The streets apparently rang with more or less agreeable cries of itinerant traders, among which the still familiar cry of the milkman--or perhaps milk-girl--and the tinkle of the muffin bell must even then have been well established. There were, however, other street cries which are unknown to us in the present day, those of the professional rat-catcher and the street gambler, which latter apparently stood in the gutter and rattled a dice-box as an invitation to passers by to come and have a throw, an invitation which, in all probability, ended in disaster to the unwary who accepted it. Drunkenness, too, was very rife among all classes, the following inscription on a public-house being a fair sample of the tastes of the people: “Drunk for one penny. Dead drunk for two pence. Clean straw for nothing.”[16] As regards the time for meals in fashionable circles in those days, there was really little difference between those times and our own except that the meals were called by different names. Dinner was taken in the middle of the day or a little later, which would very well correspond to our luncheon. As for the afternoon, why ladies of quality did very much the same then as they do now; they were trotted about in their sedan-chairs or coaches from one friend’s house to another drinking “dishes” of tea at each and destroying their nervous systems just as they do in 1911. Supper was the most pleasant meal of the day, and might well be set down to correspond with the very late dinner hour of the fashionable world at the present time. So the world--the _beau monde_ at any rate--has gone on for nearly two hundred years with but very little variation in its feeding time at any rate. Very much the same might be said of the life in St. James’s Street as it is lived at the present time. There was no electric light, but the scene must have been very much more brilliant especially at night. The men-about-town of those days dressed in silks, satins, and velvets of varied colours, heavily laced with gold. Their sword hilts were either of gold or silver and very often jewelled. They carried in their hands long canes frequently jewelled too, and to add to the stateliness of their appearance they either wore white wigs or had their own hair powdered. The coffee and chocolate houses of St. James’s Street of those days, when full of their patrons, must have presented scenes worth looking upon. White’s Chocolate House was the principal, and the Cocoa Tree its rival, both represented at the present time by clubs of almost identical names. Of clubs, as we understand them, there were none in the year 1728, if we except such as the “October Club” and the “Hell Fire Club,” the former composed of old Jacobite squires who probably met at an inn, and the latter the drunken desecrators of Medmenhain Abbey on the Thames, neither of which societies had a club house as we understand it.