misplaced and perverted gradually left you as you gazed.  You perceived its falseness.  You perceived that Mr. Oxford’s club was a monument, a relic of the days when there were giants on earth, that it had come down unimpaired to a race of pigmies, who were making the best of it.  The sole descendant of the giants was the scout behind the door.  As Mr. Oxford and Priam climbed towards it, this unique giant, with a giant’s force, pulled open the gigantic door, and Mr. Oxford and Priam walked imperceptibly in, and the door swung to with a large displacement of air.  Priam found himself in an immense interior, under a distant carved ceiling, far, far upwards, like heaven.  He watched Mr. Oxford write his name in a gigantic folio, under a gigantic clock.  This accomplished, Mr. Oxford led him past enormous vistas to right and left, into a very long chamber, both of whose long walls were studded with thousands upon thousands of massive hooks—­and here and there upon a hook a silk hat or an overcoat.  Mr. Oxford chose a couple of hooks in the expanse, and when they had divested themselves sufficiently he led Priam forwards into another great chamber evidently meant to recall the baths of Carcalla.  In gigantic basins chiselled out of solid granite, Priam scrubbed his finger-nails with a nail-brush larger than he had previously encountered, even in nightmares, and an attendant brushed his coat with a utensil that resembled a weapon of offence lately the property of Anak.

“Shall we go straight to the dining-room now,” asked Mr. Oxford, “or will you have a gin and angostura first?”

Priam declined the gin and angostura, and they went up an overwhelming staircase of sombre marble, and through other apartments to the dining-room, which would have made an excellent riding-school.  Here one had six of the gigantic windows in a row, each with curtains that fell in huge folds from the unseen into the seen.  The ceiling probably existed.  On every wall were gigantic paintings in thick ornate frames, and between the windows stood heroic busts of marble set upon columns of basalt.  The chairs would have been immovable had they not run on castors of weight-resisting rock, yet against the tables they had the air of negligible toys.  At one end of the room was a sideboard that would not have groaned under an ox whole, and at the other a fire, over which an ox might have been roasted in its entirety, leaped under a mantelpiece upon which Goliath could not have put his elbows.

All was silent and grave; the floors were everywhere covered with heavy carpets which hushed all echoes.  There was not the faintest sound.  Sound, indeed, seemed to be deprecated.  Priam had already passed the wide entrance to one illimitable room whose walls were clothed with warnings in gigantic letters:  ‘Silence.’  And he had noticed that all chairs and couches were thickly padded and upholstered in soft leather, and that it was impossible to produce in them the slightest creak.  At a casual glance