Mr. Oxford's club alarmed and intimidated him; it was so big and so black. Externally it resembled a town-hall of some great industrial town. As you stood on the pavement at the bottom of the flight of giant steps that led to the first pair of swinging doors, your head was certainly lower than the feet of a being who examined you sternly from the other side of the glass. Your head was also far below the sills of the mighty windows of the ground-floor. There were two storeys above the ground-floor, and above them a projecting eave of carven stone that threatened the uplifted eye like a menace. The tenth part of a slate, the merest chip of a corner, falling from the lofty summit of that pile, would have slain elephants. And all the façade was black, black with ages of carbonic deposit. The notion that the building was a town-hall that had got itself misplaced and perverted gradually left you as you gazed. You perceived its falseness. You perceived that Mr. Oxford's club was a monument, a relic of the days when there were giants on earth, that it had come down unimpaired to a race of pigmies, who were making the best of it. The sole descendant of the giants was the scout behind the door. As Mr. Oxford and Priam climbed towards it, this unique giant, with a giant's force, pulled open the gigantic door, and Mr. Oxford and Priam walked imperceptibly in, and the door swung to with a large displacement of air. Priam found himself in an immense interior, under a distant carved ceiling, far, far upwards, like heaven. He watched Mr. Oxford write his name in a gigantic folio, under a gigantic clock. This accomplished, Mr. Oxford led him past enormous vistas to right and left, into a very long chamber, both of whose long walls were studded with thousands upon thousands of massive hooks--and here and there upon a hook a silk hat or an overcoat. Mr. Oxford chose a couple of hooks in the expanse, and when they had divested themselves sufficiently he led Priam forwards into another great chamber evidently meant to recall the baths of Carcalla. In gigantic basins chiselled out of solid granite, Priam scrubbed his finger-nails with a nail-brush larger than he had previously encountered, even in nightmares, and an attendant brushed his coat with a utensil that resembled a weapon of offence lately the property of Anak. "Shall we go straight to the dining-room now," asked Mr. Oxford, "or will you have a gin and angostura first?"