n
imagine the damp which penetrates everything; and you should see what
it is in winter! we must really dress up as maskers, covered with
caps, shawls and cloaks. They have the charity to leave us a little
fire in the sacristy, but many mornings they find us almost frozen.
Those of the Chapter call the choir 'kill canon,' and if those
gentlemen complain of one hour's stay in this ice-house, having eaten
well and drunk better, you may just fancy what it is for us. You have
had the good luck to begin in summer, but when the winter comes on you
will just have a good time of it!"

But even though it was the best part of the year, Gabriel coughed
much, his illness increasing from the dampness of the Cathedral.

On moonlight nights the church was strangely transfigured, and Gabriel
remembered sundry operatic effects he had seen during his travels.
The white tracery of the windows stood out against the blackness with
milky whiteness, splashes of light glided down the pilasters, some
even from the vaulting. These mocking spectres moved slowly along the
pavement, mounting the opposite pillars and losing themselves in the
darkness; those rays of cold and diffused light made the shadows seem
even darker as they brought out of the darkness here a chapel, beyond,
a sepulchral stone or the outline of some pilaster; and the great
Christ, who crowned the railings of the high altar, glowed against its
background of shadow with the brilliancy of its old gilding, like some
miraculous apparition floating in space in a halo of light.

When the cough would not allow the old watchman to sleep, he told
Gabriel of the many years he had carried on this nocturnal life in the
Primacy. The office had some resemblance to that of a sexton, for he
spent most of it among the dead in the silence of desertion, never
seeing anyone till his watch was finished. He had ended by becoming
used to it, and it had cured him of many fears he had in his youth.
Before, he had believed in the resurrection of the dead, in souls, and
the apparitions of saints. But now he laughed at all that. Whole years
he had carried on this night work in the Cathedral, and if he heard
anything it was only the scampering of rats, who respected neither
saints nor altars, for after all they were only wood!

He only feared men of flesh and blood, those robbers who in former
times had more than once entered the Cathedral, obliging the Chapter
to establish this night vigilance.

He e