In the mean time, Mr. George and Rollo remained in the seat they had taken. The service appeared to them very complicated. The different portions of it were performed by different clergymen, who were dressed in white robes, and adorned with the various other insignia of sacerdotal rank. The places, too, in which they stood, in performing their ministrations, were continually changed, each clergyman being escorted with great ceremony to the desk or pulpit at which he was to perform his part by a verger, who was clothed in an antique dress, and bore an ornamented rod in his hand--the emblem of his office. In one place there was a choir of singing boys, all dressed in white, who chanted the responses and anthems. The other parts of the service were cantilated, or _intoned_, as it is called, in a manner which seemed to Mr. George and Rollo very extraordinary. In fact, the whole scene produced upon the minds of our travellers the effect, not of a religious service for the worship of God, but of a gorgeous, though solemn, dramatic spectacle. When, at length, the service was ended and the benediction was pronounced, the congregation rose; but Mr. George perceived that those who were in the part of the church near them did not turn and go back towards the Poet's Corner, where they had come in, but stood and looked forward towards the choir, as if they were expecting to advance in that direction. "Let us wait a minute," said Mr. George, "and see what they will do." In a few minutes the verger removed the worsted cords by which the passage ways in and through the choirs had been closed, and then there commenced a general movement of the congregation in that direction. The people, as they walked along, paused to look at the monuments that were built in the walls; at the statues and groups of allegorical figures that were placed here and there in niches and recesses; at the oak carvings in the screens; the canopies and the stalls; at the stained-glass windows, with the gorgeous representations which they contained of apostles and saints; and at all the other architectural and sculptured wonders of the place. The congregation passed out from the choir into the nave through a sort of gateway in the screen beneath the organ, at the place marked O in the plan; and then, spreading out on each side, they passed between the columns into the aisles, and thus moved slowly down the nave and the aisles, surveying the monuments and sculptures as they proceeded. They did not stop long at any place, but moved on continually, though slowly, as if it were not the custom to walk about much for the purpose of viewing the abbey on Sunday.