In exterior they are generally plain and the door which leads to them is not labeled or in many cases to be distinguished from the doors of offices or warehouses near it. "In a few cases," writes Mr. Moore, "a small and insignificant brass plate near a bell-handle bears the word 'Beadle,' or sometimes even lifts the veil of mystery a little higher and records a name, as 'Weavers' Hall.' To ring the bell requires nearly as much courage as that of Jack the Giant-killer when he blew the horn that hung at the giant's gate. The beadle, or more often the sub-beadle,--for the beadle himself is too great to be lightly disturbed,--appears. You feel instantly that you are intruding, that you had no right to ring, and that you are in much the position of a man who has impertinently rung at the door of a private house and asked to see the drawing-room. If you have an introduction, above all, if you know any one on the court of the company, as its governing body is called, the beadle unbends a little, and you are admitted. You enter a great paneled hall decorated with armorial bearings, with portraits, and with banners. You are in the very heart of the city of London, where land is worth £100,000 or more an acre, yet there is a delicious garden, a court-yard recalling Italy, a splashing fountain, or a noble old tree. This element of surprise, of contrast between the rushing crowd in the street outside and the perfect fourteenth century stillness within the halls of these ancient guilds, adds much to the pleasure of seeing curious things at which you are not asked to look. You feel in a few minutes how great a thing it is to be a merchant tailor or a cloth-worker or a grocer, superlative and unattainable; and you walk round the hall with the beadle in a deferential, humble frame of mind only comparable to the sensation of a pilgrim who is just about to kiss or has just finished kissing the toe of his holiness the Pope. [Illustration: CARVED CHOIR STALL BAPTISTERY, PISA MODERN (1856)]