It was all over. Permits were kept on tap like peppermints in a slot-machine. All I had to do was to drop in my two and six and out would come a licence permitting me to walk over as many graves as I liked between twelve and four.

Outside the office I found the verger who had acted as guide - a patient, long-suffering, expectant verger. He, too, needed repairs; more especially about his pockets, which required relining. The sexton was also waiting. He took up his position near the door by which I left the church. He, too, was suffering, and so was the head beadle, who wore a gown and a silver chain around his neck, and who could easily have been taken for the wine man in a restaurant. He scrutinised the card, regarded me intently, seemed favourably impressed, and pointed out the precise spot where I could sit. His sufferings did not become acute until my work was finished.

I selected the view looking across the small area holding the remains of David Garrick, with those of Henry Irving in the near foreground, my shoulders brushing Shakespeare's monument, my easel and stool backed close to the base of the supporting marble. The bust of Mr. Thackeray, on the extreme right,

I could barely make out. The door leading to the left the verger was good enough to keep open for me. This, with the black, dingy, time-stained, benches which had been moved close together that morning and which he would have removed but for my protest, gave me two massive shadows with which to accentuate my strong foreground light, centred by Mr. Dickens's grave.

On the opening up of my easel the mob of sightseers thickened. It was evident that a live painter was infinitely more interesting than a dead poet. When the forest of legs and straight-fronts topped by bare heads and summer bonnets completely obliterated six feet of the sculptured wall facing me, I begged silently for an opening in my perspective, my hand gently waving in mid-air. This encouraged conversation.

"Can you tell me where I can find Shakespeare's monument?" came the voice of one of my countrymen, evidently from the Middle West, judging from his accent.

"You're looking at it, sir."

He was

gazing straight over my head at the figure of the Immortal Bard done in stone, one white marble hand graciously extended as if hoping somebody would shake it.

1

"Oh, thank you. And can you tell me where I can find Mr. Dickens's grave?" "You're standing on it, sir."

Another gasp and a quick movement as if he had stepped on a hot brick.

The discovery produced an oasis, the women shrinking back, the men crowding together, the oblong slab covering the ashes of the man that the world loved free for a moment from the polluting touch of irreverent feet.

This went on for an hour up to one o'clock, in fact when the pangs of hunger began to assert themselves. Another hour, my coal working like mad, and the space was cleared, with only the verger left and a young German officer who strutted about on his thin legs like a crane, avoiding the holiest spots. Soon they both disappeared, and I was left alone.

And with their absence the spell of the marvellous interior fell upon me. The kind of awe which appealed to Washington Irving when the magnitude of the building broke fully upon his mind.

"The eye gazes with wonder," he writes, "at clustered columns of gigantic dimensions, with arches springing from them to such an amazing height. It seems as if the awful nature of the place presses down upon the soul,

and hushes the beholder into noiseless revercnce."

nor

And yet none of this seems to have impressed Mr. Dickens - not in this same way would he have chosen Westminster Abbey as his last resting-place could he have been consulted.

"He would . . . have preferred," says Forster in describing the causes which led up to his burial in the Sanctuary and the ceremonies that followed, "to lie in the small graveyard under Rochester Castle wall, or in the little churches of Cobham or Shorne; but all these were found to be closed; and the desire of the Dean and Chapter of Rochester to lay him in their Cathedral had been entertained, when the Dean of Westminster's request, and the considerate kindness of his generous assurance that there should be only such ceremonial as would strictly obey all injunctions of privacy, made it a grateful duty to accept that offer. The spot already had been chosen by the Dean; and before midday on the following morning, Tuesday the 14th of June, with knowledge of those only who took part in the burial, all was done. The solemnity had not lost by the simplicity. Nothing so grand or so touching could have accompanied it, as the stillness