It was a large, dingy, dirty, water-stained and somewhat dilapidated
hall to which the stone stair, ascending immediately from the door, led
them; and it would have looked considerably worse but for the obscurity
belonging to the nature of the entertainment, through which it took some
pains to discover the twenty-five or thirty people that formed the
company present. It was indeed a dim, but not therefore, a very
religious light that pervaded rather than overcame the gloom, issuing
chiefly from the crude and discordant colors of a luminous picture on a
great screen at the farther end of the hall. There an ill-proportioned
figure, presenting, although his burden was of course gone some time, a
still very humpy Christian, was shown extended on the ground, with his
sword a yard beyond his reach, and Apollyon straddling across the whole
breadth of the way, and taking him in the stride. But that huge stride
was the fiend's sole expression of vigor; for, although he held a
flaming dart ready to strike the poor man dead, his own dragon
countenance was so feebly demoniacal that it seemed unlikely he would
have the heart to drive it home. The lantern from which proceeded the
picture, was managed by a hidden operator, evidently from his voice,
occasionally overheard, a mere boy; and an old man, like a broken-down
clergyman, whose dirty white neckcloth seemed adjusted on a secret
understanding of moral obliquity, its knot suggesting a gradual approach
to the last position a knot on the neck can assume, kept walking up and
down the parti-colored gloom, flaunting a pretense of lecture on the
scenes presented. Whether he was a little drunk or greatly in his
dotage, it was impossible to determine without a nearer acquaintance. If
I venture to give a specimen of his mode of lecturing, it will be seen
that a few lingering rags of scholastic acquirement, yet fluttered about
the poor fellow.