'To think,' replied the Giant Magog, laying his hand upon the cask,
'of him who owned this wine, and kept it in a cellar hoarded from
the light of day, for thirty years, - "till it should be fit to
drink," quoth he. He was twoscore and ten years old when he buried
it beneath his house, and yet never thought that he might be
scarcely "fit to drink" when the wine became so. I wonder it never
occurred to him to make himself unfit to be eaten. There is very
little of him left by this time.'

'The night is waning,' said Gog mournfully.

'I know it,' replied his companion, 'and I see you are impatient.
But look. Through the eastern window - placed opposite to us, that
the first beams of the rising sun may every morning gild our giant
faces - the moon-rays fall upon the pavement in a stream of light
that to my fancy sinks through the cold stone and gushes into the
old crypt below. The night is scarcely past its noon, and our
great charge is sleeping heavily.'

They ceased to speak, and looked upward at the moon. The sight of
their large, black, rolling eyes filled Joe Toddyhigh with such
horror that he could scarcely draw his breath. Still they took no
note of him, and appeared to believe themselves quite alone.

'Our compact,' said Magog after a pause, 'is, if I understand it,
that, instead of watching here in silence through the dreary
nights, we entertain each other with stories of our past
experience; with tales of the past, the present, and the future;
with legends of London and her sturdy citizens from the old simple