still supported by “Peters’ Pence”—rebuking a friend, and announcing emphatically: “My dear, the Marquis has a soul above gambling!” Messengers came and went between the hotels, and a pleasant interchange of amenities was constantly taking place. The Marquis, from his retreat near the railway-station, despatched little presents of scent and trifling sonnets to his mistress’s eyebrow. These manuscripts the recipient read in her high piping voice to her satellites, describing them as “p’tee morr-sow.” And I suppose in exchange for the bottles of strange smells and the poems there was a generous supply of “Peters’ pence.” During his stay in Boulogne the Marquis invented a new boot-varnish, the secret of applying which belonged to himself alone. He spent quite an hour a day varnishing his boots, the result being that he was evicted, one after another, from half the hotels in the town. His varnish had a nasty habit of communicating itself to table-linen, carpets, or any other hotel property that happened to touch it. But Oliver stuck to his boot-varnish, and permitted himself to be driven from hostelry to hostelry rather than abandon it. He afforded a fine example of the old nobility sacrificing itself on the altar of principle. A year after I had seen him in Boulogne I read of his death; and the devoted chatelaine of the Priory, Kilburn, soon followed him into a realm where charlatanism is, we may imagine, at a discount. Colonel Whitehead was another gentleman who thought it well to establish relations with gentlemen on the Press—on the principle, I suppose, that it is well to make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness. The Colonel was a great admirer of the stage, more particularly that department of the stage which devotes itself to the encouragement of histrionic talent in good-looking young women. He was a haunter of stage-doors, was admitted, here and there, to the _coulisses_, and was one of those patrons of the drama whose patronage takes a practical turn in the case of its female professors. In order to indulge his tastes in this direction, he leased the Canterbury for a season, revived the ballet with some of its ancient glory, and thoroughly enjoyed himself among the members of the corps. But the experiment was a costly one, and his operations were subsequently carried on at a less ruinous scale of expenditure.