ere breathless. They wore their gaudy clothes with an air, no
doubt. The Kings struck regal attitudes. The cricketers had a set manner
of bringing off dreamy, difficult catches. The actresses were properly
made up to charm, and the statesmen must surely have brought plenty of
empires to ruin, if insipidity has power to cause such wreckage. But
they were all decisively breathless. They seemed caught by some ghastly
physical spell. And this spell was laid also upon the man who wandered
among them. The breath of life withdrew from him to a long, long
distance--he fancied. He felt as one who, taken by a trance, is bereft
of power though not of knowledge. The staring silence was as the silence
of a tomb, whose walls were full of eyes, intent and fatigued. He
started when a person in uniform, hitherto apparently waxen, said in a
cockney voice,

"See the Chamber of Horrors, sir?" But he recovered in time to
acquiesce.

He descended towards a subterranean vault: as if to a lower circle of
this inferno full of breathless demons. Here there were no rustic
strangers, no clergymen with their choirs, no elderly ladies in command
of "Bands of Hope." The silence was great, and the murderers stood
together in companies, looking this way and that as if in search of
victims. Some sat on chairs or stools. Some crouched in the dock. Some
prepared for a mock expiation in their best clothes. One was at work in
his house, digging in quicklime a hole the length of a human body. His
waxen visage gleamed pale in the dim light, and he appeared to pause in
his digging and to listen for sounds above his head. For he was in the
cellar of his house.

The man stood still and looked at him. He had a mean face. All the
features were squeezed and venomous, and expressive of criminal desires
and of extreme cruelty. And so it was with most of his comrades. They
varied in height, in age, in social status and in colouring. But upon
all their faces was the same frigid expression, a sort of thin
hatefulness touched with sarcasm. The man wandered on among them and saw
it everywhere, on the lips of a youth in rags, in the eyes of an old
woman in a bonnet, lurking in the wrinkles of a labourer, at rest upon
the narrow brow of a doctor, alive in the puffed-out wax of an
attorney's bloated features. Yes, it was easy to recognise the Devil's
hall-mark on them all, he thought. And he wondered a little how it came
about that they had been able, in so many cases, to