncheon had come to composure inside their persons , for drawing his Master 's attention to the quaint similarity of feature in the units of the busy antish congregates they had travelled so far to visit and to study : These Britons wear The driven and perplexed look of men Begotten hastily ` twixt business hours It could not have been late afternoon . These Orientals should have seen them , with Victor Radnor among them , fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset . In April , the month of piled and hurried cloud , it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all quarters , either one of the winds brawnily larcenous ; and London , smoking royally to the open skies , builds images of a dusty epic fray for possession of the portly dames .