favour. Who is this old old gentleman? I
asked myself, wondering. Is he the oldest
inhabitant of Windsor, privileged to witness the
wedding by virtue of his seniority ! Is he the
Lord Chamberlain's great-grandfather ? Is he
the ghost of George the Third? (He was not
unlike George the Third.) Thus was I musing
when the "frosty pow" bobbed, and its owner
vanished. We rubbed our eyes at the astounding
disappearance, for he was a dozen paces from
the door, and had clearly not descended the staircase.
Neither had he crossed the isthmus in
front to the choristers' loft. Still I wondered
and pondered, till, by the side of the organ, I
became aware that there railed off from us a
certain pit, or grave. I looked over the rail
and saw that the bottom of this pit was boarded,
and that a little ladder led down to it, and that
it was down this ladder, after bobbing under the
rail, that the old old gentleman had trotted. But
what was he doing there ? He sat on a little
stool, like Patience in a coal-hole, smiling at
nothing at all, except cobwebs. The level of the
trench was a good four feet above his head, and,
beyond a ray of light that glinted on his
powdered sconce, darkness encompassed him. So
sat he in this tenebrous abyss, a mystery and a
marvel to me. I likened him to Truth at the
bottom of a well, to the gravedigger in Hamlet,
to a toad in a hole. I fancied that he was a
man-hater, or had been permitted to expiate
some dreadful crime by self-interment. The
fact is, that I could make nothing at all of him,
till Dr. Elvey began to play a triumphal march
on the great organ. Then I heard a rumbling
and a grumbling and a sighing in the regions
below the railing. I looked over, and saw far
down in the pit the old old gentleman hard at
work — at hard labour rather, to which the crank
in county jail must be a joke. Eureka ! I had
discovered it all. The old old gentleman was the
man who blew the bellows

He must have been a philosopher. He could
see nothing of the brave pageant. Rustling
robes and swaling plume and spangled sheen of
heraldry were nought to him. It was his business
to blow the bellows. Mourning or rejoicing —
burial or bridal — wedding chorale or the
Dead March in Saul, what difference made they
to his flexors and extensors? He was called
upon neither to weep nor to laugh, but simply
to go on blowing the bellows. Te Deum and
De Profundis, Nunc Dimittis and Dies Iræ,
anthem and psalm and voluntary, he had been
blowing away for Heaven knows how many years.
Father Schmidt, who built the organ, and Purcell,
and Handel, and Haydn, who may have fingered
its keys, were all very great men, and so is,
doubtless, the Maestro Elvey, Mus. Doc., Oxon; but
none of them could have discoursed sweet or
solemn music in the chapel of Saint George
without the assistance of him who blew the
bellows. Did he blow when George the Third
died, I wonder? I fancy that I had met with
him once before, and that it was he who blew
when I came into this self-same chapel fifteen
months ago to see a sad, sad, princely burial.

But matters more pregnant speedily called me
away from old Timotheus — if the venerable
flower will pardon my thus personifying him as
a reminiscence from John Dryden's great ode.
The chapel had begun to fill. The great business
of the day had commenced. The jackdaws
began to hop; for they had a couple of weathercocks
to perch upon between their hops. Sure,
never was there a stranger contrast of
chiaro-oscuro than that double vista afforded. It was
like the fabled Russian bath — not the real one, by
any means — the bath of violent transition, where
you rush out of the red-hot vapour to roll yourself
in the snow. Take the nave, first. I peered
down at it, and saw all, bright, shining, sparkling,
spick and span new. You know how the
clustered columns have been scrubbed, and
spruced, and furbished up recently; how a new
pavement has been laid: how new stained glass
has been put into old mullions; how the antique
roof has been picked out with new colours and
gilding. The nave of Saint George's looks in truth
as jaunty and dandified as does that fairy fane
of imperishable beauty — that monument of Youth
eternal — the Duomo at Milan. To add to the
nave's newness to-day, there was its centre
decorated with a blush-new carpet woven with
the cognizance and cypher of the young couple.
Its grand western portal was hung with a rich
heavy drapery of velvet; and beyond that you —
I, rather, was aware, from the foregone conclusion
of ocular inspection — there stretched a suit of
improvised reception-saloons, moist and garish
from the upholsterer's and decorator's hands.
Nothing, in this part of the home of the Tudors
and Plantagenets, had an older date than the
middle of last week. Even in that south-west
corner, where, concealed by a towering range of
red baize seats, I knew the mortuary chapel of
the poor Princess Charlotte ought to be, the
genius of modern, not mediæval, art was
triumphant. There, the best materials and the
worst taste were lavished. There, badly stained
glass cast a theatrical coloured glow over a
clumsily grouped mass of sculpture. Then my
orbs travelled back, and I surveyed the people
gathered together on the baize forms. With
their ironwork arm-rests, those forms had an
odd resemblance to the amphitheatre stalls at
that newest-looking of new theatres, the Royal
Italian Opera. The audience had a lyrico-dramatico-
inclined look. They reminded you of orchestral
block B. at the Crystal Palace. They seemed
to be waiting for a festival of the Tonic Sol-fa
Association. They had a Horticultural Show or
Great Exhibition aspect. Their attires were of
the concert-room, not the cathedral. They were
as new as the bonnets and waistcoats they wore.
The newest Spring fashions had been brought
to bear on their attire. Some of them may have
been made new to all time — " beautiful for
ever" — by the Hebrew maiden who, according
to her own showing, has become the lessee of
the Fontaine de Jouvence. The very colours
that glowed in their garments were of new
discovery — novel chemical extracts from organic
nastinesses as old as the hills — mauves, magentas,