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In less than a quarter of an hour not one of the rioters was to be seen, and the peaceful inhabitants came trembling into the streets, to look upon the wreck, and to convey their women and children to some safer locality. Some ladies had to be brought from upper storeys by ladders. Tradesmen took their account books away, for fear of further troubles.
The inn stands on legs raised a foot or two from the ground, and is well built, with solid wooden posts and a tiled roof. It is two storeys high and has verandahs round both floors. As our men let down the shafts of the chairs for us to alight, two women and a man in native dress come out on to the verandah, and immediately fall down on their faces before us, with their foreheads on the ground.
The Pig Slide, which was in one of the less noisy quarters of Luna Park, consisted of an enclosure in which stood a wooden building of two storeys, some five yards wide and three high. On the upper storey was a row of six or eight cages, in each of which dwelt a little live pig, an infant of a few weeks.
It was an old-fashioned place of two storeys having rather a dilapidated appearance, and the top floor consisted of a series of rambling, ramshackle rooms, one leading into the other, extending away back to the old office of the Alliance Bank of Simla in Council House Street.
The quasi-Moorish belfry is the most pardonable addition, but to crown all is an exhibition of incongruity which has no excuse. The original tile-faced turret of the Moors, with its gilded balls, has actually been replaced by a structure of several storeys, the first of which is Doric, the second Ionic, and the third Corinthian.
Some of the rooms are hollowed out below the surface of the earth; these are the cellars where the baby-ants are kept warm in cold weather, while in summer they are taken by their watchful nurses to the cool upper storeys. Now I have read that every ant-city has its wary sentinel, to keep watch and ward, and give warning of the approach of the foe.
"At last I reached the object of my quest, a dirty, fly-blown little shop in a by-way near Drury Lane, with a window full of tinsel robes, sham jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes and theatrical photographs. The shop was old-fashioned and low and dark, and the house rose above it for four storeys, dark and dismal. I peered through the window and, seeing no one within, entered.
I walked by an old white house of two storeys with a terrace, and there suddenly opened before me a view of a courtyard, a large pond with a bathing-house, a group of green willows, and a village on the further bank, with a high, narrow belfry on which there glittered a cross reflecting the setting sun.
"The stranger who knows nothing of its story would surely smile if he were told that beneath the grass and daisies round him were hidden the vast foundation storeys of one of the mightiest of our proud mediæval abbeys; that on the spot where he was standing were once grouped a forest of tall columns bearing up lofty fretted roofs; that all around once were altars all agleam with colour and with gold; that besides the many altars were once grouped in that sacred spot chauntries and tombs, many of them marvels of grace and beauty, placed there in the memory of men great in the service of Church and State of men whose names were household words in the England of our fathers; that close to him were once stately cloisters, great monastic buildings, including refectories, dormitories, chapter-house, chapels, infirmary, granaries, kitchens all the varied piles of buildings which used to make up the hive of a great monastery."
Situated in the busiest quarter of Paris, the Place had long lost the fine stateliness it had worn a hundred years ago; the mansions forming its three sides, built in the days of Henri IV in one uniform style, of red brick with white stone dressings, to lodge splendour-loving magistrates, had had their imposing roofs of slate removed to make way for two or three wretched storeys of lath and plaster or had even been demolished altogether and replaced by shabby whitewashed houses, and now displayed only a series of irregular, poverty-stricken, squalid fronts, pierced with countless narrow, unevenly spaced windows enlivened with flowers in pots, birdcages, and rags hanging out to dry.
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