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 might rest was stretched a white cloth,
so that their heads might not touch the spots sanctified by the heads of
the mighty departed. They rarely spoke to one another, but exchanged
regards of mutual distrust and scorn; and if by chance they did converse
it was in tones of weary, brusque disillusion. They could at best descry
each other but indistinctly in the universal pervading gloom--a gloom
upon which electric lamps, shining dimly yellow in their vast lustres,
produced almost no impression. The whole establishment was buried in the
past, dreaming of its Titantic yore, when there were doubtless giants