seniority, and so on one from the other, until
not only the entire monkish community but the
lay brethren, and a certain selection from the
boys in the reformatory, have received and
bestowed this Christian greeting. Then, the chapel
is gradually emptied, the lights (with the exception
of some three or four in the immediate
vicinity of the altar), are extinguished, and, looking
down into the gloom, I find that I in my
gallery, and eight monks, four on either side the
altar, are the only occupants of the building.
The echoes of the last footsteps die away, the
door immediately beneath me shuts with a heavy
clang, and the four monks on the right hand
burst into a monotonous chant—a rapid and
slurred delivery of Latin words, with a very deep
bass, and a very shrill treble for the penultimate
and final notes—which I regard as the most
dismal and appalling vocal exercise I have ever
listened to; until the four monks on the left-hand
side take up the burden, and prove themselves
infinitely more discordant. I sit and listen to
this chanting, until a disagreeable feeling arises
in me that I have been forgotten, and may
probably have to pass the remainder of the night in
the gallery: a circumstance which would be the
more uncomfortable, as the only chance of my
spending my Christmas at home, lies in my
catching the mail-train at Buffborough: for
which poor Father Lawrence told me he had
provided, but which may now be overlooked.
At length, however, after groping about and
making many vain attempts to discover any
outlet, I am joined by one of the lay brethren,
who conducts me to the guest-chamber, which I
reach in safety, with no other incident on the
way than that, as we pass through the corridor
leading to the chapel, I hear a measured tramp
of footsteps, and, looking up, see four men
approaching, bearing between them on an open
bier the body of their dead comrade.

In the light of a blazing fire, the snug, warm
guest-chamber looks doubly inviting when
contrasted with the cold and darkness from which I
have emerged. I am here joined by the abbot,
with whom I have a long conversation, principally,
of course, concerning the melancholy event of the
night. I learn that Father Lawrence had always a
predisposition to disease of the heart, and that, on
the day of his death, he had undergone some
extra excitement, in his anxiety that the
consecration of the image of the Virgin should go
off well. Further, I learn that he had often
expressed the greatest horror of lingering illness,
and the miseries too frequently attendant on
physical decay; these have been mercifully
spared him, and his two chief wishes, that
his death should be sudden, and that it
should take place among the boys, have been
fulfilled.

The sound of wheels grating on the gravel
warns me that the time for my departure has
arrived, and I take leave of the abbot, who, in
his farewell, expresses many kind wishes that I
shall come at some more favourable season, and
renew my intercourse with the order. Perhaps
I may; for, though I was enabled to see but
little of the ordinary lives and habits of those
monks, never were the events of any twelve
hours so firmly impressed on my mind as those
which I spent Out of the World.

HAUNTED LONDON.

THE GHOST OF SAMUEL JOHNSON.

THERE is no ghost, among all the ghosts
haunting London, that we oftener meet at
night, just by the black mud-splashed arch of
Temple Bar, than old Samuel Johnson's.

When the sooty orifice that cabs and omnibuses
are all day threading, is visited at the small hours
by lurid glimpses of the Fleet-street moon; when
St. Clement's clock is striking, we will not say
what, and white as snow shines the pointing hand
of James the First from his niche above the
ebon gateway; and when the prim, fish-headed
statue of Queen Elizabeth on the Temple side,
is dark in shadow as a female mute; then I meet
my burly ghost with the little shrivelled
scorched wig and the inked ruffles. Then, when
the moon shows her silver disk, and the glass
windows of the upper room where Messrs.
Child keep their banking ledgers, look dim,
semi-transparent, and solemn as the windows of
some mortuary chapel, the sturdy ghost rolls
through to revisit his old haunts.

I will follow the great lexicographer in the
knee-breeches and deep flapper waistcoat, to all
his old Strand lodgings and old club haunts,
whether up silent courts, where your footfall
sounds loud in the silence, or into sawdust-
strewn taverns, where the portraits of extinct
waiters are over the mantelpiece, and the cry
is "Stale or household?" "Old or mild, sir?"
"One chop and follow!" and other still more
abbreviated inquiries and signals. Or, we shall trace
him up the black common stair of chambers to
the double door and the room strewn with books,
paper, and crushed quills—rooms with smoked
ceilings and wainscoted walls, long since passed
into air? Nor must we forget to walk round St.
James's-square, as he and that vagabond poet,
Savage, once did all night for lack of a lodging.

It becomes me at this season, to think how
that John Bushnell, the architect who carried
out Wren's design and built this gateway, has
been gone to dust exactly one hundred and fifty-
eight years, and as I muse over the not
uncommon lot of John Bushnell, who built a
gateway, who died and was forgotten, I follow the
burly ghost of the son of the poor Lichfield
bookseller that just now rolled through,
as he was wont years ago at such hours,
returning from his club in some of the side streets
of the Strand, to his lonely lodgings in the
Temple or Bolt-court, thinking of Boswell, and of
Reynolds the painter's ear-trumpet, of Burke
the orator's spectacles, or Gibbon the
historian's snuff-box, and of some of his own
solemn sledge-hammer repartees, beginning,
"Why, sir?" or "No, sir," or "What then,
sir," with which he had felled his conversational
antagonists. I am so near the ghost that I can
see his dirty large hands, bitten nails, scrofula-scarred