f gas, not very brilliantly,
yet with lustre enough to show the damp plaster of the ceiling and
walls, and the massive stone pavement, the crevices of which are oozy
with moisture, not from the incumbent river, but from hidden springs in
the earth's deeper heart. There are two parallel corridors, with a
wall between, for the separate accommodation of the double throng of
foot-passengers, equestrians, and vehicles of all kinds, which was
expected to roll and reverberate continually through the Tunnel. Only
one of them has ever been opened, and its echoes are but feebly awakened
by infrequent footfalls.

Yet there seem to be people who spend their lives here, and who probably
blink like owls, when, once or twice a year, perhaps, they happen to
climb into the sunshine. All along the corridor, which I believe to be
a mile in extent, we see stalls or shops in little alcoves, kept
principally by women; they were of a ripe age, I was glad to observe,
and certainly robbed England of none of its very moderate supply of
feminine loveliness by their deeper than tomb-like interment. As you
approach, (and they are so accustomed to the dusky gas-light that they
read all your characteristics afar off,) they assail you with hungry
entreaties to buy some of their merchandise, holding forth views of the
Tunnel put up in cases of Derbyshire spar, with a magnifying-glass at
one end to make the vista more effective. They offer you, besides,
cheap jewelry, sunny topazes and resplendent emeralds for sixpence, and
diamonds as big as the Koh-i-noor at a not much heavier cost, together
with a multifarious trumpery which has died out of the upper world to
reappear in this Tartarean bazaar. That you may fancy yourself still
in the realms of the living, they urge you to partake of cakes, candy,
ginger-beer, and such small refreshment, more suitable, however, for the
shadowy appetite of ghosts than for the sturdy stomachs of Englishmen.
The most capacious of the shops contains a dioramic exhibition of cities
and scenes in the daylight-world, with a dreary glimmer of gas among
them all; so that they serve well enough to represent the dim,
unsatisfactory remembrances that dead people might be supposed to retain
from their past lives, mixing them up with the ghastliness of their
unsubstantial state. I dwell the more upon these trifles, and do my best
to give them a mockery of importance, because, if these are nothing,
then all this elaborate contrivanc