lantern.  Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had oiled it first, it grated so dismally.  The gate swung open and we stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared cavern, carved out of the solid darkness.  The conductor and my friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise.  For the moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom.  I looked my inquiry!

    “It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey."...

We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting, standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness —­reached out their hands toward us—­some appealing, some beckoning, some warning us away.  Effigies they were—­statues over the graves; but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows.  Now a little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn of history, more than twelve hundred years ago . . . .

Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of interest.  He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the great pile.  Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would say: 

“Observe the height of the Abbey—­one hundred and three feet to the base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day.  Notice the base of this column—­old, very old—­hundreds and hundreds of years —­and how well they knew how to build in those old days!  Notice it —­every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and flake.  Architects cannot teach nature anything.  Let me remove this matting—­it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before time and sacrilegious idlers marred it.  Now there, in the border, was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by the ornaments that have been pulled out—­here is an A and there is an O, and yonder another A—­all beautiful Old English capitals; there is no telling what the inscription was—­no record left now.  Now move along in this direction, if you please.  Yonder is where old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the Abbey; Sebert died in 616,—­[Clemens probably misunderstood