The bell was tolling for afternoon service, the voice of a guide could be heard echoing in the chapels below, and we had the place to ourselves. Mrs. Darling returned and had another look at Charles II, just, as she expressed it, to "wonder what any woman could see in him," and, for the moment, I was alone with those waxen men and women who stared at me across the ages. There is something oddly intimate about a wax figure, and I was making strides in the acquaintance of Queen Elizabeth and Nelson when the verger returned with the intimation that sight-seers must depart, as Evensong was about to begin. Remorselessly he switched off the lights and we clattered down the wooden stairway, leaving the little company of strangely assorted ghosts to their dreams, and maybe an interchange of thoughts as the outcome of their long broodings. It occurred to me as we came into the sunlight again, that while we were about it we would go and see the older figures which have been placed in the Norman Undercroft. And so we turned into Dean's Yard, and from thence to the cloisters, pausing now and again to read the inscriptions on the tombstones over which we walked. The lettering on some of them had been freshly chiselled, and the names stood out, giving, it seemed, new life to the memories of those who lay beneath. Mrs. Darling complained that I might have taken her to a more cheerful place, giving it as her opinion that Westminster Abbey was "nothink more than a bloomin' churchyard". I had to remind her that it is we who, in that place, are the ghosts, and the ghosts who are the real people. The present no longer exists for us. We left it, half an hour ago, to adventure into the dim old ages. "Speak for yourself, sir," said she. "The present's good enough for me. You got a white mark on yer coat leaning up against the wall, and there's the old chap waiting what you asked to take us underground." The verger approached with a bunch of keys, leading the way through the "dark cloister" to a door above which was an iron grating. At its opening, a gloomy dungeon-like interior was disclosed, but he put up his hand, and in a moment the Undercroft was flooded with electric light. It is of spacious proportions and of Norman architecture, having a clean-swept empty appearance. On the floor are some glass cases containing the oldest of the effigies, the actual figures which were carried at the funerals. Here is Katherine of Valois. I never hear her name without remembering a passage in Pepys' Diary, where he says: "To Westminster Abbey and there did see all the tombs very finely, having one with us alone ... and here we did see, by particular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and I had the upper part of her body in my hands, and I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a queen, and that this was my birthday, thirty-six years old."