There was a ghostly air about these uninhabited chambers¹ in the Temple, and attending every circumstance of Tom’s employment there, which had a strange charm in it. Every morning when he shut his door at Islington, he turned his face towards an atmosphere of unaccountable fascination³, as surely as he turned it to the London smoke; and from that moment it thickened round and round him all day long, until the time arrived for going home again, and leaving it, like a motionless cloud, behind.

It seemed to Tom, every morning, that he approached this ghostly mist, and became enveloped⁴ in it, by the easiest succession of degrees imaginable. Passing from the roar and rattle⁵ of the streets into the quiet court-yards of the Temple, was the first preparation. Every echo of his footsteps sounded to him like a sound from the old walls and pavements, wanting language to relate the histories of the dim, dismal⁶ rooms; to tell him what lost documents were decaying in forgotten corners of the shut-up cellars, from whose lattices such mouldy sighs came breathing forth⁷ as he went past; to whisper of dark bins⁸ of rare old wine, bricked up in vaults⁹ among the old foundations of the Halls; or mutter in a lower tone yet darker legends of the cross-legged knights¹⁰, whose marble effigies¹¹ were in the church. With the first planting of his foot upon the staircase of his dusty office, all these mysteries increased; until,

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