Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with
Mr. Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle
of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in
the foundations of his house. The fog still slept on the wing
above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like
carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty
wind. But the room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the
acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened
with time, As the colour grows richer in stained windows;
and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards
was ready to be set free
and to disperse the fogs of London.
From "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson
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