with
thousands upon thousands of massive hooks--and here and there upon a
hook a silk hat or an overcoat. Mr. Oxford chose a couple of hooks in
the expanse, and when they had divested themselves sufficiently he led
Priam forwards into another great chamber evidently meant to recall the
baths of Carcalla. In gigantic basins chiselled out of solid granite,
Priam scrubbed his finger-nails with a nail-brush larger than he had
previously encountered, even in nightmares, and an attendant brushed his
coat with a utensil that resembled a weapon of offence lately the
property of Anak.

"Shall we go straight to the dining-room now," asked Mr. Oxford, "or
will you have a gin and angostura first?"

Priam declined the gin and angostura, and they went up an overwhelming
staircase of sombre marble, and through other apartments to the
dining-room, which would have made an excellent riding-school. Here one
had six of the gigantic windows in a row, each with curtains that fell
in huge folds from the unseen into the seen. The ceiling probably
existed. On every wall were gigantic paintings in thick ornate frames,
and between the windows stood heroic busts of marble set upon columns of
basalt. The chairs would have been immovable had they not run on castors
of weight-resisting rock, yet against the tables they had the air of
negligible toys. At one end of the room was a sideboard that would not
have groaned under an ox whole, and at the other a fire, over which an
ox might have been roasted in its entirety, leaped under a mantelpiece
upon which Goliath could not have put his elbows.

All was silent and grave; the floors were everywhere covered with heavy
carpets which hushed all echoes. There was not the faintest sound.
Sound, indeed, seemed to be deprecated. Priam had already passed the
wide entrance to one illimitable room whose walls were clothed with
warnings in gigantic letters: 'Silence.' And he had noticed that all
chairs and couches were thickly padded and upholstered in soft leather,
and that it was impossible to produce in them the slightest creak. At a
casual glance the place seemed unoccupied, but on more careful
inspection you saw midgets creeping about, or seated in easy-chairs that
had obviously been made to hold two of them; these midgets were the
members of the club, dwarfed into dolls by its tremendous dimensions. A
strange and sinister race! They looked as though in the final stages of
decay, and wherever their heads