d seats in the form of an
amphitheatre, were being erected in the nave for a children's festival,
which prevented our doing more than glance down its length. We read some
of the inscriptions upon the monuments, that one, so often quoted, of
Sir Christopher Wren, among them--"Do you seek his monument? Look around
you;" glanced into the choir, with its Gothic stalls, where the service
is performed, and then descended into the crypt beneath all this, that
labyrinth of damp darkness where so many lie entombed. Here is the
funeral car of Wellington, with candles burning around it, cast from the
conquering cannon which thundered victory to a nation, but sorrow and
death to many a home. Shrouded with velvet it is, as are the horses, in
imitation of those which bore him to his rest. All around were marble
effigies, blackened, broken, as they survived the burning of the late
cathedral, at the time of the great fire. Tombstones formed the
pavement. "Whose can this be?" I said, trying to follow with the point
of my umbrella the half-worn inscription beneath my feet. It was that of
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Strange enough it seemed to us, coming from a
country so new as to have been by no means prolific in great men, to
find them here lying about under our feet.

Having explored the crypt, we prepared to mount the endless winding
stairs, whose final termination is the ball under the cross that
surmounts the whole. Our ambition aimed only at the bell beneath the
ball. We paid an occasional sixpence for the privilege of peeping into
the library,--a most tidy and put-to-rights room, with a floor of wood
patchwork,--and for the right to look down upon the geometrical
staircase which winds around and clings to the wall upon one side, but
is without any visible support upon the other. The "whispering gallery"
was reached after a time. It is the encircling cornice within the dome,
surrounded by a railing, and forming a narrow gallery. "I will remain
here," said the guide, "while you pass around until you are exactly
opposite; wait there until I whisper." Had we possessed the spirit of
Casabianca, we should at this moment be sitting upon that narrow bench
against the wall, with our feet upon the gas-pipes. We waited and
listened, and listened and waited; but the sound of the blows from the
hammers below reverberated like thunder around us. We could not have
heard the crack of doom. Becoming conscious, after a time, that our
guide had disappeare