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They kept watch in the streets, from neighbouring houses, trees, walls, stair-cases, landings, roofs, adjoining rooms, and even chimneys. The Minister and his friend saw with alarm all round their bed room, gimlets boring through doors and shutters, and drills making holes in the walls. A photograph of Madame Ceres in night attire buttoning her boots was the utmost that had been obtained.
Bland again be young, and you and I be young to see them could the good old one shilling gallery days return they are dreams, my cousin, now but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa be once more struggling up those inconvenient stair-cases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us I know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew R is supposed to have, to purchase it.
Down the long corridors there was a sound of weeping and scrubbing; while the galleries and the dark wooden stair-cases were sluiced with water. "Look out there!" called somebody every moment from somewhere, and then it was a question of escaping the downward-streaming flood. During the whole morning the water poured from one gallery to another, as over a mill-race.
All experience has shown that too much light cannot be had in any public library. Railings and stair-cases for the second or upper floors should be of perforated iron. The reading-room should be distinct from the book delivery or charging-room, to secure quiet for readers at all hours, avoiding the pressure, hurry and noise of conversation inevitable in a lending library or department.
By the time the foundation was in and the brick walls had begun to go up, there were so few people left in the neighbourhood that she might indulge with impunity her husband's passion for having her clamber over the floor-timbers and the skeleton stair-cases with him.
Its high white walls were blotched with patches of mildew, and in some parts there were long greenish stains from roof to ground, like tear streaks on the crumbling plaster. Indoors there was a dank graveyard smell in the low corridors and narrow stair-cases. Floors and ceilings were equally worm-eaten and rotten. Broad flakes of plaster from the walls lay littered about in the passages.
Two stair-cases of one hundred and fifty steps each wind upward to its summit on either side, giving the building from a distance the appearance of a huge brick cork-screw.
Through that chilly gallery, preceded by Barker and his wax- lights; stared upon by those grim portraits, till more than once she started as if she had seen a ghost; up narrow, steep stone stair-cases, which might lead to a prison in a tower or a dormitory in a monastery any where except to ordinary, natural bedchambers.
Twenty-five arches, all of equal size, serve each as an entrance. On the ground-floor are pillars of the Tuscan order, supporting vast granaries, the communication to which is by two stair-cases of well-executed design.
Why I should have been so far conducted from the habitable portion of the house I had spent my evening in, I leave the learned in such matters to explain; as for me, I have ever remarked it, while asking for a chamber in a large roomy hotel, the singular pride with which you are ushered up grand stair-cases, down passages, through corridors, and up narrow back flights, till the blue sky is seen through the sky-light, to No. 199, "the only spare bed-room in the house," while the silence and desolation of the whole establishment would seem to imply far otherwise the only evidence of occupation being a pair of dirty Wellingtons at the door of No. 2.
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