Fog is everywhere. It’s up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows. And it’s down the river, rolling defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog is on the Essex marshes. It is on the Kentish heights. Fog is creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; it is lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships. It droops on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog is in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards. Fog is in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, it is down in his close cabin. And fog is cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. There are fortunate people on the bridges who are peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.