Reader, were you ever up all night? You may answer that you are neither a newspaper editor, a market gardener, a journeyman baker, the driver of the Liverpool night mail, Mrs. Gamp the sicknurse, the commander of the Calais packet, Professor Airey, Sir James South, nor a member of the House of Commons. It may be that you live at Clapham, that one of the golden rules of your domestic economy is “gruel at ten, bed at eleven,” and that you consider keeping late hours to be an essentially immoral and wicked habit,—the immediate prelude to the career and the forerunner of the fate of the late George Barnwell. I am very sorry for your prejudices and your susceptibilities. I respect them, but I must do them violence. I intend that—_bon gré, mal gré_—in spirit, if not in actual corporeality, you should stop out not only all night but all day with me; in fact, for the space of twenty-four hours, it is my resolve to prohibit your going to bed at all. I wish you to see the monster LONDON in the varied phases of its outer and inner life, at every hour of the day-season and the night-season; I wish you to consider with me the giant sleeping and the giant waking; to watch him in his mad noonday rages, and in his sparse moments of unquiet repose. You must travel TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK with me; and together we will explore this London mystery to its remotest recesses—its innermost arcana. To others the downy couch, the tasselled nightcap, the cushioned sofa, the luxurious ease of night-and-day rest. Ours be the staff and the sandalled shoon, the cord to gird up the lions, the palmer’s wallet and cockle-shells. For, believe me, the pilgrimage will repay fatigue, and the shrine is rich in relics. Four o’clock in the morning. The deep bass voice of Paul’s, the Staudigl of bells, has growlingly proclaimed the fact. Bow church confirms the information in a respectable baritone. St. Clement’s Danes has sung forth acquiescence with the well-known chest-note of his tenor voice, sonorous and mellifluous as Tamberlik’s. St. Margaret’s, Westminster, murmurs a confession of the soft impeachment in a contralto rich as Alboni’s in “Stridi la vampa;” and all around and about the pert bells of the new churches, from evangelical Hackney to Puseyite Pimlico, echo the announcement in their shrill treble and soprani.