casual and prosaic a fleeting touch of romance. And the wide steps
with balustrades sweeping down in many turnings to the gardens, cause
vagrant and hurrying steps to pause, and wander about the library and
through the gardens, which lead with such charm of way to the open
spaces of the King's Bench walk.

There, there is another dining-hall and another library. The clock is
ringing out the hour, and the place is filled with young men in
office clothes, hurrying on various business with papers in their
hands; and such young male life is one of the charms of the Temple;
and the absence of women is refreshment to the eye wearied of their
numbers in the streets. The Temple is an island in the London sea.
Immediately you pass the great doorway, studded with great nails, you
pass out of the garishness of the merely modern day, unhallowed by
any associations, into a calmer and benigner day, over which floats
some shadow of the great past. The old staircases lighted by strange
lanterns, the river of lingering current, bearing in its winding so
much of London into one enchanted view. The church built by the
Templars more than seven hundred years ago, now stands in the centre
of the inn all surrounded, on one side yellowing smoke-dried
cloisters, on another side various closes, feebly striving in their
architecture not to seem too shamefully out of keeping with its
beauty. There it stands in all the beauty of its pointed arches and
triple lancet windows, as when it was consecrated by the Patriarch of
Jerusalem in the year 1185.

But in 1307 a great ecclesiastical tribunal was held in London, and
it was proved that an unfortunate knight, who had refused to spit
upon the cross, was haled from the dining-hall and drowned in a well,
and testimony of the secret rites that were held there, and in which