The “Old Cock” boasted of a respectable antiquity even at this time, 1777. The old gossip, Samuel Pepys, had graced its haunts in the time of the Stuarts; it survived the ravages of the Plague, and even the great fire of Old London; the entrance was a passageway that passed a flight of stairs and a bar into a large, well-lighted coffee-room. Skylights furnished air and sunshine whenever London could lay claim to the latter. Bright sea-sand glistened on the faultless floor. Rows of mahogany boxes, formed by high-backed seats on three sides and open toward the center, surrounded the entire room, except where the huge fireplace added good cheer in its restful, blazing wood. In one of these boxes a party could be quite secluded. The tops of the settles were higher than one’s head and a bandy-legged table of mahogany sat between the benches. The mantel of the fireplace was massive oak, carved after the fashion of the Elizabethan age, and the atmosphere of the place was presided over by a heroic representation of an “Old Cock” perched high at the farther end in the act of hailing the morn. Noted for its wine and for those “who knew what was good and could afford to pay for it,” the “Old Cock” was justly celebrated for the solace within its walls. Life swirled in Old London, around the young bloods at Brooks’. The great room where hazard ran riot beheld noted encounters between Fox, March, Burgoyne, Carlisle, Rodney and Selwyn. These revels afforded gossip in coffee-houses, taverns and drawing-rooms. Many a bottle of good, old port tickled the cockles of a Londoner’s heart, while Fox’s debts, Carlisle’s losses and Selwyn’s witticisms afforded old London-town an excuse to gossip about people to one’s heart’s content. A reckoning, however, was sure to come. No bulls and bears were in existence then, but their progenitors revelled in high play at the club. “Charles,” began Carlisle in a cozy nook of the “Old Cock,” “you know that Burgoyne’s return from his disaster affects our situation most seriously. What can be done to meet our disappointments? If Burgoyne had simply reached New York, the King would have elevated him to the vacant peerage of S---- as was promised us; and Parliament would have voted him one hundred thousand pounds sterling so that he could have paid me his debt of twenty-five thousand pounds.” Fox, who had been in Lord North’s cabinet, and as Junior Lord of the Treasury had opposed the estrangement of the Colonies, foresaw the disaster in war as carried on by Lord North. His powerful influences were directed to stop the war more by diplomacy than by force. But his gambling proclivities kept all of his friends in jeopardy. Now something must be done to stop the disastrous war and at the same stroke recoup the waning fortunes of himself and his cronies. Therefore, turning to his two friends in distress, he mildly argued: