Giving entertainments in private houses is a constant source of delight to me, and I feel both pleasure and pride in my work. I take sometimes enormous pains in writing and composing the sketches, and have often devoted several hours a day for a week or so in arranging and composing a musical illustration which will only occupy a few minutes in performance, and which may pass almost unnoticed by the majority of the audience. But when the connoisseur picks that illustration out from all the rest of the entertainment as his choice, I feel am I more than rewarded for my trouble. All sorts of stories about me appear from time to time in the cheap weekly journals of the coloured paper or wrapper type, and I suppose they are amusing to the readers. The amuse _me_ sometimes. I never mind chaff. My entertainments in private are capital scope for the smaller journalists; and journalists, like other people, can be very small sometimes. I read accounts of my own indignation at having been told to go round to the servants' entrance; how a duchess was horrified at discovering she was dancing with me instead of Lord Adolphus; my injured feelings because a hostess did not shake hands with me; and my having called upon the butler at Marlborough House, and spreading the report that I had visited the Prince of Wales. These paragraphs, though absolutely untrue, are inoffensive, and do good, inasmuch as they do not hurt me, but supply the author with a few hard and honestly-earned shillings. Spiteful and really offensive paragraphs are regarded by me in a different light. An offensive paragraph has the same effect upon me as an anonymous letter. I feel the same sort of pity for the writer as I do for the poor "Norfolk Howard," who can only do its work in the dark, and cuts such a terrified figure when the light is suddenly flashed upon it. The anonymous letter-writer is, perhaps, the worst of the three; for his action is nearly always dictated by a feeling of spite; whereas the "Norfolk Howard" and the "offensive paragraphist" are actuated by a feeling of hunger: and _necessitas non habet leges_. There are exceptions to every rule, and I soon ascertained that hunger was not the _raison d'etre_ of the following exceptional notice in reference to my _debut_ in a weekly paper: