that
way. Young Dowgate was courting Jane Comfort when he gave her her
prayer-book, and recorded the presentation in the fly-leaf. If Jane were
fond of young Dowgate, why did she die and leave the book here? Perhaps
at the rickety altar, and before the damp Commandments, she, Comfort,
had taken him, Dowgate, in a flush of youthful hope and joy; and perhaps
it had not turned out in the long run as great a success as was
expected.

[Illustration: THE FOURTH SALTERS' HALL. (_See page 548._)]

"The opening of the service recalls my wandering thoughts. I then find
to my astonishment that I have been, and still am, taking a strong kind
of invisible snuff up my nose, into my eyes, and down my throat. I wink,
sneeze, and cough. The clerk sneezes: the clergyman winks; the unseen
organist sneezes and coughs (and probably winks); all our little party
wink, sneeze, and cough. The snuff seems to be made of the decay of
matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth, and something else. Is the
something else the decay of dead citizens in the vaults below? As sure
as death it is! Not only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough
and sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens
have got into the very bellows of the organ, and half-choked the same.
We stamp our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds.
Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on the
sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and when a gust of air comes,
tumble down upon him.

* * * * *

"In the churches about Mark Lane there was a dry whiff of wheat; and I
accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock in
one of them. From Rood Lane to Tower Street, and thereabouts, there was
sometimes a subtle flavour of wine; sometimes of tea. One church, near
Mincing Lane, smelt like a druggist's drawer. Behind the Monument, the
service had a flavour of damaged oranges, which, a little further down
the river, tempered into herrings, and gradually toned into a
cosmopolitan blast of fish. In one church, the exact counterpart of the
church in the 'Rake's Progress,' where the hero is being married to the
horrible old lady, there was no speciality of atmosphere, until the
organ shook a perfume of hides all over us from some adjacent warehouse.

[Illustration: CORDWAINERS' HALL. (_See page 550._)]

"The dark vestries and registries into which I have peeped, and the
little hemmed-in