Soon I discovered the reason, and this, by the way, is a rather interesting morsel of history which has escaped the vigilant eye of Mr. Aaron Watson. In those early and unsophisticated days, when a man was put up for membership at the Savage, he was given the run of the club until the date of the next election; and some men are by nature such excellent company that a club existing above all other things for congenial companionship will be apt to regard the claims of the professionally unqualified candidate as above those of the highly qualified man who happens to be a dull dog. This month of probation afforded the good fellow—“the clubbable man” of Dr. Johnson—the opportunity of asserting his claims; and although the committee was bound by its first rule, which provided that only men professionally connected with literature, the drama, or the arts, should be eligible, when they got the chance of electing a man of Macdonald’s erudition, humour, and powers of conversation, they were not likely to give that chance away. It was a strange rule, but it worked well. In those days there was no place in a club forced to forgather in a single room for men who could not talk well and laugh loudly. Under the guidance of my friend, I crossed to the right through the inevitable slush and vegetable refuse, and we were soon mounting the steps that led to Evans’s Hotel. With the celebrated Supper-Room beneath the hotel I was already acquainted, but I had never before visited the hotel. Nor did I for a moment imagine that the club which occupied so large a place in my fancy and my esteem occupied rooms on licensed premises. The Savage Club was in possession of the room on the left of the hall as you entered the hotel. It had originally been the coffee-room, and was one of the principal apartments in the building. Evans’s Hotel is now the National Sporting Club. It was first the Falstaff, and to fit it for its new purposes considerable structural alterations were necessary, including a small private theatre, now abolished, but the lines of the old home of the Savages can still be made out.