"I was incurious and indifferent, but Gerald Standish was a genius, and my particular chum. I could not, therefore, be so churlish as to refuse so slight a concession. We dined together at the Horseshoe Restaurant, then in the bloom of novelty; and, after a very temperate dinner, we walked through the autumn dusk to the quiet street on the eastward side of Russell Square, where the priest and priestess of the spirit-world had set up their temple. "The approach of the mysteries was sadly commonplace, a shabby hall door, an airless passage that smelt of dinner, and for the temple itself a front parlour sparsely furnished with the most Philistine of furniture. When we entered, the room was empty of humanity. An oil-lamp on a cheffonier by the fireplace dimly lighted the all-pervading shabbiness. The scanty moreen curtains--lodging-house curtains of the poorest type--were drawn. The furniture consisted of a dozen or so of heavily made mahogany chairs with horse-hair cushions, a large round table on a massive pedestal, supported on three clumsily carved claws, and a bookcase against the wall facing the windows, or I should say rather a piece of furniture which might be supposed to contain books, as the contents were hidden by a brass lattice-work lined with faded green silk. The gloom of the scene was inexpressible, and seemed accentuated by a dismal street cry which rose and fell ever and anon from the distance of Hunter or Coram Street. "'We are the first,' Gerald whispered, a fact of which I did not require to be informed, and for which he ought to have apologized, seeing that he had deprived me of my after-dinner coffee, and dragged me off yawning, full of alarm lest we should be late.