time and thoughts.

From the dais-end of the hall, where on other days the Benchers' table
stands, you may well take a preliminary survey of the scene of action.
What a flood of light those sun-burners in the roof pour down! The
blazoned escutcheons of past and present judges, members of the Inn,
with which the walls are lined, show off all their colors, and the
stained-glass windows do their best to look illuminated. In the gallery
opposite a band of no less than nine-and-twenty picked men of Coote and
Tinney's sit ready to play all the latest dance-music as long as any one
will stay to dance to it; while all over the smoothly-polished floor the
dancers are somehow evolving a kind of order out of chaos, and sorting
themselves into pairs and sets for the opening quadrille. The male half
of the gathering is, of course, almost exclusively legal, but there are
no distinctions of legal rank to-night. Learned vice-chancellors,
queen's counsel, juniors and students fraternize and compete for chats
and dances with the ladies quite promiscuously. The hosts of the
evening, the members of the corps, are distinguished by a small knot of
ribbons, the corps colors, in their button-holes; but, for comfort's
sake, uniforms have been tabooed in favor of the ordinary civilian's
black and white. There is present, however, a military element, after
all. Something like eight hundred guests are assembled here, and no
little method is needed to enable such a crowd to move about from room
to room without confusion and blocking-up of doorways and passages. So a
couple of tall Guardsmen have been providently posted in every doorway,
who, you will find, allow you readily enough to pass them in one
direction, but, once passed, politely prohibit your returning on your
steps, and point you forward on a course which, circling through a suite
of rooms and passages, will bring you round again by another entrance
into the ball-room. By this simple expedient free circulation to and
from the tea-rooms and the supper-tent--a temporary erection stretching
nearly to the Temple church outside--is effectually kept up all the
evening, and much loss of time and temper saved. Note how, in the hall,
too, the crowd of dancers are kept, in their own interest, within
bounds. Half a score of the little drummers of the Grenadiers are on
duty there, in all the finery of scarlet, braid and overwhelming
bearskins. These, as soon as the band strikes up a waltz or galop, r