"Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey..."

That's from the first text that I ran across looking for evidence to support my theory — stated in the comments to "A Gray Walk" — that "grey" is a better spelling than "gray":

I like the spelling "grey" because it expresses the meaning better. The letter "a" looks happier to me — maybe just because of my name — and "e" looks dreary. 

As the commenter who raised the subject observed, "grey" tends to be preferred in the U.K. and "gray" is the American preference. The important thing, for blogging purposes, is to pick one and stay with it. The key is consistency within a single work, and I picked "gray" early on in this 12-years-and-counting project — probably under the influence of Crayola. And looking for a photo of "gray" on a crayon label, I see that I've blogged about this before, in a post with the evocative title "50 Shades of Gary."

Anyway, the quote in the post title is the beginning of "To Build a Fire." Wouldn't it seem less foreboding if Jack London had written "Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray..."?

And test this one, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe (whose middle name should have been Allen).

"On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of grey human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots."

or

"On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of gray human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots."