pealed out their warning for that once, and the gust of wind that
moaned through the place seemed cold and heavy with their iron
breath.

The time and circumstances were favourable to reflection. He tried
to keep his thoughts to the current, unpleasant though it was, in
which they had moved all day, and to think with what a romantic
feeling he had looked forward to shaking his old friend by the hand
before he died, and what a wide and cruel difference there was
between the meeting they had had, and that which he had so often
and so long anticipated. Still, he was disordered by waking to
such sudden loneliness, and could not prevent his mind from running
upon odd tales of people of undoubted courage, who, being shut up
by night in vaults or churches, or other dismal places, had scaled
great heights to get out, and fled from silence as they had never
done from danger. This brought to his mind the moonlight through
the window, and bethinking himself of it, he groped his way back up
the crooked stairs, - but very stealthily, as though he were
fearful of being overheard.

He was very much astonished when he approached the gallery again,
to see a light in the building: still more so, on advancing
hastily and looking round, to observe no visible source from which
it could proceed. But how much greater yet was his astonishment at
the spectacle which this light revealed.

The statues of the two giants, Gog and Magog, each above fourteen
feet in height, those which succeeded to still older and more
barbarous figures, after the Great Fire of London, and which stand
in the Guildhall to this day, were endowed with life and motion.