Much difficulty was experienced in locomotion. Trains were delayed but there was no interruption of the service, for the wind being still, there was no drift. All day and night of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and the twentieth the snow came steadily down, and on the twenty-first, despite all efforts to clear it, was twenty-seven inches deep. Traffic in the streets was now suspended, and the steamers ceased to ply, partly from want of passengers, and partly because of the dangerous obscurity. Most of the lines were blocked, and on the twenty-second when the snow had even depth of thirty-three inches, not a train reached London. Business was at an end. Till now the snow had been treated as a good joke by the populace who pelted each other in high spirits at their holiday, but when the trains ceased to arrive a species of desponding stupor seemed to fall upon them. The twenty-third was a windy day, the breeze increasing from the east, till in the evening it blew almost a hurricane. The grains of frozen snow lifted up and driven by the wind rushed up the streets like pellets from a gun. The narrow portals of Temple Bar were impassable, so vehement was the blast, and those who attempted to get through describe the hard snow as cutting the skin of their faces in a painful manner. This gale drifted the snow in huge mounds. On the morning of the twenty-fourth the western side of Trafalgar Square was eighteen feet deep in snow, the entrance to the Haymarket was blocked up, and Regent Street near the Quadrant was buried under more than twenty feet. The Thames Embankment was quite clear – the wind having an uninterrupted sweep up it – but the Houses of Parliament formed a dam across the stream of snow and against the eastern side there rose a mound at least twenty-seven feet high. The fleet of merchantmen at the mouth of the Thames were driven onshore, and the whole northern and eastern coasts were strewn with wreckage. Many of these incidents were not ascertained till long afterwards, for the telegraph posts were blown down, the wires snapped, and all communication at an end. The bitter wind lasted five days, and is described as causing an insupportable cold which neither walls, nor curtains, nor roaring fires could overcome. It penetrated through everything.